When a person faces the hardships of life, he must develop a way of dealing with the dark situation set before him. Kurt Vonnegut, one of America's outstanding modern authors, certainly dealt with the atrocities of life himself. His experiences during the Great Depression, his childhood, and World War II helped mold his perspective on humanity. Vonnegut's means of coping with these horrific difficulties was to see the humor in the midst of tragedy. Born in 1922, into a family who emigrated from Germany in 1848, Kurt Vonnegut was one of three children of Kurt and Edith Vonnegut who settled in Indianapolis, Indiana. The Vonnegut family prospered in a flourishing German-American society. In his early teens, however, Vonnegut dealt with the first major setback of his life. During the Great Depression, his affluent lifestyle became a meager one. His family was forced to move to a smaller, less flamboyant house built by his father, a successful architect (Litz 754). The new economic circumstances formed by this Depression traumatized his parents. His father later gave up on life, and after Kurt J

r.'s enlistment, his mother committed suicide in 1944 by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. In a later interview Vonnegut confessed: "I learned a bone-deep sadness from them [his parents]" (Allen 2-3).

In addition to the influences of his adolescence, Vonnegut faced the brutality of war. In 1944, Vonnegut was serving infantry duty in Europe, when he was caught behind German lines at the Battle of the Bulge and sent to Dresden, Germany, as a prisoner. In February, 1945, the Allies unleashed a firestorm that essentially annihilated the historic city of Dresden, killing nearly 135,000 thousand people. Luckily Vonnegut was working in an underground meat locker, somehow emerging to the blasted landscape one of the few survivors. Afterwards, the prisoners were forced to excavate the ruins of Dresden and sniff out the thousands of buried bodies. All of Vonnegut's novels are viewed as attempts to come to terms with Dresden. These rapid and dramatic events had a profound effect on the attitudes depicted in Vonnegut's novels (Bleiler 553-554). Vonnegut portrays these absurdities of the human condition by creating characters that react humorously to their pain and suffering.

Vonnegut's pessimism, rooted in his parent's despair, became clearly evident in his view of mankind. He sees that the universe does not appear to have been designed as the true home for human beings (Allen 10). He neither puts his faith in human reason to resolve all problems, nor believes the "all-powerful Other" can give meaning to the human life and solve all of man's difficult problems. Similar to the views of the realists and skeptics Ste

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Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)