these works. Before becoming a full-time writer, Kurt Vonnegut worked as a police reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau, and then as a public relations writer for the General Electric Company in Schenectady (Wakeman, 1494). He used his various experiences as a writer to create the narrator for Cat's Cradle. The narrator is a writer planning to write a book called The Day the World Ended. His research for this book provides a base plot for the story, on which all of the other action happens. He also includes writers in The Sirens of Titan and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. In the former, the writer is an omniscient man who writes about the history of mankind on Mars and revises the Bible (Vonnegut, Sirens, 196). In the latter, the writer is Kilgore Trout, a relatively unknown science fiction author whose numerous stories get shelved with pornography. This is commonly seen as Vonnegut's fear of what he himself might become (Amer. Lit. Bio., 305). In the preface of a different book, Vonnegut states, "I want to be a character in all of my works. . . . I have always rigged my stories so as to include myself, and I can't stop now" (Amer. Lit. Bio., 308). Therefore, he has put himself into these novels as writers. Finally, Vonnegut's family has played a role in influencing his works. Both his brother and his sister have had some effects on his writing. In Kurt Vonnegut: A Self Portrait, he states that he has a tendency to create his characters in groups of three: two men and a woman. This is his brother, his sister, and himself, he says (Mantell). Each of these three novels demonstrates that pattern. In Cat's Cradle, three main characters are the Hoenikker siblings: Frank, Angela, and Newt. In The Sirens of Titan, the group of three is Malachi Constant, Beatrice Rumfoord, and their son Chrono. Eliot Rosewater, his ex-wife, and his father are the three main characters in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,, and also fit the pattern. Vonnegut's br...
