Today, I visited the Kurt Vonnegut Museum in downtown Indy with my dad.

We have both
read Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five by Vonnegut and my dad was in town for the
weekend, so I thought this would be something fun for us to do together. I would also like to
note at this time that my dad did not particularly like either of Vonnegut’s books he read, but he
is a Butler alum so we had to go. I was blown away by how well done this museum is. The
mixture of art, memorabilia, letters, and history in this tiny museum was impressive. The majority
of the display focused on Slaughterhouse Five and Vonnegut’s background.
I think that the history of a writer has a lot to do with what they write about. Vonnegut
was a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany during World War II. During his time there, the city
was bombed and this experience was the inspiration for writing Slaughterhouse Five. He
suffered many atrocities during this time that led to his development of PTSD. With just this
background alone, I suddenly understood his book a little more than I had when I had originally
read it. He was able to project his own suffering onto the character Billy Pilgrim and combine
that with Einstein’s theory of relativity to make a crazy alien, anti-war, and time jumping novel.
The chaos of the book I think just attributes what it is like to have PTSD and be drawn back in
time to the incidents that traumatized Vonnegut the most while also providing the escapism of
moving forward and believing that time really is just relative.
The museum also provided insights of how Vonnegut produced books. He was 6 feet
and 3 inches tall, but decided to use a low crouching chair and desk. He did this because the
crouching position was very uncomfortable and he thought he wrote better when he was
uncomfortable. Additionally, he kept a box of rejection letters with him and they were posted
throughout the museum to show how often this accomplished writer had been denied. With
these things in mind, I am taking away that writing can sometimes make you uncomfortable,
whether that’s physically or emotionally, and you should take that as something to grow and
learn from. Being afraid of being uncomfortable is to be afraid to live. I think pushing myself to
write about things I wouldn’t normally and push myself to access the feelings I don’t want to feel
is important to improving myself as a writer and I think Vonnegut understood this very well. He
also believed that this was just a way to access his best writing ability, while I likely won't be
sitting like that when I write, I think being okay with being uncomfortable is the lesson I learned
here and will start to put into practice.
Now onto the rejection letters. Vonnegut was rejected a LOT and now he has his own
museum. I think this is a valuable lesson that no matter what others think, you should continue
to write if it makes you happy. Vonnegut could have given up on writing after he received those
letters, but he didn’t. I think this again attests to the idea of writing for yourself and not for
others. This connects back to how Sally Rooney uses her writing to process the world. While
she does this in a very literal sense, I think Vonnegut uses satire and comedy to do the same
thing. It’s funny how authors can still accomplish the same idea with completely different modes
of writing processes. Vonnegut most definitely wrote for himself and he was even funnier for it.
He didn’t let the limits of society prevent him from writing what he needed to in order to process
the world around him and I think that is very powerful. I also think he would laugh at what I just
wrote, but so it goes. *