[Delacorte; 2010]
by Sasha Tropp
One of Vonnegut’s greatest and most appealing skills is his ability to blend an utterly humanist sensibility with sardonic dark humor. This collection of sixteen of his earliest unpublished short stories demonstrate that talent in its infancy.
Like much of Vonnegut’s work, these stories are ultimately about people relating to one another. These are stories about people not caring, caring too much, caring about inappropriate things, caring about the wrong things, trying to care but being unable to, et cetera. Vonnegut uses his wry humor to explore the human condition, but the overall message of most of these stories is, essentially, one of hope in humanity. And through his humanist lens, Vonnegut has indeed helped generations of readers learn how to live. The characters are relatable, the plots accessible, and the morals readily apparent. They encourage the reader to have faith and to strive to be good.
These stories originated during a time when Vonnegut was writing stories to sell to magazines like the Saturday Evening Post. Consequently, Vonnegut seems inclined to stick to themes and stories that relate to the average American reader. With the exception of a few stories—including one featuring a robot that could pass for a real woman if only she didn’t have the body of a refrigerator—While Mortals Sleep is rooted in realism, lacking any of the fantastical or experimental conventions his fans grew to love over the years. This is early Vonnegut.
The common thread that weaves throughout the stories in While Mortals Sleep is a sense of loneliness or isolation, of characters desperate to connect with someone, such as the young lady in “Girl Pool” who daydreams of a rendezvous with an escaped murderer just to feel some sort of connection with another human. Although these stories aren’t dated (one of drawbacks of the book), you can feel the post-war aura loitering heavily in the background. He tempers the potential heaviness of the stories with large doses of cynical black humor and, in many cases, surprisingly upbeat endings.
Although many of the stories feature characters suffering from a lack of morale—the wealthy young heir in “Tango” who is too afraid to stand up to his father in the name of love, the two artists in “The Humbugs” who are convinced they are actually frauds—by the end, a glimmer of hope or a redeeming action inevitably occurs. The stories in this collection are driven by the idea that people will, essentially, “snap out of it” so long as they continue to interact with one another, whether they are forced into those connections through outside circumstances or they gather the strength to engage with others on their own.
The most important takeaway of this collection is not that everything will turn out okay in the end, but that we will get by in the end, as long as we can rely on others. Vonnegut’s outlook in While Mortals Sleep is captured in a phrase he uses in “Girl Pool”: “Tomorrow’s another day.”
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