Thursday, December 15, 2022

Sinbad: A Mirror on Us

Kurt Vonnegut's Sinbad is a young man who gets ship-wrecked and lands in an island inhabited by just 6 people, who are leading a primitive social life. They consider him insane because the rum they drink feels like water to him..! Sinbad tries hard to find out who they are and how they ended up there. 

Sinbad is a long story or a short novelette. It's available in Audible. It's a deceptively simple story with a cliched plot. But the brilliance of Vonnegut lies in the crisp writing, slow built up of suspense and unpretentious story telling. 'It's written and you can take what you want from it' seems to be his motive behind writing it. 

I felt that Vonnegut tries to draw a parallel of the life of these inhabitants with human social structure. We consider those who question our established norms as insane, just like how Sinbad is considered a nut-loose case by them. It's as if Vonnegut holds a mirror on to us


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