Absurdity and Truth
It is only fitting that the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library sits in Indianapolis, the city of his birth, nestled among brick buildings that might have been witness to his childhood musings. The city that shaped him, and in many ways, rejected him, now celebrates him with a museum dedicated to his life, his work, and his razor-sharp wit.
Outside, a mural of his unmistakable self-portrait looms against an orange brick wall, his name emblazoned beside it as though sketched in the margins of some unfinished manuscript. Beneath it, in simple black script, the words:
"So it goes."
It is an unavoidable phrase in Vonnegut’s world—a shrug at death, a sigh at fate, a refrain that acknowledges life’s cruel absurdities without giving them too much power. Seeing it here, scrawled beneath his caricature, feels both reverent and irreverent, much like Vonnegut himself.
Inside, the museum is part shrine, part playground, part war memorial. There is a section dedicated to his service in World War II, the experience that shaped Slaughterhouse-Five, the book that made him famous (and frequently banned). There is his Purple Heart, awarded, as he put it, for a case of “frostbite.” The irony of war is not lost here—Vonnegut's humor was his armor, his prose his battlefield.
Then, there is his typewriter.
A Smith Corona 2200, sky blue, like a relic from some retro-futurist past. Behind the glass, it sits with a quiet dignity, its keys worn from the weight of ideas, of satire, of sentences that have burned themselves into the collective consciousness. It is believed he typed Slapstick on this machine, a novel about loneliness, absurdity, and the deep yearning for connection. His glasses rest beside it, as if waiting for him to return, to press another key, to carve out one more line of weary wisdom.
I could not leave empty-handed. A copy of Slaughterhouse-Five found its way into my grasp, as inevitable as time itself in a Tralfamadorian sense. To read it again is to relive the looping horror of Dresden, the surreal detachment of Billy Pilgrim, the bitter comedy of war and bureaucracy.
Vonnegut once said, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” Here, surrounded by artifacts of his life, it is easy to pretend, just for a moment, that he is still here, watching over his absurd, tragic, beautiful world.
So it goes.