Chapter 8: Human or Robot?

         I read this chapter right after watching an episode of Futurama. I have always enjoyed the humor of the robot in the television show named, Bender. As soon as I came across the passage where Kilgore Trout is telling the boy who wanted to quit the paper route that he was a, “gutless wonder,” (Vonnegut 167) which also happen to be one of Trout’s book about a robot it immediately caught my attention because of Bender. The story, “Gutless Wonder… was about a robot who had had bad breath...But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings. It was dropped on them from airplanes...They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground....And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race" (Vonnegut 168).

         After I read this passage about three or four times I had to stop reading and think about what Vonnegut was trying to get at through this. I wanted to know why Vonnegut included Kilgore Trout and his sci-fi novels, which all seemed to have something to do with time travel. I soon decided that the story of the “Gutless Wonder” symbolized the acceptance of evil and wrong doing of humans into the war. By calling humans robots I feel as if Vonnegut is saying that we have no conscience and no care of other human life. So the robot story to me was explaining the human race and our actions. The robot was outcast by others because of his “halitosis” or bad breath, which in our lives could symbol that fact that humans tend to outcast other due to foolish characteristics such as a handicap mentally or physically, maybe the color of someone’s hair, or even their race and ethnical background. The robot was casted off from society due to one foolish characteristic and I feel as if we, as humans tend to cast away others in our lives due to a few small flaws or different characteristics.