Galapagos
Kurt Vonnegut
336 Pages, large font/gaps.
Kurt was born in 1922 and only just recently passed in 2007 due to health implications resulting from smoke inhalation (the apartment/condo/whatever below his caught fire) as well as smoking cigarettes for the better part of his life. He is most notably known for his other writings, Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1972). Vonnegut uses satire as his main medium of diction, which Kurt utilizes in an affective and fun manner. I do very much want to read Slaughterhouse-Five and it is widely regarded as his best work. Kurt Vonnegut was a private in the 423rd Infantry Regiment, 106th Infantry Division, and was captured during the Battle of the Bulge. Kurt was imprisoned in a prisoner of war camp in Dresden and witnessed its firebombing in 1945. Kurt was eventually rescued from German clutches by the Russians shortly after the firebombing. Upon returning he was awarded a Purple Heart. Kurt Vonnegut is a pretty well-known author and where I could go on for days over the weird things that have transpired in his life, I will not. Look him up if you’re interested. Kurt meanders through his stories as he meandered through life, a rambling man with a point if your patient.
On to Galapagos!
The narrator of this short work is Leon Trout. Leon was seeking asylum in Sweden from Vietnam when he met an unfortunate end via decapitation from a steel plate while building a ship. Instead of going down the "blue tunnel to the Afterlife", Trout decides to stay on and seek the answers to life and stay aboard the earth and upon the ship that cost him his life. Years later that ship would harbor the only hope for civilization. A rag tag rabble that would have chosen any other fate than the one before them, through a series of events humans completely render themselves extinct, except the few survivors now hopelessly stranded on the Galapagos. Trout who continues to snub the advances of the "blue tunnel to the Afterlife" is forced to spend the next million years on earth searching for his answers, during the course of which Trout is able to watch the re-evolution of human beings with the absence of technology.
The story itself is more about how the survivors came to be stuck on the island and less about their transformation over the course of those million years. Kurt hypothesizes that our evolution to include such a "big brain" will inevitably be our undoing, simply for the fact that all of this brain power isn't needed to survive and creates incalculable complications when blended with human nature and the ability to lie. The entire delivery of the story is pretty exquisite and easy to follow.
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