History Creator / KurtVonnegut

* HumansAreBastards: A lot of his books have a rather dim view of humanity. Considering what the man went through, it's hard to not understand how he came to this conclusion.

* BecomingTheMask: One of his most famous quotes explicitly references this trope, stating, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."

* CosmicPlaything: Most of Vonnegut's protagonists are poster children for this trope, suffering one misfortune after another as a consequence of an indifferent society (and a Godless, inherently meaningless universe) while usually taking the blows in stride. Notable examples are Billy Pilgrim in ''Literature/SlaughterhouseFive'' and Rudy Waltz in ''Literature/DeadeyeDick''.

* ThoseWackyNazis: Because of his experiences in the Second World War, Nazis feature prominently in Vonnegut's fiction. Parts of ''Literature/MotherNight'' and ''Literature/SlaughterhouseFive'' take place in Nazi Germany. In ''Literature/DeadeyeDick'', Rudi Waltz's father is a Nazi sympathetizer who had befriended a young Adolf Hitler, and in ''Literature/GodBlessYouMrRosewater'', one of the many neighborhood misfits that Rosewater tries to help with his vast inherited wealth is a cartoonish US Neo-Nazi.

* WorldOfJerkass: Those characters in Vonnegut's novels who aren't complete idiots or CloudCuckooLanders on the margins of society tend to be selfish, crass, and needlessly cruel. This is especially the case in ''Deadeye Dick'' and ''Literature/SlaughterhouseFive''.

* HypocriticalHumor: His son, Mark Vonnegut, wrote the foreward for this book and recounts this exchange from one of his last conversations with his father:

* HereditarySuicide: Fred Rosewater's father committed suicide. Fred often thinks about killing himself and once nearly goes through with it, but gets interrupted.

* CosmicHorrorStory: While most of his works don't deal with hostile extraterrestrial or quasi-supernatural beings (preferring anthropogenic agents of the apocalypse, like Ice-9 in ''Cat's Cradle''), Vonnegut shares with authors of the genre a belief in a universe that is completely indifferent to human welfare and morality and therefore seems hostile.

* WorldOfJerkass: Those characters in Vonnegut's novels who aren't complete idiots or CloudCuckooLanders tend to be selfish, crass, and needlessly cruel. This is especially the cases in ''Deadeye Dick'' and ''Literature/SlaughterhouseFive''.

* DeathBySex: Specifically cited in "Welcome To The Monkey House" (the short story itself, not the collection that borrowed the name).

* RichIdiotWithNoDayJob: What Eliot Rosewater is trying to avoid. At least the idiot and no day job part.

* WritersSuck: The hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, something of an [[SelfDeprecation parody]] of [[AuthorAvatar Vonnegut himself]], appears in several of Vonnegut's novels. While Trout is described as having clever ideas for stories, his writing itself is only fit for publication as filler material for pornographic magazines.

* WritersSuck: The hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, something of an [[SelfDeprecation parody]] of [[AuthorAvatar Vonnegut himself]], appears in several of Vonnegut's novels. Trout is described as having clever ideas for stories, his writing itself is only fit for publication as filler material for pornographic magazines.

* WritersSuck: The hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, something of an SelfParody AuthorAvatar, appears in several of Vonnegut's novels. While he has clever ideas, his writing style is so bad that he can only get his stories published as filler material for pornographic magazines.

* MechanisticAlienCulture: The Tralfamadorians, depending on the story or novel that features them, are either StarfishAliens or MechanicalLifeforms that replaced their organic ancestors (Vonnegut never makes it clear if there was a RobotWar or if this was a more benevolent [[TheSingularity Singularity-like event]]), their culture is perhaps [[UpToEleven even more]] [[BuffySpeak Starfish-y]] then their physical form (when Salo tries to explain their system of government in ''Literature/TheSirensOfTitan'', he sounds like [[TheStoner he's fraking stoned]]). So, they ''sometimes'' count as examples of this trope, depending on the story. Vonnegut's literary, AuthorAvatar, Kilgore Trout, [[ShowWithinAShow wrote several stories]] using aliens that had the stereotypical features of this trope, including a race of Car-People.

* CreatorInJoke: Vonnegutt reuses the name "Diana Moon Glampers" from Literature/HarrisonBergeron, although unlike TheVerse examples discussed above, rather than being the same character, the two women are in fact polar opposites.

* LotsAndLotsOfCharacters: The storyline wanders around both Eliot and Fred Rosewater's hometowns, detailing the lives of their various inhabitants.
* MoneyFetish: Norman Mushari.

* {{Asexuality}}: Rudy Waltz, the narrator, is asexual or, as he describes himself, a 'neuter'. WordOfGod states that Rudy's asexuality is supposed to represent Vonnegut's declining sexuality.

* RealityEnsues: [[spoiler: Mary Kathleen O'Looney]]'s ultimate plan was to [[spoiler: create a socialist society by having RAMJAC expand until it owned all businesses, then leave it to the US government when she died.]] While a creative idea, [[spoiler: the government has no interest in running all of RAMJAC's businesses and just auctions them off.]]

[[caption-width-right:350:some caption text]]

-->-- from ''Timequake'', his final novel