Epicac

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (November 11, 1922-April 11, 2007) was born to a once wealthy and prestigious family in Indianapolis, Indiana. The family fortune dwindled during the advent of the Great Depression, but Vonnegut was able to enroll at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, after high school as a member of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC). Much of the critical attention given to Vonnegut’s writing career notes his subjects are often war-related and his pieces often present an anti-war sentiment. This is not surprising given the fact that Vonnegut, after losing his place in Cornell’s ROTC program because of subpar academic performance, enlisted in the Army in March of 1943 instead of waiting to be drafted into the World War II military effort.

The United States had entered World War II after Japan’s 1941 attack on the US Pearl Harbor Naval Base. Shortly after enlisting, the Army trained Vonnegut in mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and at the Army Specialized Training Program at the University of Tennessee. This training placed him in close proximity to a part of the military beginning to consider the uses of computer-type technology as part of its strategic planning practices. Vonnegut would ultimately be deployed to fight in Germany as an intelligence scout. This aspect of his military life also placed him in direct connection with the ways war strategy was changing due to technological advances being made during the war.

EPICAC’s setting is similar to what Vonnegut would have experienced during his military training. The story’s use of colloquial language and its quick-to-distrust “the Brass” feel distinctly akin to an enlisted man, such as Vonnegut, who served in close quarters to decision-making officers. Vonnegut fought in the Battle of the Bulge (Germany’s last large-scale offensive attempt of the war). He was captured by German troops and sent to a prison camp near Dresden. He was made to live in a slaughterhouse during his prison internment, which influenced his writing of his most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-5.

After the Allied Forces destroyed the city of Dresden in February of 1945, Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners were evacuated to the border of the present-day Czech Republic and then relocated to France. Eventually, Vonnegut returned to the United States. Vonnegut served the end of his enlistment in Fort Riley, Kansas.

Vonnegut married Jane Cox and enrolled at the University of Chicago to study anthropology in the fall of 1945. He would ultimately leave the university during Jane’s pregnancy with their first son and would accept employment as a technical writer for General Electric. This experience would again bring him into association with militarized technology. Vonnegut’s brother, Bernard, also worked for General Electric on what would become known as Project Cirrus. General Electric partnered with the Army Corps of Engineers on the project to explore “cloud seeding,” which was an attempt to create rainfall by putting certain chemicals into the clouds. Vonnegut’s experience and his brother’s stories would influence many of Kurt’s early short stories, such as “EPICAC.”

Serving in the Army, experiencing such large-scale wartime thinking, and being a part of many military-based technical projects created much of the anti-war sentiment and themes of ethics alongside Vonnegut’s use of satirical humor in his literary career. After facing such adversity and large-scale destruction, Vonnegut engaged with his own experiences and traumas through satirical humor. When he was able to leave General Electric because of his literary successes, Vonnegut felt a distinct duty (because of his journalistic background as a young man alongside his Socialist political views) to make his writing do cultural work and not just entertain.

His experience in war and his distaste for American capitalism combined in the themes, characters, and subjects in his literary writing. “EPICAC” is an excellent demonstration in his early work of the themes that would endure throughout his literary career. It is no coincidence that the story is set in a physics building and that in 1969, Vonnegut would give a speech called “The Virtuous Physicist” to the American Association of Physics Teachers. When asked afterward what a virtuous physicist was, he would answer, “one who declines to work on weapons” (Strand, Ginger. The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, p. 245).