A review by wolfdan9
Bagombo Snuff Box by Kurt Vonnegut

2.5

Bagombo Snuff Box is a short story collection published late in Vonnegut’s life that assembles 24 or so stories from early in his career. Early, as in most of them were published in various magazines before even Sirens of Titan, his landmark second novel, had been released. There aren’t many sci-fi or speculative fiction themes in the collection and it seems like Welcome to the Monkey House had already gathered his best stories from (before and?) after this era. After a handful of stories, the reader will start to notice that there are plenty of Vonnegutian elements present and many other missing. I wouldn’t go so far as to classify the works in the collection as juvenilia, but their quality is really inconsistent. Some, like “The Cruise of the Jolly Roger” have an odd charm. Others end with a punchline, like the rather smartly designed “Der Arme Dolmetscher.”

I guess my main issue with Bagombo is that, even knowing how Vonnegut is a largely humorous/satirical writer, I don’t know how contrived some of these stories are meant to be for the sake of humor vs. with the intent of having popular appeal in the magazines in which they were published. Surely, the titular story is meant to parody the character archetypes that are portrayed (the beautiful but dumb woman, the clueless husband with the gorgeous wife, the loser-ish ex-boyfriend trying to impress the beautiful married woman), and it does so to great effect. Runaways is similarly obvious. But other stories are quite stale or stiff — still providing the odd giggle or two — but lacking the teeming frustration, masked by ridiculous humor, that permeates Vonnegut’s best works. The only exception to this is 2 B R 0 2 B, easily the best cut in the selection, which I’ll cover below.

“2 B R 0 2 B” is one of Vonnegut’s earlier stories, featuring his trademark sarcastic style and blend of speculative science fiction and humor. It stands out in Bagombo Snuff Box as a distinctly Vonnegutian story—most of the other selections in this collection were written before Player Piano and have some weaknesses that I’ll outline in another post. But 2 B R 0 2 B easily blows away the rest in terms of humor, succinct storytelling, and thematic delivery.

The story is set in a futuristic world, maybe a couple hundred years from now. In this future, global population is strictly controlled: for a baby to be born, someone must volunteer to die. Otherwise, people can live indefinitely. The conflict centers around a man who has triplets but only one death volunteer. After some philosophical musings disguised as witty dialogue—between a painter creating a portrait of the doctor who discovered immortality, a government worker who oversees voluntary deaths, and the doctor himself—the story reaches a brutal finale. The father, unable to secure two more volunteers, ends up shooting and killing both the doctor and the government worker before taking his own life, fulfilling the three deaths needed for his children to be born. In a final darkly comic twist, the painter, disillusioned by it all, calls the gas department to schedule his own death. They casually inform him they can fit him in that afternoon.

The humor is obviously there—Vonnegut referring to God as a “happy hooligan” is pretty hilarious—but the story’s message is also clear about the dangers of taking science too far. It raises questions about the lengths we go to in order to improve and progress, and how that pursuit can ultimately strip us of our own humanity. There’s a point where the obsession with achieving perfect practicality becomes less about actual betterment and more about the process itself, and I think that’s part of what Vonnegut was getting at.

What really stood out to me, though, is how the story explores control over death. As we advance scientifically, we seem to gain more control over mortality. But the protagonist—by directly taking death into his own hands, not just for himself but for others—completely undercuts that idea. His actions expose the illusion that humanity can ever truly master death. In the end, the story suggests that no matter how much progress we make, we’ll never really be ahead of it.