Vonnegut and his inconsistency

The America in which Kurt Vonnegut finds himself is a country of broken promises. His ancestors emigrated to America to escape poverty, encouraged by the hope of a new way of life, epitomized by the American Dream. This is the dominant philosophy in American society, that if you work hard enough, you can achieve anything that you want to. Vonnegut’s novels express a dissatisfaction with this view, a desire for a more realistic and useful approach to life. What Vonnegut likes to point out is an intrinsic fault in the structure of America. This country is almost entirely composed of immigrants, from a vast cross section of culture. But rather than drawing on all these different cultures, they have been mangled and distorted to form the America of today. The various cultures have been left behind, in favor of a new identity, a strong part of which is the American Dream. Success in America is supposed to be dependent on hard work. Success for characters in Vonnegut’s novel’s...