So it goes

This is what I remember of Kurt Vonnegut: in Mother Night, the main protagonist is a Lord Haw-Haw type character, propagandising for the Nazis—although, all the time, he is really an undercover agent working for the democratic side. Later, he comes to wonder whether he hasn't been a better propagandist than a spy.

In Bluebeard, Rabo Karabekian, an abstract expressionist and escapee of the Armenian genocide, paints his greatest works using some cheap industrial paint that soon falls apart.

Cat's Cradle—the invention of a religion and a dictatorship, so that the eternally poor have something to live for and to fight against: ie so that they have a meaning.

In Slaughterhouse Five: Billy Pilgrim falling backwards through time and seeing the bomber plane on TV extract the shrapnel out of the dead, as if by magic, as it flies backwards over the battlefield.