2 B R 0 2 BKurt VonnegutOmniClassics · Literature
2 B R 0 2 B
Kurt VonnegutA prospective father waits in a society where every birth requires a voluntary death.
Progress is saved in this browser
About the book
Disease and old age have been conquered, and the United States maintains a carefully fixed population. The price of a new life is someone else's agreement to leave it. In a Chicago hospital, Edward K. Wehling waits for the birth of triplets under rules that make ordinary family happiness a problem of numerical balance. Nearby, a painter works on an official mural celebrating the system, while staff discuss its arrangements with reassuring professional confidence. Vonnegut lets these public images and casual conversations expose the pressure beneath an apparently perfected society. The brief story uses bureaucratic cheerfulness and dark comedy to ask what disappears when human lives become interchangeable places in an administrative plan.
- Population and control
- Institutional optimism
- The value of life
Why read it
Read a concentrated satire whose ordinary hospital setting makes its social bargain especially unsettling.
English story from Worlds of If, January 1962