ABSTRACT
The conclusion notes that while Vonnegut shared many concerns, themes, and techniques with other contemporaries, few have brought so many disparate elements together in the way that Vonnegut was able to. Moreover, Vonnegut’s unflinching attention to the ways in which human beings are materially, intellectually, and culturally determined by their continuity with nature – indeed, of the ways in which they are nature – was nevertheless leavened with a genuine sympathy and humanitarianism that his fellow ironists and black humourists often lacked. It is the synthesis in Vonnegut’s work – the never uncomplicated or unmediated elision of binaries such as culture and nature, discourse and materiality, human and ahuman – that epitomises his posthumanist understanding, which is as alive to the movement to rocks as it is to the intricacies of human interaction. In this light, the wider relevance of Vonnegut’s work in academia and in general is considered, and the future possibilities of posthumanist theory in literary studies are explored.
