The Problematic of Vonnegut's Protagonists: Search for Meaning of Life

This volume acquaints the readers with the problematic situation of the protagonists in the select fiction of Kurt Vonnegut. A relentless effort has gone into the critical scrutiny and analysis of the texts under consideration so as to negotiate Vonnegut?s tryst with existential questions as raised by a postmodern and absurdist milieu that refuses to offer any comprehensible pattern of life. Writers like William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Jerzy Kosinski, John Hawkes, Kurt Vonnegut etc. went on weaving their novelistic narratives and spinning their fictional heroes in a synthesized and fabulatory manner. The reader now has to negotiate a new compendium of central protagonists who came to be presented as existential explorers across an agonizing spectrum of deculture, materialism, dehumanization and the profanities of highly provocative metropolitan living. The book will prove useful to the students, researchers and teachers of contemporary American fiction.