(Post inspired by 2manyusernames, because one good turn deserves another!) :)

I love Kurt Vonnegut.

Wait... since when do Republicans and Democrats not get along? Did I miss something? (*Still no sarcasm tag*)

This is kind of why I've never fully engaged with Vonnegut, or many other postmodern authors, (with respect to 2many). The very question of how myths, legends, fairy tales, affect our ideas of story and its sensibility, as such, was already well-covered by the Romantics, including the Grimms, and some modernist-era types, like Joseph Campbell, C.S. Lewis, and Tolkien, et al.

Not impugning Vonnegut's work at all -- he was certainly capable of brilliance, but like so much 20th-century writing, it's always seemed to me a bit like tilting at the shattered windmill blades of the Great War, despite itself -- a war which I feel we are still waging to this day.

I think we may need to truly acknowledge this as an influence in our media before we can move on.

I love this quote of his:

Those little drama graphs he was drawing were originally the basis for his thesis when he was going for his Doctorate in cultural anthropology. He explains it better in his pseudo-autobiography, Palm Sunday, but the point he was trying to make was that all of mankind's epic stories have shared similar "drama timelines", meaning you could plot the drama of, say, Gilgamesh, and lay it over the plot of Rumplestiltskin and they would match.

He never finished his thesis or his degree. Years later he was awarded an honorary degree, but I'm not sure if it was from the same university he attended.

yes, our epic stories or the ones that affect us most all have thing in common, such as the drama timelines or the way the most resonant fantasy stories rely on archetypes.

I read somewhere that he was awarded an anthropology degree for his novel "Cat's Cradle."

According to wikipedia, the University of Chicago accepted Cat's Cradle as his thesis and awarded him a master's in anthropology. I guess it wasn't an honorary degree after all.