“Playing God, Are We?”: The Cosmogonic Concoction in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos

ABSTRACT

Kurt Vonnegut’s corpus boasts of works deriding humanity’s ethical infirmity and the human hand in the planet’s effacement whilst suggesting ingenious reforms. His most vocal appeal is Galápagos (1985), written during the Cold War when the impending threat of a Third World War troubled the author with grim forebodings. A spiritual culmination of a series of novels charged with Vonnegut’s trademark satire at human-made debacles like World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War, Galápagos disses the human brain as the source of all evil – reminiscent of Kant’s idea of humankind’s innate evil – and imagines human apocalypse by a virus outbreak and the evolution of a brain-less post-human species in a utopian future. This article attempts a close reading of Galápagos against the cosmogonic cycle of creation and destruction of worlds as chronicled in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). It unravels in the novel the archetypal creation myth which Vonnegut, a trained anthropologist, seems to have adapted to serve his humanist ends. The article assesses the drivers – divine, human and chance – involved in effecting the fictional cosmogony, studies Vonnegut’s take on religion, comments upon his authorial god complex, and goes on to locate Galápagos as his greatest god-act.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank their gods and ancestors for the gift of life.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Though Gulliver’s Travels is commonly held as a testimony of Jonathan Swift’s abhorrence of humankind, Vonnegut has acquitted Swift of charges of misanthropy: “We can be sure that this is not Swift’s own opinion of us, thank God – for, before he allows Gulliver to declare us no better than vomit, he makes Gulliver insane. … Gulliver is no longer the reliable witness he was in Chapter I” (Palm Sunday 569).

2. We see a full blown Martian attack on Earth in The Sirens of Titan; a deadly substance called Ice-Nine freezes the Earth’s oceans and all life forms with it in Cat’s Cradle; and in Deadeye Dick, a neutron bomb depopulates an entire city.

3. Winston Niles Rumfoord in The Sirens of Titan mistakenly causes Martian extinction under the impression of doing good; Dr Felix Hoenikker in Cat’s Cradle invents the atomic bomb and the deadly substance called Ice-Nine in his pursuit of truth; Howard W. Campbell Jr. serves the Nazis more than the Allies while playing double agent in Mother Night; and Dwayne Hoover, infected by his unstable mind and a misinterpreted work of fiction, goes on a violent spree in Breakfast of Champions.

4. See Caracciolo; Hicks.

5. Robinson views Billy Pilgrim’s journey in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five as a life-death cycle where “apocalypse is blunted” with “no final ending” (7). He also discovers a denial of the finality of death in Cat’s Cradle (7), deducing it from Franklin Hoenikker’s message on his mother’s tombstone: “You are not dead, But only sleeping” (Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle 44).

6. Puranas are ancient Hindu texts, composed primarily in Sanskrit, containing scholarship on a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, theology, grammar, cosmogony, cosmology, medicine, arts and legends.

7. Many of the puranas (Bhagavata Purana, Vishnu Purana, Brahma Purana etc.) mention the yugas. For a comprehensive account in English, see the ‘Introduction’ in Debroy.

8. Other than Galápagos (1985), Kilgore Trout appears in God Bless You, Mr Rosewater (1965), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Breakfast of Champions (1973), Jailbird (1979) and Timequake (1997).

9. Vonnegut’s discourse on the inherent evil residing in the human brain is starkly reminiscent of Immanuel Kant’s idea of the radical or “innate evil in human nature” (Kant 35) i.e. the “natural propensity of the human being to evil” (31).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ankit Raj

Ankit Raj is Assistant Professor of English at Government College Gharaunda, Karnal, India, and has submitted his PhD thesis at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, India. He has research articles in Routledge and Johns Hopkins University Press journals, is a poet and writer with work published in seven countries, and is the author of the poetry collection Pinpricks (Hawakal, 2022).

Nagendra Kumar

Nagendra Kumar is Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, India. He is the recipient of multiple academic awards and fellowships, has traveled extensively around the globe on academic and professional assignments, and has published articles and chapters in Routledge, Johns Hopkins University Press, SAGE and Springer volumes.