Because of the paradoxical nature of Kurt Vonnegut's work, critics have often mistaken the fatalism of such characters as Billy Pilgrim and Kilgore Trout as a reflection of Vonnegut's own resigned acceptance to the deplorable condition of human life. Sadly, such readings of Vonnegut's work ignore his unique response to the postmodern condition. I contend that Vonnegut offers a provisional answer to what Ihab Hassan calls the shibboleths of disconfirmation. Unlike other postmodern writers, Vonnegut's answer goes beyond the modernist conception of binary opposition and establishes a postmodern humanism negotiated on an operational essentialism. For Vonnegut, the fact that we can only know our world through language, through the fictions we create, does not make the plight of humanity any less real. Rather, Vonnegut suggests that all we have to improve the human condition are "comforting lies" and that such lies should be put to good use in answering the central question of the postmodern age: What does one do to bring about change in a decentered world? Thus, as a postmodern humanist, Vonnegut attempts to alter the world through the stories he tells, and, as he explains, our stories should lead others to treat one another with common decency and loving kindness. By examining Vonnegut's work in light of what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls the "crisis of narratives," I show that Vonnegut deconstructs and demystifies the "grand narratives" of American culture while offering provisional narratives, petites histoires, that may serve as tools for daily, localized living in a postmodern age that too often exploits human flesh for the sake of production.
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