Heinrich Böll Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Critical Essay by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

SOURCE: "The Unsaid Says Much," in The New York Times Book Review, September 12, 1965, pp. 4, 54.

Vonnegut is an American writer of darkly comic fiction which reflects his essential compassion for humanity and his complete pessimism. He rose to prominence during the 1960s with such works as Cat's Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), and Slaughterhouse Five (1969), which is considered his best novel to date. His novels and short stories, which frequently contain elements of science fiction, satirize human stupidity, shortsightedness, and brutality, assailing in particular humanity's tendency towards warfare and the worship of automation. In the following review, he praises the incomplete quality of the two novellas comprising Absent without Leave.

Disturbing, queer things these—two unconnected novellas ["Absent without Leave" and "Enter and Exit"] in one thin volume—tales told in the first person by German males who, like the author, were of military age...
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