Kilgore Trout is a fictional character in Kurt Vonnegut’s books:
- Breakfast of Champions
- God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
- Slaughterhouse-Five
- Jailbird
- Time Quake
He seems to be Vonnegut’s alter ego, and often represents the pure artist.
Lots of interesting background and trivia in the Wikipedia article:
And for our friends working in the Rare Book section of the Vatican Library:
The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
Mr. Trout morphs a bit from book to book, but generally he is an unsuccessful Science Fiction writer. In Time Quake, he lives in a run-down homeless shelter (he’d been kicked out of the public library) and writes a new Sci Fi story each day, then takes it down to the trash bin each evening.
In other words, art for arts sake. This is reflected in a letter he wrote to a high school student in 2006:
I was thinking of ending by providing some quotes by Kurt Vonnegut, but there is a problem. Basically, everything he’s said, every line he’s written, is pretty profound. Good Reads has 4,745 quotes:
But, what the hell…..
