Kilgore Trout: Kurt Vonnegut's Alter Ego
Stephanie E. Bonner
In 1922, two residents of Indianapolis, Indiana had a son
who would later become one of the premiere writers in 20th
century American literature. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born to Edith
and Kurt Sr. on November 11, 1922. He graduated from Shortridge
High School in 1940, attended Cornell University for a year, then
joined the army. He fought in World War II and was captured by
the Germans in 1944. As a Prisoner of War, he lived through the
firebombing of Dresden, an event which inspired his acclaimed
novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. After he returned from Europe in
April of 1945, he married Jane Marie Cox and spent several years
studying at the University of Chicago and working as a reporter
for the Chicago City News Bureau. In 1947, he went to work at
General Electric Corporation as a research laboratory publicist.
He worked there for 3 years until he left to become a full time
writer in 1950. In the past 47 years, he has become one of the
most acclaimed writers of our time.
Kurt Vonnegut's first novel was entitled Player Piano and
was published in 1952. Since then, he has written over a dozen
other novels, collections of short stories, a collection of
essays and interviews, and a play, Happy Birthday Wanda June. He
spent 1965 in residence at the University of Iowa Writer's
Workshop and taught writing at Harvard in 1970. He also was
awarded a M.A. degree from the University of Chicago. Vonnegut
currently appears on the Barnes and Noble Booksellers bag and is
featured on a Visa commercial in which he buys a copy of one of
his own books.
If one looks through Vonnegut's works, one will find many
occurrences of reoccurring characters, settings, and themes.
Perhaps one of the most frequently occurring characters is
Kilgore Trout, an obscure science-fiction writer with a small but
devoted following of readers. Though the details of Trout's life
change from book to book, in all of the books he has written
a huge number of short stories and novels, but has had trouble
getting reputable publisher to print them. However, there are
many similarities between Vonnegut and Trout. The reoccurring
character Kilgore Trout mirrors Vonnegut himself through the
similarities in their lives, writings, and themes.
The life of Kilgore Trout changes from book to book. In
Jailbird, he was serving a life sentence in prison (Vonnegut 21)
In Breakfast of Champions, he lives alone with a parakeet named
Bill (Vonnegut 18), while in Galapagos, he had a wife and a son
(Vonnegut 42). In some books, like Breakfast of Champions and God
Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, he rise into fame by the end, but in
others, he dies an unknown. However, a few factors remain the
same in all of the books. He always has written a phenomenally
large number of works, but his works aren't accepted by normal
publishers. Thus, while Trout labors as some sort of manual
worker to earn money, his stories are printed as filler in
pornographic magazines, though the stories themselves are far
from obscene. By the time of the action in Breakfast of
Champions, Trout had written 117 novels and 2000 short stories,
yet still worked as "an installer of aluminum combination storm
windows and screens" (Vonnegut 18)
Though in some ways, the life of Kurt Vonnegut is very
different from that of Kilgore Trout, there are some amazing
parallels. Though Vonnegut has not written nearly as many works
as Trout, both have written a large number of stories, and most
of them are science fiction. Near the end of his life in his
Breakfast of Champions persona, Trout had become a famous and
acclaimed person who had won a Nobel Prize and had become so
respectable that even his jokes were taken seriously and
incorporated into the language (Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
25). When Vonnegut began publishing works, though respectable
publishers did accept them, they were printed as paperback
originals, "the form that pulp fiction done by hack writers often
takes" (Mustazza xxii). It wasn't until the mid '60's that he
began to take his place in the literary world (Mustazza xxii).
Though Trout started at a more extreme low and rose to a more
extreme high, Trout's rise to fame mirrored that of Vonnegut.
Similarities between Vonnegut and Trout appear in the
storyline of their writings as well. Several stories Vonnegut
attributes to Kilgore Trout appear someplace else written by
Vonnegut himself. Perhaps the best example of this is the Trout
story called "2BRO2B." In "2BRO2B," which appears in God Bless
You, Mr. Rosewater, Trout created a world where almost all the
work was done by machines, and humans could only get work if they
had several Ph.D.'s. (20) This world is remarkably similar to the
one where Vonnegut set Player Piano, his first novel. The action
in Player Piano takes place on a world where almost everything is
done by machine, and the machines themselves "are no longer
controlled by men but by other machines" (Broer 18).
The people in "2BRO2B" are so hopeless, and the world is so
overpopulated, that the government has set up a "purple-roofed
Ethical Suicide Parlor at every major intersection, right next
door to an orange-roofed Howard Johnson's" (Vonnegut, God Bless
You, Mr. Rosewater 20). The visitors to the Suicide Parlor die
painlessly and patriotically, and even get a free last meal at
the Howard Johnson's next door (21). In Vonnegut's short story
"Welcome to the Monkey House" the story opens in an Ethical
Suicide Parlor almost identical to the ones described in
"2BRO2B," right down to the purple roof and the Howard Johnson's
next door (Welcome to the Monkey House 32) By actually writing
stories that he had earlier attributed to Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut
emphasizes the similarities between the two.
In Kurt Vonnegut's works, fragments of short stories or
novels attributed to Kilgore Trout often appear. As Marek Vit
says, "the themes of these fragments are often very similar to
the themes of Kurt Vonnegut's novels." One of the main themes the
two share is dehumanization. For example, Player Piano deals with
a world where almost everything is done by machines, causing most
humans to become useless and hopeless. Several Kilgore Trout
stories related in the Kurt Vonnegut novel Breakfast of Champions
share this theme. One, appearing on page 73, is set on the
Hawaiian Islands:
"Every bit of land on the islands was owned by only
about forty people, and, in the story, Trout had those
people decide to exercise their property rights to the full.
They put no trespassing signs on everything."
"This created terrible problems fro the million other
people on the islands. The law of gravity required that they
stick somewhere on the surface. Either that, or they could
go out into the water and bob offshore."
Eventually, someone hits on the idea of giving everyone
a helium balloon so they can hover over the islands without
actually touching the ground. However, the residents of the
island are dehumanized by money and property rights to the point
where they can no longer even walk on the ground.
Individuality is another theme that both Trout and Vonnegut
use. In Breakfast of Champions, there is a character named Rabo
Karabekian. Rabo Karabekian is an abstract expressionist painter
who's paintings consist of canvases covered in one shade of paint
with stripes of colored tape on it. When defending his works, he
describes the stripes of tape thus:
"It is the immaterial core...the 'I am' to which all
messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us...
It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous
adventure may befall us... Our awareness is all that is
alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything about us is
dead machinery." (221)
In this, Vonnegut states that our awareness is what makes
us human and makes us individuals (Broer 105). In the same book,
Vonnegut relates another Kilgore Trout story, entitled "Now It
Can Be Told." The story is formatted as an open letter from the
Creator of the Universe to a Creature he had made as an
experiment in Life. In the story, this creature was the only
actual living being on earth, and everyone else were merely
robots programed so that the Creator could see how the Creature
would react to different things. The Creator was continually
being surprised by the way the Creature reacted to things.
Because the Creature had free will, the Creator couldn't predict
what it would do (173-175). The entire Trout story dealt with
what makes one a human, an individual. Thus, like the Rabo
Karabekian's speech written by Vonnegut, the Kilgore Trout story
deals with individuality.
Marek Vit calls Trout "a parody of Kurt Vonnegut himself."
James Lundquist says that he is Vonnegut's "alter ego" (41).
Lawrence Broer dubs Trout Vonnegut's "fictional counterpart"
(102). The basic life of Kilgore Trout reflects Vonnegut's, and
the two share the some of the same writings. The basic themes of
both Kurt Vonnegut's actual works and the ones he attributes to
Trout are the same. Kilgore Trout, in many ways, truly is the
parody, the alter ego, the fictional counterpart, of Kurt
Vonnegut himself.
References:
Broer, Lawrence R. Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of
Kurt Vonnegut. Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama
Press, 1989.
Klinkowitz, Jerome, and John Somer. The Vonnegut Statement. New
York, New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1973.
Lundquist, James. Kurt Vonnegut. New York: Frederick Ungar
Publishing Co, 1977.
Mustazza, Leonard. The Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut.
Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994.
Vit, Marek. "Kurt Vonnegut." Online. URL:
"http://geocities.datacellar.net/Hollywood/4953/vonn.html" (May 10, 1997.)
Vonnegut, Kurt. Player Piano. New York, New York: Dell
Publishing, 1952.
Vonnegut, Kurt. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. New York, New York:
Dell Publishing, 1965.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Welcome to the Monkey House. New York, New York:
Dell Publishing, 1968.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York, New York: Dell
Publishing, 1969.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions. New York, New York: Dell
Publishing, 1973.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Jailbird. New York, New York: Delacorte Press/
Seymour Lawrence, 1979.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Galapagos. New York, New York: Delacorte Press/
Seymour Lawrence, 1985.
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Last modified: March 11, 2002