![]() This innovative mode of writing narratives, along with providing a critique of their own methods of construction, deals with the external real world to examine some established structures of the human society like religion. Instead of being predominantly existential, Vonnegut’s works leave unresolved a tension between existentialism, where people create their own meaning through acts of free will, and determinism, where people have no free will and react to the physical environments in which they have been placed.īokononism is a fictional religion Vonnegut brings into his narrative, Cat's Cradle (1963), to create a self-conscious novel known as metafiction. Through an examination of Vonnegut’s treatment of free will and determinism in three of his signature texts, The Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle, and Slaughterhouse-Five, this study reveals a tension between the two philosophies in the author’s work. By overstating the influence of existentialism on Vonnegut’s novels, critics have neglected the influence of determinism on his work, and this neglect disconnects the author from his American literature roots of naturalism. In spite of the critical insistence on Vonnegut’s existential or deterministic philosophy, little work has been done to develop either of these ideas, and strictly through critical repetition, Vonnegut’s work has become more closely associated with French existentialism than with the determinism of American literary naturalism. These two labels recur frequently in Vonnegut criticism with little or no explanation as to how they apply to his novels. ![]() Over the years, critics have noticed two antithetical tendencies in Kurt Vonnegut’s work: one toward existentialism and another toward determinism. ![]()
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