A Birds Nest

A Man Without A Country, By Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut died a while ago, and it still makes me sad. In my mind, you should not even be able to apply for Secondary education job openings unless you have a good knowledge of his literature. If you don’t know his literature, there’s a good chance that his style of writing is the style for you: Vonnegut wrote with a sharp, caustic wit, his rants always derailing the argument he was trying to put across by going off at a tangent which revealed an honesty seldom seen in modern authors. The man, quite simply, knew what he wanted to say and was not afraid of contradicting himself. Rather than trying to bury these contradictions—usually cultural—he embraced them, exposing the riddles of his mind and asking others to do the same.

Another unique facet of his writing was his way of perceiving the source of it, and what led him to record his deepest darkest thoughts: the German American saw no reason for English academies to rule the literary world. He himself was, in fact, a scientist and an academic of the sort that most English academies refused to accept as reasonably literate, or worthwhile as authors. He didn’t care about their opinion, of course. This became something he pushed at every opportunity, questioning why a person had to be a certain way to do a certain thing.

The book is a fine piece of work by anyone’s standards. Child-like and heartbreakingly taught in places—with Vonnegut recalling the horrors of war and other such atrocities he has not allowed to stay hidden—the book is a short one, but full of love, promise and value. It is the work of a man who has accepted everything thrown at him, and has altered his perspective to dissect each thing, seeing not only the big things that matter to the world as a whole but those smaller things. Those tings which identify us as free-thinking individuals, born to question rather than merely just accept.