The Quest for Order: Social Chaos in Kurt Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan

The individual's search for absolute order and meaning within a chaotic universe is an important theme in the novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Ordinary human consciousness, it seems, simply incompatible with what it cannot clarify and control. It requires and it insists on as much form, as much meaning, and as little ambiguity and inconsistency, as possible. In such novels, the characters and the form itself are free to reflect and react to chaos without becoming indistinguishable from it. This is primarily focused in the Sirens of Titan and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.