Don't mind me, just posting the best Vonnegut novel

Don't mind me, just posting the best Vonnegut novel.

Vonnebad is worthless. His opportunity cost is far too high.

that's not sirens of titan though

everyone thinks that book sucks including kurt himself

>Fun
>Insightful
>General air of cynicism
Why does Veeky Forums dislike Vonnegut? Is it because he's so easy to read?

that's like posting a picture of the least smelly turd

Cat's Cradle was better.

It's mostly an overreaction to him being memed by reddit kids. Though really, he's never been more than just ok and his style can get repititive quickly.

I just told you. Did you read my post? Can you read? Can you read this?

>opportunity cost
>when lesswrong autists try to do art critique

>His opportunity cost is far too high
Not really a detailed criticism there, boyo.

>wincest
this. feet best fetish

>posting the best pile of shit from a shitty memester
woah

Ok???

>calling postmodernism memery as an insult
you've the levels of irony you're hiding behind set to an even number and just look like an idiot

It's in the backlog, but pic related is comfiest Vonnegut I've read so far.

I think most people dislike him because Slaughterhouse V is super edgy and has aliens and weird shit in it. Even Cat's Cradle has the hypothetical chemistry in it, but this is good prose and an interesting story.

>hurr durr irony is bad
you and dfw can go suck a dick.

Is slaughterhouse V really considered edgy by anyone under the age of 50-60? It is childish and morose in his usual way, but I wouldn't call it edgy.

>he doesn't know what irony is
>m-maybe it ended well for oedipus really
>the first postmodern writer he can think of is dfw
so you're not really into literature so much as role playing someone who reads.

lol irony

epic books banter m9, i'm sure all the bookworms want to hang out with you which is strange since most of them don't need friends

Yea I didn't really articulate it that well - A lot of people I know that really like it, like it because its weird and has aliens and time travel or whatever the fucks going on. It's the only kind of book that can keep their attention besides Stephen King, basically, and to me that comes across as being edgy.

A better way to put it might just be calling it pandering. At least Vonnegut admitted he didn't think it was any good. If I wrote something I felt was drivel but people loved it I would certainly take credit for it.

wow insecure much

fuck off reddit

Yeah, that's a bit different and I agree with you. He pretty much only put scifi type things in his books because he didn't think they'd sell any other way, which is probably true.

I don't hate him like some of the other people here do, but he really didn't have the talent to write anything more dense or "serious" in a way that'd be tolerable even to people who do read those kinds of things.

I thought Veeky Forums established this was already a reddit thread?

>le Veeky Forums is reddit meme

not the user you're talking to, but i think that's what makes vonnegut one of the great 20th C writers. he's not a very happy man, and it's obvious from his work he's not a happy man or happy with his work, and it makes everyone laugh. he writes books about people who when they do eventually pour out their suffering, everyone laughs. slapstick's definitely up near the top for that, and you could put him in the same trend that chaplin and laurel and hardy started for the 20th C.

i think he knew if he had written anything else it wouldn't have sold, like when jack lemmon made wine and roses and people walked out of the cinema, or chaplin tried to make something without the tramp. very few people know bluebeard because it doesn't have that. it doesn't even have psychosis like breakfast of champions.

his friend the socipath who tells everyone he laughed like hell when he's never ever heard him laugh i think is one of the stronger characters in slaughter house v because of that, as a side effect of that focus. the so it goes thing is supposed to be banal, but the i laughed like hell guy is fucking chilling.

oh no, I've been outmemed by the mememasters of Veeky Forums and don't even have a downvote button to defend myself with. Welp, they know its me now, better get on back home.

I definitely liked him more after I learned a bit about him, I assume he probably did some shady things as an army chemist/engineer that he had to live with for the rest of his life.

/lit hates on it for being easy, but theres nothing wrong with an easy-read here and there, so long as its part of a balanced literary diet

He did have that sort of sad clown sort of thing going, but I'd say he never really achieved greatness with it. It was always well outside his abilities to write anything truly great. That's why he went with the clown routine in the first place. There wasn't really anything else he could do well enough to have it sell and he was painfully aware of that fact.

I agree. Palate cleansers and all. Though it should only be like, 1 Vonnegut or some equivalent for every 1-3 more challenging books depending on length and difficulty.

I really like this one, and nobody else that I know who "loves Vonnegut" has read it. Rabo was a fantastic character, and the statements about art and aging were interesting.
I honestly think most of the people here who shit on Vonnegut do it because of reddit's love of him. He's accessible, sure, but he's still a good writer in my opinion. His style also lends itself better to short stories, I find.

i think that's like saying chaplin or lemmon went back to being funny because they couldn't achieve greatness. whether you like it or not, he's well known and probably the most widely read postmodernist. i don't really blame him for honing in on that, because he has bills to pay too. he begged to get the ones he'd written for money early on edited when they were republished because i think he wanted it to mean something, even if everyone was taking it the wrong way.


it's a bit like when chaplin made the great dictator, and most everyone who saw it thought the not in character speech to end fascism at the end was terrible, even if it did really hurt hitler's feelings. how the crowd takes it is only part of the point, but under all the vonnegut fan club, the greatest that popularity has given him aside, he really does make some beautiful work. not all of them, not by a long shot, but he's enough great books it doesn't overshadow him. his fanclub overshadows him more. so_it_goes_tattoos.jpg

I always found the self-insert character he puts into many of his books to be interesting. Every time Kilgore Trout comes up he's a friendless, ugly loser living in poverty whose family can't even stand him. It's repeatedly stated that his writing is devoid of talent and not read by anybody. The other user that mentioned his unhappiness was also right.

>the greatest that popularity has given him aside
the greatness*

I don't think the Chaplin analogy really works, because Chaplin was considered an all-time great at what he did, and Vonnegut, while popular with readers, and widely read, has never been thought of as much by most critics.

They might not push quite as much paper, but DeLilo and Pynchon are much more well-received and influential pomo authors. Being the most widely read doesn't strictly mean that much.

Again, I'm not disparaging him for doing what he did, but I don't think his reasons for doing it were solely financial ones.

Chaplin was considered a failure pretty often m8. Especially when he wasn't pandering. Catch 22 wasn't thought of much by critics either, it doesn't mean it's not a great book in many senses of the word, and Vonnegut didn't get half as many rejection slips as Heller.

Also, your only argument for not liking him seems to be that people told you not to like him, and probably not even "critics" so much as edgy fucks on the internet who three years ago also told you you weren't allowed believe in god. DeLillo and Pynchon being well received is what tips me off that your opinions are entirely meems, and you couldn't tell a good book from a bad one.

I did point out his greatness aside he was trying to do something which has a lot of comparisons with both 20th C. comedy and great but misunderstood postmodern irony so it goes becoming the banality it's supposed to be without any of those girls noticing before tattooing it on their wrist from a wwii book about a holocaust, while the guy who laughed like hell becomes "his books are so funny XD i was constantly lol'ing" is fucking amazing control of irony, Swiftian levels of irony, along with a lot of other reasons why people can misunderstand what's great about him and what's just terribly tragic, but apparently the only counterargument you have is "Veeky Forums told me the book about dicks is better than the one about assholes, and i have no taste of my own". Which is very funny because both those authors don't suffer from people misunderstanding their use of technique, because their uses of the same techniques of postmodernism aren't as complex, especially on the dramatic irony front. Neither of those authors have the influence of Vonnegut, if you mean in the real world or literature. At least go with one of the earlier postmodernists instead of "what Veeky Forums says is good for, er, reasons"

His reason for becoming a writer was financial. He could make money that way and he had a new family. It's why he Kilgore Trouted out all those early stories.

>Kilgore
everytime he does into a reader or fan it's not a good experience either

You might have me mixed up with some of the other posters here, but I never said I didn't like him. I just said he inherently wasn't as good as a lot of others writing similar things and was aware of that fact.

I do appreciate what he did, yes, and I appreciate how it's misunderstood by both his "fans" and detractors alike, but again, his overall talent paled in comparison to a lot of others.

I like to think of him as an inverse McCarthy in that McCarthy's one trick is fooling people into thinking he's a good writer with "important" looking writing that says nothing and has no substance behind it, while Vonnegut had a hard time convincing anyone he was a good writer in spite of the substance his stories did have, because he just didn't have that kind of ego or the emotional wherewithal to pretend he did.

did anyone save the mccarthy egg breakfast thing pls?

He wasn't comparing himself to Delillo or Pynchon, user, and if he was he might have felt a bit better about his technique not really, the reason why he didn't like his work is he didn't like himself, it's not a reason to think his work is bad
>more of Veeky Forums's recs because you can't think outside memes
How do you argue one line that he was aware he wasn't good, and then that he's somehow hiding this from his readers, when he says it in the books? You either believe him he's not good and aren't tricked, or he's secretly good and you have been tricked when you buy him saying all his stuff is terrible and he thinks of himself as Philbold Studge or whoever when he reads his shit.
>comparing him to McCarthy at all
damn you are so lost, there are Vonnegut fan girls less empty headed than you

This isn't an argument. I'm saying things and you're just bent on taking them all as slights for some ass backwards reason or another. Droll as this is, it's something of a waste of time, so I'm out. Whatever's eating you, get over it.

It's not my fault Veeky Forums trolled you into thinking memebooks are better, but popular books are a different category. You believed them when they said Delillo and Pynchon were critically well received but Vonnegut wasn't. There's nothing eating me, I'm just trying to get you to actually think about a book or author for once instead of just parroting what you've been told by NEETs who lie on the internet as a hobby.