The Sirens of Titan

"If the questions don't make sense, neither will the answers."

Vonneget's The Sirens of Titan is the first Vonnegut novel I ever read. I read it for a high school science fiction course several years ago and, at the time, did not care for Vonnegut. I was perhaps too young and put off by the dense, philosophical debates contained in the novel. All I recall from the high school period was the plot and how confused this novel left me. It was also my first and only Vonnegut novel until last month, so I was unaccustomed and unfamiliar with Vonnegut's style, humor, and themes.

Now, after returning to The Sirens of Titan multiple years later, I have a greater appreciation for this novel, which is far more entrenched in the genre of science fiction than other works of Vonnegut. Vonnegut manages to comment on human existence, the purpose of said existence, religion, science, free will, family, and war. These aforementioned themes appear in several of Vonnegut's works. War, for example, in the inevitably doomed Martian invasion plotted by Rumfoord, was ultimately planned at great profits and sacrifice to bring about a "Brotherhood of Man." Organized religion, military conflict, exploitation of others, our favorite aliens (Tralfamadorians, machines from another galaxy), and just about anything you might expect Vonnegut to satirize humorously happens here.

Ultimately, my take on the novel is one of a compatibilist understanding of human existence and the purpose of life. There is more than one purpose of life hinted at by the text, and even when one accepts the proposition that all of human history on Earth has been orchestrated by Tralfamadorians and, more recently, Winston Niles Rumfoord (himself also a 'tool' being used by somebody), there is still highly personalized ways in which humans carry out their 'fate.' There seems to be a willingness on the part of Vonnegut to allow for more than one meaning of life, and even the Tralfamadorian machines were created by someone else, and, in the case of Salo, achieve human-like qualities of a highly personalized way of completing their destiny. Perhaps that is the arguably the main thrust of the work, that there may be some sort of God or Creator, someone who likes us above, but we still have agency in this world, regardless of the various religions we create to explain the why of our existence.

Below are some of my favorite quotations from the text, particularly those pertaining to the purpose of life.

"The moral: Money, position, health, handsomeness, and talent aren't everything."

"All persons, places, and events in this book are real. Certain speeches and thoughts are necessarily constructions by the author. No names have been changed to protect the innocent, since God Almighty protects the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine."

"These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth--a nightmare of meaningless without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death."

"If Rumfoord accused the Martians of breeding people as though people were no better than farm animals, he was accusing the Martians of doing no more than his own class had done. The strength of his class depended to some extent on sound money management--but depended to a much larger extent on marriages based cynically on the sorts of children likely to be produced."

"At the hospital they had said the most important rule of all was this one: Always obey a direct order without a moment's hesitation."

"When I ran my space ship into the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, it came to me in a flash that everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been."

"It was literature in its finest sense, since it made Unk courageous, watchful, and secretly free. It had made him his own hero in very trying times."

"His ship was powered, and the Martian war effort was powered, by a phenomenon known as UWTB, or the Universal Will to Become. UWTB is what makes universes out of nothingness,--that makes nothingness insist on becoming somethingness."

"But Boaz had decided that he needed a buddy far more than he needed a means of making people do exactly what he wanted them to do. During the night, he had become very unsure of what he wanted people to do, anyway."

"I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all."

"The concessionaires knew all to well about Rumfoord's penchant for realism. When Rumfoord staged a passion play,  he used nothing but real people in real hells.

"As a machine, he had to do what he was supposed to do."

"The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody," she said, "would be to not be used for anything by anybody."

 "It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."