Title: Slaughterhouse-Five
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Publisher: Dell
Form: Mass market paperback
Pages: 215
Date of Publication: 1969
Date of Publication: 1969
Source: Borrowed from the Neutron Bar
Dates of Reading: 1/1/13 – 1/3/13
The List: #121
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| The skull and crossbones are a clue . . . |
“He’s a pretty big
man,” said Derby, who, of course, was a pretty big man himself.
“Size
don’t mean a thing.”
“You’re
going to shoot him?”
“I’m
gonna have him shot,” said Lazzaro. “He’ll get home after the war. He’ll be a big hero. The dames’ll be climbing
all over him. He’ll settle down. A couple of years’ll go by. And then one day
there’ll be a knock on his door. He’ll answer the door, and there’ll be a
stranger out there. The stranger’ll ask him if he’s so-and-so. When he says he
is, the stranger’ll say, ‘Paul Lazzaro sent me.’ And he’ll pull out a gun and
shoot his pecker off. The stranger’ll let him think a couple of seconds about
who Paul Lazzaro is and what life’s gonna be like without a pecker. Then he’ll
shoot him once in the guts and walk away.” So it goes.
Slaughterhouse-Five
is a book about death. It is undoubtedly about other things as well: the
passage of time, the absurdity of war, the loss of will to live in a world gone
mad. But for me, it is death, in its many shapes and sizes and numbers, in all
its peculiarities and permutations, that dominates this book. Death casts its
eerie shadow over every idea and object; it is by turns frivolous, fatigued,
and horrifying, and usually, it is all of these at once.
He
asked Billy what he thought the worst form of execution was. Billy had no
opinion. The correct answer turned out to be this: “You stake a guy out on an
anthill in the desert – see? He’s facing upward, and you put honey all over his
balls and pecker, and you cut off his eyelids so he has to stare at the sun
till he dies.” So it goes.
It’s not all about peckers, though:
They had both found life meaningless,
partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot
a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes.
And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the
firebombing of Dresden. So it goes.
Whether a boy or an entire city, death treats them all the
same. Even the inanimate are not exempt:
There was a still life on Billy’s
bedside table – two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in
it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So
it goes.
“So it goes” is this book’s funny catchphrase, the refrain
of death, both “poignant and hilarious,” as the Boston Globe says on the front cover of my copy. In general, I
regard cover blurbs with disdain, but these words are quite apt. Vonnegut’s
lines, the beautiful ones at least, are at once “poignant and hilarious,”
sincere and satiric. By the directness of his art, sadness is somehow elevated
to unbearable acuteness when transformed into humor.
The colonel imagined that he was
addressing his beloved troops for the last time, and he told them that they had
nothing to be ashamed of, that there were dead Germans all over the battlefield
who wished to God that they had never heard of the Four-fifty-first. . . . He
said all this while staring into Billy’s eyes. He made the inside of poor
Billy’s skull echo with balderdash.
This colonel embodies the bravado and war glory that Vonnegut
has consciously avoided. Vonnegut vows in Chapter One: “If I ever do finish it, though,
I give you my word of honor: there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John
Wayne.” I’m not sure if John Wayne was the motivating force behind naming the
main character Billy Pilgrim, but it makes sense. Here is the naïve, listless
boy-man who represents the reality of war, “fought by babies,” swept aside by a
cultural reimagining of war as some grand enterprise for heroes.
This is the willing blindness that allows some viewers of
history to take a crime like the fire-bombing of Dresden (or the Trail of
Tears, or enshrining slavery in the American Constitution, etc.) and try to
justify it on moral grounds. The irony being that the actual governments that
perpetrated this crime did it fully understanding its heinous criminality, without
feeling any need to justify it to the public, and having made their peace with it
long ago.
* * *
When I started reading the book, the person from whom I
borrowed it warned me that it was “hard to follow,” as the narrative jumps
around often and disconcertingly. Explaining here what happens in the book
seems hardly necessary, as Vonnegut helpfully outlines the entire book in the
first two chapters. Moreover, he writes, “There are almost no characters in
this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people
in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces.” But
perhaps it is a service to the reader of this post to distill the book’s events
down to a few lines.
Billy Pilgrim was in World War II and was a prisoner of war
in Dresden during the Allied fire-bombing of the city. His life afterward
includes wealth and a family. At some point (it seems hardly relevant when), he
becomes “unstuck in time,” meaning he travels from one point of his life to
another against his will. Aliens from the planet Tralfamadore abduct him and he
learns about their four-dimensional way of living, where moments in time can be
seen all at once and will always exist.
That’s about it. Everything else is stories about death and
the morality that attends it. The disjointed narrative, jumping from time to
time, is a way of avoiding a traditional narrative, and thus undermining the
traditional narrative of the Second World War, and indeed, all wars and
massacres.
Just as Billy Pilgrim is always lost between times, the
reader is lost between actions. The morality is clear, yet the choice of action
is murky. War is terrible and life is full of pain. But what do we do about it?
Vonnegut’s book is different from a book like Les Miserables, which comes down firmly
on the side of social justice and presents a scathing view of how the world is,
while working off the rational, even quasi-scientific, premise that human
problems have human solutions. Slaughterhouse-Five
seems to throw up its hands, crying aloud, How
can the world be so screwed up even though we know how it ought to be?
I find something very comforting in the Tralfamadorian
ability to stand outside of time and look at its wholeness, not its
fleetingness. Knowing that whatever the most beautiful moments of your life
were, they will always exist, that not even death can take them away. Billy
announces to the world:
“The
most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he
only appears to die. He is still very
much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All
moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The
Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look
at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent
all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is
just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one,
like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”
And Billy again, as
he announces that his death is imminent:
“If you protest, if you think that
death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I’ve said.”
Yet I don’t know if Vonnegut sympathizes with this view. Death
is inevitable, and so our only way of facing it is to accept its power over us.
But is war the same thing? What about cruelty and selfishness? Are they as
immutable and predetermined as death?
“So it goes” is the Tralfamadorian, not the human, response
to the fact that everything that happens, no matter how terrible, simply exists
and cannot be altered. The terrible becomes mundane when we accept that we are
not free to choose how we live and die. But if we adopt that view, what does
that make us? Are we supposed to resign ourselves, when the tale of Dresden’s
demise seems to require that we rage against injustice?
“If I hadn’t spent so much time
studying Earthlings,” said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn’t have any idea what
was meant by ‘free will.’ I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets, and I have
studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free
will.”
By this alone, I believe that Vonnegut thinks there is
something valuable, if slightly ludicrous, about free will and the humans who
thrive on it. Removing the possibility of free will takes away Billy’s
responsibility to make moral choices, and I don’t think we are to admire him
for evading either tough choices or difficult experiences. On the other hand,
he does endure a litany of traumatic events and injuries without becoming bitter
or defeated. Ultimately though, this may be a sign of an elaborate psychic wall
he has built up to defend himself.
My instinct is to reject the comfort of the Tralfamadorian
eternality because it ignores the evanescence and uncertainty that are part of
what makes life precious – knowing that we can’t relive the past, accepting
that we can’t control the future, not because it is written, but precisely the
opposite – because it is unpredictable. Yet there is value in trying to steer
the future in a better direction than what the past has seen.
The Tralfamadorians are the book’s Chorus, commenting on
human life, and their adage, “So it goes,” tries to encourage humanity toward
their way of existence. But I think there is another phrase in Slaughterhouse-Five that captures more
comprehensively the book’s spirit of outraged resignation.
In the most ordinary of settings and circumstances, sitting
alone in his office staring out the window at cars in the parking lot, a
middle-aged Billy Pilgrim wonders to himself, “Where have all the years gone?”
It would be nice to say that the years haven’t gone
anywhere, that indeed, he will visit them over and over and be reassured by
their permanence. But if beauty is to be permanent, then so is horror. And yet
if all things are fleeting, then we are left only with a dwindling hourglass.
Eheu,
fugaces labuntur anni – Alas, the fleeting years are slipping away
(quoted in Slaughterhouse-Five from Horace)
The specter of death is relentless in this book, and if
there is value to four-dimensional vision, it is perhaps because it allows us
to see that death, the inevitable, is not the enemy; rather, the enemy is to
put one’s life in the service of death, when death needs no help from us.
* * *
As I tried to figure out what to say about Slaughterhouse-Five, I was reminded of one
of my first memories from my days as a college student at the University of
Chicago. I was browsing the Seminary Co-op Bookstore with a new friend I had
met that first week, and she pulled out a book called An Unsentimental Education. The book is a collection of interviews
in essay form with various literary lights who had either studied or taught at Chicago.
One of the interviews is with Kurt Vonnegut. Along with some repeats of stories
he tells in Slaughterhouse-Five,
Vonnegut reflects on his career as a novelist:
The novelist is in a
funny position: utterly unqualified. Having no badge or rank, and cracking off
about this or that. It peeves a lot of people. How dare we do what we do?
Yet novelists can have
a great effect on young people. When I was between the ages of fourteen and
twenty and starting to read just about anything, I had no immunity whatsoever
to ideas. I would read Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, and James T. Farrell –
and their political opinions would become mine.
I assume that some
kids have become pacifists because of me. Actually, I’m not even sure what my
message as a novelist is. But I would like to infect people with humane ideas
before they’re able to defend themselves.
I had never read Vonnegut before commencing my readings for this year with him. But I am lucky to have encountered in my youth many writers whose
nobility of spirit were equal to his. Among the many humane passages in Slaughterhouse-Five, my favorite describes
a gung-ho war movie that Billy watches in reverse, having become unstuck in time
again:
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and
corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few
German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell
fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American
bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the
formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was
in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism
which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and
lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were
stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own,
which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the
crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and
some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters
came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel
cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of
America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders,
separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women
who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote
areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them
cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
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