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TrimmMichael TrimmJ. Omlor English 2 HonorsApril 23, 2009Kurt Vonnegut’s Short StoriesIn many ways the nightmarish science fiction introduced in Vonnegut’s shortstories are close to becoming a reality in today’s society. With the population expanding,scientists making new advancements daily, and government meddling in private affairs,Vonnegut’s warnings from forty years ago are proving to be relevant today. Vonnegutmight be more prophetic than he realized.“Welcome to the Monkey House” discusses the topic of overpopulation, the problems associated with it and those entailed in eradicating it. The sexual energy thatruns through the story serves as the vital counterpoint to the declining sterility of asociety that suppresses sexual pleasure and encourages euthanasia. This world of seventeen billion people and Ethical Suicide Parlors with six-feet tall, sexily cladhostesses appears reminiscent of that in “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.” Thefirst difference is that in this story the world government has imposed compulsory ethical birth control, rendered through pills that numb the lower extremities.Most women said their bottom halves felt like wet cotton or stale ginger ale. The pills were so effective that you could blindfold a man who had taken one, tell himto recite the Gettysburg Address, kick him in the balls while he was doing it, andhe wouldn’t miss a syllable.1

TrimmThe pills do not prevent reproduction; they simply remove any sexual pleasure. “Thus didscience and morals go hand in hand.”The second difference from the world of “Tomorrow and Tomorrow andTomorrow” is the emergence of an inevitable human resistance to the dehumanizingstructures of the world government. The voice of irrepressible human vitality in this storyemanates from Billy the Poet, a “nothinghead,” as those who refuse to take their pills arecalled. Billy is known to assume various disguises and abduct Suicide Parlor hostesses,deflowering them and introducing them into an underground culture of nothingheads.The plot has the sheriff come to an Ethical Suicide Parlor to warn the twohostesses, Nancy McLuhan and Mary Kraft, that Billy the Poet is on the loose. Past behavior suggests he will head for the suicide parlor, since his targets have always beenthe hostesses. The telephone rings and a voice delivers one of the brief, taunting poemsthat are Billy’s trademark. But the police are prepared and capture the caller. The sheriff races off to the scene of the arrest, with Mary following. Nancy returns to the old manthey have been about to terminate, but he pulls out a gun, strips off his disguise andreveals himself as Billy the Poet. He smuggles Nancy out and leads her through sewer tunnels to the Kennedy Compound Museum, which closes for the winter. There, other nothingheads seize her and drug her. By the time she awakes, the effects of her ethical birth control pills have worn off, and she finds herself in the cabin of Joseph Kennedy’syacht “Marlin” with Billy. She tells him that if he wants to take her he had better call hisfriends to hold her down, and that is what happens. Later, she looks out from under her covers to see Billy quietly reading at the cabin table. When he confirms that he has donethe same to the other hostesses, she asks why they have never killed or betrayed him. Heexplains that they are grateful and that, in time, she will be, too. “ ‘What you have been2

Trimmthrough, Nancy,’ he said, ‘is a typical wedding night for a strait-laced girl of a hundredyears ago, when everybody was a nothinghead’ ”. He explains that marriages often beganthat way, but that with time the bride could become “a sexual enthusiast.” His intent is to bring an innocent pleasure back into the world and to express his tenderness he leaves her a book of poetry open to the poem his grandfather had read his bride on their weddingnight: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

He alsoleaves her with a bottle that contains the old birth control pills that allowed pleasure but prevented conception. And on the label are the words, “WELCOME TO THE MONKEYHOUSE” .The inscription refers to the history of how the whole idea of the numbing pills began. A druggist named J. Edgar Nation had been taking his eleven children for a walk through the zoo and came upon a monkey playing with its genitals. He invented the pillto “introduce morality into the monkey house at the Grand Rapids zoo.” Since the anti-aging pill that kept everyone looking like twenty-two was boosting the populationgrowth, Nation’s ethical birth control pill was imposed on humans, too. The druggist’sname is a two-part derivation from J. Edgar Hoover and Carrie Nation. Hoover, as theFBI Director of the time, was vigorous in his rigid moral judgments, despite some peculiar proclivities of his own, while Carrie Nation sought to purge the society of alcohol-induced sin. Carrie’s influence lives on in Nancy’s teachers, for she believes thatunrestrained promiscuity can be induced by just one glass of the worst drug of all – gin.One of Vonnegut’s targets is “the people who have been most eager to rule, tomake the laws, to enforce the laws and to tell everybody exactly how God Almightywants things here on Earth –those people have forgiven themselves and their friends for 3

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