The Importance of Being in Ilium

Most readers of Vonnegut are familiar with the fictional city of Ilium, NY. The city appears in many of Vonnegut’s works including Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, and Piano Player (among others). There are a few specific sites and buildings to which Vonnegut frequently refers including Ilium High School and the General Forge and Foundry Company. In Cat’s Cradle, Ilium, NY is the hometown and scientific playground of Dr. Hoenikker, the eccentric father of the atomic bomb. The Del Prada Hotel, the Cape Cod Room, the graveyard, Jack’s Hobby Shop, and the tombstone salesroom are introduced into Ilium’s vast collection of settings by this novel. It has been proposed that Ilium could actually be a simple pseudonym for either Troy, NY or Schenectady, NY, but this proposition lacks validity as both cities are described as explicitly separate from Ilium in Vonnegut’s Piano Player. However, descriptions of Ilium do suggest that the city is very much like Troy and Schenectady, and that it would be in a similar geographic area of the state were it real. This completely constructed setting allows Vonnegut to create a city as fanciful or mundane as he so chooses. It is true that Ilium is a common thread throughout Vonnegut’s repertoire, but the question that I have to ask is why does Vonnegut tie his characters and novels together with the use of this city? Why does Billy Pilgrim live in Ilium? Why Dr. Hoenikker? Why Kilgore Trout? One possible answer is very simple: by having one setting span a range of works, those works gain a level of perceived reality that the novels, were they all set in separate fictional locations, could never achieve. Although none of the works that involve Ilium belong to a series, they belong to the same universe by means of a common setting, and this adds an entirely new dimension of believability to Vonnegut’s works.