Six Degrees of Slaughterhouse-Five

In this absurdist sci-fi /military mashup, Billy Pilgrim is a world-weary optometrist living in Upstate New York during the prosperous years following World War II. Only he can't exactly enjoy the trappings of his suburban dream because a time-travel portal - revealed to him when he's kidnapped by a race of aliens called the Tralfamadorians - allows him to alternately revisit his past as a POW in Dresden, Germany, and his... future, where he is eventually assassinated by a war enemy.

Published in 1969, Slaughterhouse-Five encapsulates Vonnegut's own experience as a prisoner during the horrific bombing of Dresden, which killed 35,000 German civilians. Though he would continue to grapple with the enormity of the event in future writings, it was this book, his seventh, that established his signature storytelling style and proved to be his greatest critical and commercial success. Slaughterhouse-Five is widely considered one of the most influential novels of the 20th century and a cultural touchstone of its era. ("So it goes," the Tralfamadorian utterance that typifies the race's extraterrestrial-Buddhist attitude towards death and destruction, became a favorite catch phrase of Vietnam protestors.)

Vonnegut's voice, a blend of fanciful imaginings and plain-speaking prose, incisive political critique and unexpected emotional resonance, was drawn, in part, from his own influences, writers like Sinclair, Twain and Swift. As Vonnegut's status rose from cult favorite to bestselling author, his work rippled outward to touch generations of writers after him. While Vonnegut surely impacted his own writing students like Gail Godwin and John Irving, he's also the admitted inspiration for Ken Kalfus' sardonic social satires and even the unsparing comic monologues of Jon Stewart. With Vonnegut's death in 2007, many came forward to announce their admiration for the iconoclastic writer, and though he may never be truly imitated, the following books give us a glimpse at his long literary shadow.

As a pioneer of American humor writing, Twain was an enormous influence on young Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut's love for the author was so great that he named his son after him. Later, with his pouf of hair, prodigious moustache and air of twinkling pessimism, Vonnegut even began to resemble his hero. But the legacy is most obvious in the work itself. In stories like his novella Pudd'nhead Wilson, Twain called attention to... the injustices of social conventions - in this case, the arbitrary birthrights of race, as a slave's baby and master's baby are switched in their cribs. Twain's tongue-in-cheek wit, quirky characterization and ironic plot twists always cloaked a more serious message. Vonnegut discovered in his own writing that humor was sometimes the most effective device for depicting otherwise incomprehensible tragedy. Off the page, he borrowed Twain's penchant for well timed, wry observations to create an enduring cult of personality.

Like Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim, Yossarian is a disillusioned soldier, questioning the rationality of a war that has killed off his fellow servicemen and friends. And like Pilgrim, Yossarian is forced to grapple with issues of free will in the face of what seems like inevitable, thoughtless destruction. Catch-22 predated Slaughterhouse-Five by eight years but its commentary on the atrocities of the Allies in World War II, its non-chronological narrative, and its acute... sense of irony (now widely used in contemporary vernacular, the book's term "catch-22" refers to the absurd bureaucratic rules that presented a no-win situation for the soldiers) have inspired paragraphs on many a compare-and-contrast term paper. In real life, Heller and Vonnegut were personal friends and neighbors on Long Island, and taken together, their most famous works are an essential part of the modern humanist canon.

As a student of the Iowa Writers Workshop in the 1960s, John Irving directly learned his craft from Vonnegut, who was a writer in residence there for two years (at the very time he began writing Slaughterhouse-Five.) The two remained friends until Vonnegut's death in 2007, when Irving eulogized him by revealing that Vonnegut taught him to use fewer semicolons (which he called transvestites). More broadly, Vonnegut's influence is felt in the... random and occasionally cruel acts of plot that impact Irving's helpless characters, told with a "so it goes" detachment. The World According to Garp is his fourth novel, written after he met Vonnegut. Its protagonist, T.S. Garp, is brought into the world under unusual circumstances, and spends a lifetime contemplating its meaning and mysteries. Irving's affinity for braiding comedy and tragedy and both global and personal history shows that he learned much more from Vonnegut than semicolon placement.

Vonnegut's genius was that he could get laughs out of World War II's atrocities, and in this viciously dark comedy Ken Kalfus barrels through the reader's discomfort to satirize September 11. Marshall and Joyce are caught in the middle of a beyond-bitter divorce when the planes hit the World Trade Center towers. He's disappointed that she wasn't, as scheduled, on the flight that hit the Pentagon and she's disturbed to learn that... he never made it up to his Trade Tower office and escapes unscathed. The domestic terrorism builds and implodes from there. Kalfus, a self-identified Vonnegut fan, makes the violence around his characters that much more horrific by emphasizing their bourgeois pettiness. Even as they're traumatized by a growing sense that New York is no longer safe for their children, they continue to savage one another in increasingly outlandish ways. In the inhuman, unrelenting world of this novel, Kalfus makes Vonnegut look like Suzy Sunbeam.

Daily Show comedian Stewart has said that Vonnegut's books - and particularly Slaughterhouse-Five - made his adolescent life bearable. And in 2005, Vonnegut appeared on Stewart's show to promote his book A Man Without a Country, which he said he originally wanted to call The 51st State: The State of Denial. This might have been an equally fitting title for Stewart's America, a sly, cutting satire of our country's values and institutions... that would make Stewart's literary progenitor proud. ("From your morning hardcore pornography masturbation session, to your lunchtime abortion, right up through your twilight neo-Nazi march through a predominantly Jewish/black community, the judicial branch is there to make sure everything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law...under God.") There are no sacred cows here, only the tasty hamburger of the Daily Show writers' critiques, dressed up as a faux civics textbook. But Stewart has a truly Vonnegutian, humanist point of view that makes America as compelling as it is hilarious.