Contents introduction chapter I. Existentialism as a literary trend

CONCLUSION
Vonnegut's novels are a complex symbiosis of reality and fantasy, fiction and documentary, logic and absurdity, which is based on playful artistic imagination, realized through the poetics of paradox. From Vonnegut's point of view, artistic creativity, by its nature based on a subjective vision of reality and imagination, and not on objective rationalism, can best express human understanding and feeling of the world and help people create their own, humane system of relationships. Literature needs not a photographic copy of reality, but its image, corresponding to the human idea. For Vonnegut, humor, fantasy, and the grotesque are means against dogmatic and utopian thinking, methods of humanization and personalization of the text, constructive elements of a dystopian worldview. The world of novels is decentered, based on an infinity of transitions and combinations, and is a boundless cultural text. There is no serious object that could be subjected to ridicule. The concept of time is chaotic and inherent in the postmodernist theory of eclecticism. The work does not fetishize the "new" or "old" time, these concepts are dissolved in each other, intertwined or interchanged.
The writer is not interested in the logical sequence of events - at the very beginning of the novel, he can reveal to the reader how the action will actually end, in the course of the narrative itself, he mixes events endlessly, moving freely in time and thus, as it were, destroying it. Such a collage of fragments of time, fragments of space, twists and turns of human destinies, presented from the most unexpected angle, is designed to stun the reader and make him think. This form of presentation of the material provides for the intense participation of the reader in the creation of the text. Reading stereotypes are being deconstructed, the codes of traditional literature are being destroyed, the reader chooses his own way of entering the labyrinth and joins the game. This participation in a single act of text creation is considered the most important principle of modern aesthetics, and collage is considered to be an invention of postmodern culture, since it is this form that makes it possible to reflect the splitting of modern consciousness. So, Vonnegut in the most detailed way at all levels of the narrative substantiates the impossibility of constructing a form. He aims to create an anti-art, an anti-system, to develop a new way of talking about an absurd reality (a reality engulfed in war), a way in which the principle of power and violence will be eliminated.
The next feature is Vonnegut's creative method, in which irony and subtle empathy, paradox and pathological rejection, alogism and reality are closely intertwined, the main technique of baroque literature is “laughter through tears”. The nature of the narrative is such that the recipient in each chapter can decipher veiled codes, references to the historical past, the most modern elements, combinations of cultures. The truth of the story is unobtrusive and relative. Text instead of history. History is nothing but the history of reading a text. Having given the thesis, Vonnegut immediately gives the antithesis, emphasizing the polysemy of any event or artifact. Vonnegut speculates that in an era in which science has become a possible source of unhappiness, truth can be harmful.
In the course of the study, we identified the following existential motifs in the works "Cat's Cradle" and "Sirens of Titan":
-signs of degeneration and degradation
- dominant qualities of humanity:
pettiness, wretchedness, absurdity and senseless cruelty.
- the earth looks like an abandoned, cluttered and filthy attic, stinking through and through with dampness and old age
-ecological catastrophy
-extreme wretchedness of a person
-absolute loneliness of an individual on an overpopulated planet
- the futility and meaninglessness of life.
Life is meaningless, social activity is fruitless, morality is untenable. There is no god in the world, there are no ideals, there is only existence, fate-calling, to which a person stoically and unquestioningly submits; existence is a concern that a person must accept, because the mind is not able to cope with the hostility of being: a person is doomed to absolute loneliness, no one will share his existence.