"It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead"
About this Quote
A resurrection with strings attached: Vonnegut’s line treats the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy as a bureaucratic inconvenience, maybe even a scam. “Mixed blessing” is doing the heavy lifting. It’s the language of polite disappointment, the phrase you use for a promotion that doubles your workload or a miracle that ruins your life. Applied to “brought back from the dead,” it collapses the sacred into the mundane, a classic Vonnegut move: flatten the cosmic so you can see the machinery and the absurdity.
The intent isn’t to shock but to undercut sentimentality. In much of Vonnegut’s work, survival doesn’t read as triumph; it reads as continuation. Coming back means returning to the same systems that chewed you up the first time: war, grief, bad luck, human cruelty, and the petty routines that persist even after catastrophe. The subtext is that death isn’t only an end; it’s also a release from narrative obligations. To be resurrected is to be drafted back into plot, back into consequence, back into a world that will ask you to perform gratitude for the privilege of suffering again.
Contextually, Vonnegut writes as someone haunted by mass death and moral injury (Dresden, yes, but also the broader 20th-century machinery of slaughter). Against that backdrop, resurrection isn’t a clean second chance; it’s survivorhood, with its guilt, confusion, and relentless afterlife of memory. The line works because it refuses the clean emotional payoff. It’s funny in the way gallows humor is funny: not denial, but diagnosis.
The intent isn’t to shock but to undercut sentimentality. In much of Vonnegut’s work, survival doesn’t read as triumph; it reads as continuation. Coming back means returning to the same systems that chewed you up the first time: war, grief, bad luck, human cruelty, and the petty routines that persist even after catastrophe. The subtext is that death isn’t only an end; it’s also a release from narrative obligations. To be resurrected is to be drafted back into plot, back into consequence, back into a world that will ask you to perform gratitude for the privilege of suffering again.
Contextually, Vonnegut writes as someone haunted by mass death and moral injury (Dresden, yes, but also the broader 20th-century machinery of slaughter). Against that backdrop, resurrection isn’t a clean second chance; it’s survivorhood, with its guilt, confusion, and relentless afterlife of memory. The line works because it refuses the clean emotional payoff. It’s funny in the way gallows humor is funny: not denial, but diagnosis.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mortality |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Kurt
Add to List
