Welcome To The Monkey House

     Well this is a story that speaks for it self.  As I read this story over and over again it didn't make any sense to me.  When the author mention the word" nothinghead " what kind of word is this, then when he gave the meaning of the word I really was puzzled then.  Then the phrase " ethical birth-control pills three times a day."  As you see no one of this makes any sense.  So as I read on I started trying to understand this .  The Hostesses where the ladies that runs a call girl house.  when the police was looking for this guy name Billy but they had never seen him or didn't even have a picture to identify him by that is where they went.  But the girls was the only ones that could identify him.  So we have a drug dealer is who I took Billy at.  So when he would slip the men this pill they say that below the waist felt cold as iron or balsa-wood.  The woman said that below the waist they felt like wet cotton or stale ginger ale.  These pills was very poteen  as they say.  To the women Billy was known for the poems that he written or rewrote to fit the women he was trying to impress.  Near the end of the story Nancy was one of the ladies that the police know was close to him when they wired up her phone they thought they had him when he called her.  But when they traced him down he said he was  a friend.  Then one day he came and got Nancy  out the house, he didn't take her out the door and to a car or cab.  He took her down the sewer drain, so he kidnapped her.  as the police was looking for Billy they didn't know that their witness Nancy was missing as well.   When they went to the zoo that is where they went to the monkey house to see the monkeys and then the phone rang and they answered it right in the monkey house.  Now where do the Monkey House fit in with Billy and the girls?

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Mind = Blown

I absolutely loved Kurt Vonnegut's story. Dysentopia novels are definitely my favorite genre and when it's done right it's the most facinating look into the plausable future of our current society. Sometimes we have to remember that Vonnegut wrote these stories long before modern technology. Like most Science Fiction writers such as Orson Scott Card often he predicts technology that eventually comes to be apart of our daily lives. Ender's Game has a semi iPad that the kids use every day. While there isn't a specific form of technology predicted in Welcome to the Monkey House Vonnegut makes other inferences on a plausible future. With numb genitals being a "solution" to over population and suicide buisnesses where someone wishing to die can end thier lives. This is an ideal of the future also presented in the comedy cartoon Futurama. But who's to say that this doesn't become a reality. Should someone have that choice, when to die and how to come to that ultimate ending? Should they be able to have a lovely lady read them a menu of options on their death and they pick the final moments of their life? What about for the terminally ill shouldn't people be able to decide to die with dignity rather than suffer pain and agony, needing their bed pans changed and losing all control of themselves until they are a shell and and burden to their family? Vonnegut lightly touches on this solution to population but maybe it wasn't a satire. Maybe he really thought that chosing to die in a suicide parlor was a viable option. I mean why not? It's your life, if you chose to end it shouldn't you have that right? I've always thought the same for drugs, hell make them legal, start of buisnesses where adicts can go get high, and there's a babysitter essentially to get them through the experiences, take out the criminalization and allow the choice. It's something I've always wondered about. I love the way Vonnegut thinks though, it's like he's always saying why not, why can't people just travel through time, in one novel as the narrator he eventually places himself into the story and simulatiously talks to the auidence because why not, why can't he. It's facisnating. Sometimes his writing are so-so and sometimes it's phemoninal but I promise you it's always a literary exploration and worth reading. I loved this story the tone the way it changed at the end and the mood became dark and almost sydistic. Vonnegut has a way of creating an alternate world but it's so real, it's tangible that you wonder if that is our future if we continue down a certain road. Like Pharmaceuticals, like government mandates, like criminalizing free expression and individuality. 

Is Vonnegut's work a warning or pure satire? Why does he take on such a dark tone in the end after having such light heartedness and jovial nature why change to something so deep and twisted? Was he just an obscure Sci-Fi writer or did Vonnegut see something about his current society that others didn't? 

PS. If you've never read anything else by Kurt Vonnegut please don't start with Slaughter-house Five, it's good but it's not great. I loved Breakfast of Champions, the drawings are hilarious because they're all little doodles that he does himself. I also truly think his short stories tend to be his best writing because they didn't have any overkill like in some of his novels. But I definitely recommend reading more.

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