"Playing God, Are We?": The Cosmogonic Concoction in Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos

Kurt Vonnegut's corpus boasts of works deriding humanity's ethical infirmity and the human hand in the planet's effacement whilst suggesting ingenious reforms. His most vocal appeal is Galapagos (1985), written during the Cold War when the impending threat of a Third World War troubled the author with grim forebodings. A spiritual culmination of a series of novels charged with Vonnegut's trademark satire at human-made debacles like World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War, Galapagos disses the human brain as the source of all evil - reminiscent of Kant's idea of humankind's innate evil - and imagines human apocalypse by a virus outbreak and the evolution of a brain-less post-human species in a utopian future. This article attempts a close reading of Galapagos against the cosmogonic cycle of creation and destruction of worlds as chronicled in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). It unravels in the novel the archetypal creation myth which Vonnegut, a trained anthropologist, seems to have adapted to serve his humanist ends. The article assesses the drivers - divine, human and chance - involved in effecting the fictional cosmogony, studies Vonnegut's take on religion, comments upon his authorial god complex, and goes on to locate Galapagos as his greatest god-act.