In a 1973 interview published in Playboy, Kurt Vonnegut declared himself to be ‘in the business of making jokes.’ The Sirens of Titan (1959) is one sure instance of the truth of that self-description of Vonnegut the writer. The fiction amounts to a mordant joke of literally cosmic proportions, extending from Newport, Rhode Island, to a moon of Jupiter, and beyond that, to the imaginary Tralfamadore, 150,000 light years from Earth – and, elliptically, to yet farther reaches of the universe. But Sirens hardly stands as the only instance of that kind of joke-making on Vonnegut's part. Many of his subsequent books – including Cat's Cradle (1963), Galápagos (1985), and Timequake (1997) – can also readily be seen as extended jokes. Sirens, however, sets itself apart from those and other works by Vonnegut in two respects. First, in its overall structure it conforms rather strictly to the pattern of a joke, the punch line to which comes in Sirens’ penultimate chapter. Second, it explicitly invites the understanding that its punch line is also the answer to a question.

It is clear from the start that Sirens’ question involves The Meaning of Life. And in that regard (among others), Sirens is very much a book of its time – of the late 1950s when adolescents, mostly, in groups as well as privately, actually did agonize over questions which ultimately came down to the meaning of life. But it is equally evident from the outset that Sirens also has something to tell us about time. And in so far as time is its fundamental subject, what Sirens has to tell us applies not just to the human desire, at a particular historical moment, for higher purpose, but also to the implications of any such thinking at whatever historical moment. This is also to say that its meaning resides with how it gets to its destination at least as much as in its concluding punch line.