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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 is more likely to come about from what he terms ‘dumb luck’ and life is ruled by more random principles. He sees a country where the desires and needs of people have been taken over by those of business and government; what he desires is a return to the basic needs of people. Vonneguts books each have a unique feature of them dealing around the same problems. Through his books Vonnegut has created a unique relationship between the created image of humanity, people in general and Divinity, a divine power of God. Vonnegut also portrays family life as he experienced it through out his childhood while still including humanity and divinity. Humanity is seen as a machine moving incontrollably forward, driven by several factors (such as greed for money and wealth, ambition, sex). The machine never stops, decency is unimportant, and human lives are also unimportant. The ‘monster’ moves onward, destroying everything that gets in its way. However, the machine also seems to be driven by a much high force, something completely our of humanity’s control. One thing that drives human beings is sexual lust as stated by Vonnegut. He suggests that people’s inability to control their animal drives will lead the planet into doom, mostly by means of overpopulation. Mary Hepburn, one of the main characters in Galapagos, describes, for example, “how easily a teenage virgin could be made pregnant by the seed of a male who was seeking sexual release and nothing else, who did not even like her” In Breakfast of Champions Vonnegut points out that most countries are in such a miserable condition that there is no more space for people, they have nothing to eat. Still they go on having sexual intercourse, which is, as Vonnegut reminds us, how babies are made. “More babies are arriving all the time—kicking and screaming, yelling for milk” Humanity, is producing more than it can sustain, yet it is ignorant of this fact. “Just because something can reproduce, that doesn’t mean it should reproduce,” Vonnegut does not only describe the drives of humanity, he uncovers the source of these lusts and of all the bad things humanity does.
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