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I will be the first to admit that I, too, have been trained to shy away from offering a tidy end, or moral point, to a story. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I’ve ever sent a simple declarative message in any short story. I came of age as a writer when to do so would have been out of the question. I was at least two generations removed from the days when a popular and literary short story would attempt to deliver a neat ending to a story, a conclusion that would cause the reader surprise and also recognition of a point made clearly and well.

But Vonnegut has always done so. And increasingly, what he did seems rare and necessary. Most of his short stories have resolutions that make abundantly clear that a lesson has been learned, by the characters (usually) and the reader (always).

I’ve been an avid reader of Vonnegut since I was a teenager, but it wasn’t until I read these last two posthumous collections of stories, While Mortals Sleep and Look at the Birdie, that I’ve realized just how strong a moralist Vonnegut was. I knew that as a man and as an essayist, he was not shy about making his opinions known. He spoke highly of Jesus Christ, and he made clear and simple pronouncements such as, “Goddamn it, you’ve got to be kind.” And because he looked a bit like a hippie Mark Twain and appeared older than he was, he could carry it off. He seemed, even in early middle age, to be one of those elder statesmen who could declare his opinions, grumpily, about anything, and people would attach to these statements a certain gravitas—well earned through his exemplary work and life. When you have fought in WWII, when you have survived Dresden, when you have supported your own family and also taken in the four orphaned children of your sister (after she and her husband died only days apart), then you’ve got some credit in the moral-authority bank.

And so we have these stories, which were written early in his career, when Vonnegut was trying to make a living as a writer. He was writing a great deal of short fiction at the time, and he was trying—often successfully—to sell these stories to magazines like Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post, which were then publishing a good deal of short fiction. Clearly, the way he wrote at the time was influenced a certain amount by what he knew these publications wanted. They wanted stories of relatively unadorned prose, tight plotting, simple conflict, and ideally an unexpected twist at the end.

These are what might be called mousetrap stories. This was once a popular, if not dominant, form. But you don’t see it much anymore. We’re now in the age of what might be called photorealistic stories. What we have with most contemporary short stories is a realism, a naturalism, that gives us roughly what photography gives us. A gifted photographer will frame reality in a way that seems both real and novel. His or her work will “hold a mirror” to our lives, but in such a way that we see ourselves anew. All art forms attempt this mirror-holding, but photography, and the contemporary short story, are particularly well-designed delivery devices for this aim. And thus the contemporary short story gives us characters who breathe, who seem three-dimensional, who live in real places, who have real jobs and struggles and pain. The stories are to a great extent in service to these characters. The characters make realistic moves in their lives, realistic choices, and the outcomes are plausible and perhaps even pedestrian.

Not as much so in a mousetrap story. A mousetrap story exists to trick or trap the reader. It moves the reader along, through the complex (but not too complex) machinery of the story, until the end, when the cage is sprung and the reader is trapped. And so in this kind of story, the characters, the setting, the plot—they’re all more or less means to an end.

This isn’t to say the characters aren’t real-seeming, aren’t believable or sympathetic or any of the other things we might want characters to be. On the contrary, Vonnegut