Vonnegut, War, and the Inevitable

 

Kurt Vonnegut died this year at the age of 84 and subsequently became

a hot topic once again. I decided to post my essay on Slaughterhouse 5 as an 'ode' to one of my favourite authors.

 

God grant me

The serenity to accept

The things I cannot change

Courage

To change the things I can,

And wisdom always

To tell the

Difference.[1]

           

Kurt Vonnegut deals with the inevitable and mechanistic nature of war in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. In this essay I aim to distinguish whether these elements of war are a simple representation of war or whether they are something more, in terms of an anti-war moral statement. Firstly I will look at how the book can be read as an anti-war statement. Next I will define the nature of inevitability and mechanistic sentiments in the novel and how this portrays Vonnegut’s sentiments about war. Finally I will discuss if these sentiments can be reconciled with an anti-war moral statement.

In many ways Slaughterhouse-Five can be read as an anti-war novel. It is filled with scenes of horror and loss. Peter Reed draws on the childlike nature of the soldiers, the ‘Children’s Crusade’ as Vonnegut promises to call his book. Reed writes:

…mere children find themselves the hapless pawns of forces they neither understand nor can resist.[2]

It can be read as a book of coping mechanisms and escapism from a past that is too unsavoury to recollect. That war events cannot be viewed linearly and that they affect whole lives both preceding and proceeding from the actual event. We, indeed, are confronted with the sickening reality of war. The naïve perception that war is good causes the reader to cringe when Valencia brutally questions ‘poor old Edgar Derby’s’ execution, or her proclaiming that she is ‘proud’ that Billy was a soldier. [3]

Lawrence Broer jumps on a statement by Vonnegut at in 1970:

I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientists, maybe even my brother, would have taken a colour photograph of God Almighty and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped a scientific truth on .[4]

Broer links the incident to Vonnegut’s own experiences at Dresden, when a similar sort of scientific truth was dropped on him.[5] He claims that Vonnegut uses the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five to portray his pessimistic sentiments towards war. It is an anti-war statement. This is an acceptable assessment when one considers the pacifist statements that Vonnegut makes, particularly when he refers to his direct orders to his sons:

I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.

I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.[6]

Yet at the same time Vonnegut recognises a flaw in his pessimism; an error of humanity. ’s wife looks back and turns to a pillar of salt, in the same way Vonnegut recognises that this book was ‘written by a pillar of salt’. [7] He has looked back and allowed himself to question the inevitable. When it comes to looking at the inevitable and mechanistic vision that Vonnegut conveys in his book, we encounter a problem when reconciling this with the initial perception of an anti-war moral statement.

Slaughterhouse-Five is a novel that deals with inevitabilities; the inevitability of a beginning and an end to everything. Indicated by Vonnegut prescribing how his novel will begin and how it will end:

            It begins like this:

            Listen:

            Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.

            It ends like this:

            Poo-tee-weet?[8]

What happens in between is the rebuttal of free will. Billy Pilgrim’s innate characterisation depicts the power of inevitabilities; his mechanistic acceptance of events displays the disappearance or non-existence of free will. Peter Jones identifies that:

Vonnegut sneers at the concept of free will, a delusion found in all the universe only among the dominant fauna of the planet Earth, according to the observations of the Tralfamadorian passers-by.[9]

The problem created by the rebuttal of free will, is the difficulty of reconciling such a sentiment with a moral statement. That Vonnegut is here making a great anti-war moral statement is gradually becoming clouded by reality.

            That Vonnegut addresses war is clear, that war is bad goes without saying, that war is inevitable is the sickening reality of the novel. This is clearly indicated when he allegedly discusses the anti-war nature of the book with Harrison Starr, the movie-maker:

‘I say, “Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?”’

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.[10]

War is a fact of life, an inevitable reality, much like death is an inevitable reality:

And, even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.[11]

It is the depiction of this reality, the stark truth in contrast to the elaborate science fiction sub-plot which is the vision he sets out to define, not the moral impact but the overall impact of war and mechanistic destruction. When asked directly if his book is an anti-war book he responds with ‘I guess’- he hadn’t really thought about it. [12] Arguably it is about war and it is not pro-war, in that sense it is by all means anti-war. What one misses is that the purpose of the novel is of a different calibre altogether, it does not fall on either side of the fence.  It aims to relate an occurrence, an event, without passing judgement on the event.

            Central to Vonnegut’s retelling of the bombing is that he does not tell of his personal experiences and he doesn’t explain the bombing. Instead he is aware of a problem, when it comes to making a statement of reality, as James Lundquist recognizes:

Slaughterhouse-Five thus gains its structure from Vonnegut’s essential aesthetic problem- how to describe a reality that is beyond human imagination.[13]

It was even beyond the imagination of those that experienced it, as Vonnegut himself said in the 1972 Playboy interview:

…but one of the characteristics about this object was that there was a complete blank where the bombing of took place, because I don’t remember.[14]

Vonnegut further describes this sensation, ‘I think of how useless the part of my memory has been, and yet how tempting has been to write about…’[15]

            This temptation finally got the better of him. To combat the problem he cleverly created an alternative perspective that would not relay events, but instead would convey an emotion. He, the author, stepped away from the story itself and in his place Billy Pilgrim becomes the mode for conveying the impact of the events. A technique much like T.S. Eliot advocates, whereby the artist steps away from his work and allows something outside of himself to grip the reader, something that cannot directly be routed to his inner emotions. In this way the reader can better relate to the work, rather than simply sympathise without fully understanding:

It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not "recollected," and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is "tranquil" only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story.[16]

When it comes to the inevitabilities and the mechanistic nature of warfare in the book itself,  these are just intrinsic in conveying the atmosphere. Much like the Tralfamadorian book:

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvellous moments seen all at once.[17]

We never get an account of the bombing, no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. Because there is nothing to say:

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like ‘Poo-tee-weet?’[18]

In its place we get an account of the effects this event had in the long scheme of a life. falls to the background, an inevitable fact amongst an array of inevitabilities in Billy Pilgrim’s life, in humanity as a whole. What Reed recognizes from the ‘unstuck in time’ structure is:

…Vonnegut advocates acceptance of the unchangeable course of life and death itself, not looking back, enjoying the dance and good moments life brings. As he says, “People aren’t supposed to look back.” But they do, and that they do is human and lovable.[19]

That Vonnegut is not an advocate of war is clear. Yet one imagines an anti-war novel to be a definitive opposite to Mary O’Hare’s idea of a pro-war novel:

‘Well, I know,’ she said. ‘You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.’[20]

Indeed, there are no heroes, and war does not look wonderful, but at the same time we are never really told what war looks like. What we are told is the effect that war has, that war is indeed bad, but that it is also inevitable. Vonnegut claimed to have started writing about in 1945, he said, ‘The book is a process of twenty years of this sort of living with and the aftermath.’[21] After twenty years he still fails to combat the problem of reconciliation with anti-war and the inevitable. He fails to convey a moral statement. Instead the book is not a definitive anti-war book, as Vonnegut himself recognises, ‘I’ve finished my war book now…this one is a failure, and had to be…’[22]

As Reed indicates, the success of the novel lies in the fact that no statement is made:

…the novel neither falters from, nor sensationalizes the horrors it depicts, and tenaciously avoids pedantic or moralistic commentary; no small achievement given the subject matter and the author’s personal closeness to it.[23]

In fact no statement can be made. Making a statement is entirely futile. Vonnegut himself accepts this fact. He would like to make an anti-war statement by looking back and teaching the world a lesson. Instead the inevitable mechanistic nature of war is all that he can teach the world. The two cannot be reconciled, anti-war sentiment is naive, whereas realising inevitability is a surrendering acceptance. Slaughterhouse-Five is a book that teaches us the bitter taste of accepting the inevitable. As Lundquist recognizes:

…the conclusion Vonnegut comes to after examining the causes and effects of Dresden is that there is no moral, only the ‘Poo-tee-weet’ of the bird call that Billy hears when he discovers that the war in Europe is over and he wanders out onto the shady streets of springtime Dresden.[24]

The inability to reconcile the inevitable and mechanistic sentiments with an anti-war moral statement is not a problem; in fact it solves a problem, as it teaches us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change.

Bibliography:

Allen, William Rodney, ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’, in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: Critical Interpretations, edited by Harold Bloom (: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001)

Broer, , Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut (Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1994)

Eliot, T.S., Tradition and the Individual Talent  http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw4.html [accessed 23rd April 2007]

Jones, Peter G., ‘At War with Technology: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’, in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: Critical Interpretations, edited by Harold Bloom (: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001)

Lundquist, James, ‘The “New Reality” of Slaughterhouse-Five’, in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: Critical Interpretations, edited by Harold Bloom (: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001)

Reed, Peter, ‘The End of the Road’, in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: Critical Interpretations, edited by Harold Bloom (: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001)

Standish, David, ‘Playboy Interview 1972’, in Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, edited by William Rodney Allen (Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1999)

Vonnegut, Kurt, Slaughterhouse-Five (London: Vintage, 1991)