[Almost] all the commentators on Vonnegut betray a certain uneasiness in talking about him as a satirist; he does not quite fit the mold. (p. 101)
Vonnegut's basic world view is Post-existential. He [rejects] all ethical absolutes. Vonnegut stresses the futility of man's search for meaning in a world where everything is "a nightmare of meaninglessness without end," where we are all the victims of a series of accidents, "trapped in the amber of this moment…. Because this moment simply is." In Cat's Cradle he shows how man's "nostalgia for unity," to use Camus' phrase, forces him to interpret mere chance as purposeful, leads him to create the meaning he wants to find and makes him believe in his own insubstantial structure, his own cat's cradle. Each of Vonnegut's novels shows us that there is no relation between human actions and the events that take place in human lives. All success—and, one supposes, failure—is the result of luck…. Man, like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five, finds that among the things he cannot change are past, present and future. His actions serve no purpose he can hope to comprehend. Vonnegut also has his own version of [Jean-Paul] Sartre's theory of human identity. He talks about the desire of Being-For-Itself to become Being-In-Itself as the Universal Will to Become and claims that the moral of Mother Night is "We are what we pretend to be."
