Foreword in At Millennium's End

Vonnegut wrote a Foreword in At Millennium's End: New Essays of the Work of Kurt Vonnegut, edited by Kevin Alexander Boon and published by the State University of New York Press in 2001.

Summary

Vonnegut says sometimes that he suffers from "survivor's syndrome", not because of his experiences during World War II, but because of all the artists he has known in various disciplines who died or are dying in obscurity, and often poverty as well. Audiences failed them by denying such talented people the accolades and living wage that they deserved. An old cartoon once depicted war as "a rouged, warty old whore" commenting to a young man "Hello, Sonny, I knew your Dad". The figure could also just as well depict the arts to many people. In the arts as in the trench warfare of World War I, thousands of brave young people ran onto the battlefield with practically all of them dying horribly.

This is the basis of Vonnegut's "survivor syndrome", since he is one of the few artists to have lived, not because of superior agility, courage, or character, but from sheer dumb luck. Artists become artists because they must, but whether they can live off their art is a matter of pure chance. Mark Twain, whom Vonnegut calls "a better writer and human being" than himself, was amazed when he was an old man that his works were still popular. He attributed this to his proclivity to moralize, which Vonnegut believes that he also shares. During his career there wasn't time to think much about what he was doing, but looking back now, he sees that the theme of his work has been portraying "people who behaved decently in an indecent society". Vonnegut refers to such people as "saints".