Vonnegut’s “Welcome to the Monkey House”

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a writer of rare talent, spoke to the entire generation of baby boomers. His influence was not that of Timothy Leary who told that generation to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Instead, Vonnegut made people think. Among other things, he made people think about what happens if they stay on the present path.

“Welcome to the Monkey House” is a story in a collection of short fiction bearing the same title that Vonnegut wrote, as he says, to finance his writing of novels. The world in the story, “Welcome to the Monkey House,” is vastly overpopulated. People are forced to take a new kind of birth control pill, one that makes one’s urine turn blue, making it possible to trace the noncompliant (greenish liquid in the sewer is traced), and invented by a person who was embarrassed by the natural activity of moneys at a zoo. This new birth control pill did nothing to reduce fertility, but worked by numbing sensation below the waist.

To reduce the population, mandatory birth control is supplemented by government sponsored and encouraged voluntary “ethical suicide” at government-run suicide parlors conveniently located next to the Howard Johnsons.

The story’s protagonist, “Billy the Poet,” is the classical anti-hero, a person with very clear flaws. Billy the Poet attempts to subvert government population policy by first kidnapping the beautiful young women who run the so-called “ethical suicide” parlors, weaning them of the numbing birth control, and then introducing them to sex in brutal fashion: he rapes them. Obviously, rape is a very counterproductive means of converting anyone to the cause of opposing an anti-sex governmental policy. Instead, it provides fuel and another avenue for reducing the population with capital punishment taking care of one rapist at a time. Over the years, reviewers have certainly taken Vonnegut to task for rape as an introduction to sex, as can be seen by the review in the New York Times when the book came out in 1968 or this reader’s comments on Amazon.com.

Still, Vonnegut makes us think about how certain trends or tendencies in society lead to critical situations (as we saw with 7 years ago with 9/11 or today with the meltdown of the financial industry) can easily result in repressive governmental policies that can then lead individuals to take extreme measures, even terror, in attempts to overturn such repression.

Morris Coats