Ebert 1

Randy Ebert

Dr. M. Froehlich

ENG 436

4 December 2006

The Postmodernity of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

or

You Might as Well Write an Anti-Glacier Paper

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five has been called many things over the years, from a landmark work of satire and genius to an utter waste of time and paper. It has enjoyed great success and renown since its publication in 1969, both from the literary intelligentsia and from the popular masses. Given its publication at a time when the American psyche was so dominated by social unrest, the Cold War, and Vietnam - and was becoming quite tired of all of it - it is not so surprising that a novel whose underlying point in the face of conflict is the plaintive call of a bird (poo-tee-weet?) would resonate so well with so many people, or that it still does today. It is a novel about the futility of war and the futility of trying to understand war. It is not, per se, an anti-war book, because you may as well write an anti-glacier book (Vonnegut 4). It is not even simply, as Vonnegut himself claims, a book about the Allied firebombing of Dresden in February of 1945. It is a novel about how Billy Pilgrim – an “everyman” if ever there was one – and perhaps Vonnegut himself, deals with the war and the bombing of Dresden, and the unfortunate habit that human beings have of occasionally and predictably trying to kill large numbers of each other as efficiently as possible. At its core, though, Slaughterhouse-Five is unquestionably a Postmodern work of fiction.

Of course, Vonnegut is extremely qualified to write on this particular subject, based on his own experiences in World War II. Vonnegut served as an advanced scout in the US 106thInfantry Division during the Battle of the Bulge, and was later a prisoner of war. While a POW, Vonnegut was in Dresden on February 13, 1945, when the Allies, through a series of “strategic” bombing raids, turned it into a “moonscape” (“Kurt Vonnegut”). He was one of only seven Americans present to survive the atrocity. He then spent the next twenty years telling people that he was working on his “book about Dresden,” and finally came up with Slaughterhouse-Five. It is unfortunate, however, that in their examinations of Slaughterhouse-Five, many (but not all) critics seem to neglect to take into account the unique perspective that Vonnegut has on this subject. However, it seems beyond doubt that it is Vonnegut’s unique perspective on these events that gives him the ability – or even the license – to tell his story in the way he does. And this way is unquestionably Postmodern, especially when compared to other noted Postmodern works.

One of the most obvious attributes of Slaughterhouse-Five that makes it Postmodern in nature is its absolute lack of any transcendent moral, meaning, or message in its examination of the horrors of World War II. As Bergenholtz and Clark state, “Clearly, humankind’s ruthless disregard for life – especially human life – is the central subject of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five” (84). There is such a great concentration of death presented throughout the novel – always punctuated by the complacent “So it goes” – that it quickly becomes nearly mundane. As Broer observes, the comic delivery of Vonnegut presents to the reader all of the following:

We encounter death by starvation, rotting, incineration, squashing, gassing, shooting, poisoning, bombing, torturing, hanging, and relatively routine death by disease. We get the deaths of dogs, horses, pigs, Vietnamese soldiers, crusaders, hunters, priests, officers, hobos, actresses, prison guards, a slave laborer, a suffragette, Jesus Christ, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Billy Pilgrim’s mother and father, his wife, Edgar Derby, Roland Weary, the regimental chaplain’s assistant, Paul Lazarro, Colonel Wild Bob; we get the deaths of a bottle of champagne, billions of body lice, bacteria, and fleas; the novel; entire towns, and finally the universe (as cited by Bergenholtz and Clark 84-85).

As the grotesquely passive Billy Pilgrim experiences all of this death and destruction in his life, he seems hardly to ever be affected by it. While in the hospital following the airplane crash, Billy shares a room with Harvard history professor Bertrand Rumfoord, and has the following exchange:

“It had to be done,” Rumfoord told Billy, speaking of the destruction of Dresden.

“I know,” said Billy.

“That’s war.”

“I know. I’m not complaining.”

“It must have been hell on the ground.”

“It was,” said Billy Pilgrim.

“Pity the men who had to do it.”

“I do.”

“You must have had mixed feelings, there on the ground.”

“It was all right,” said Billy. (198)

Earlier in the novel, Vonnegut himself, as author-narrator, tells of another exchange that he supposedly personally experienced:

I happened to tell a University of Chicago professor at a cocktail party about the raid as I had seen it, about the book I would write. He was a member of a thing called the Committee on Social Thought. And he told me about the concentration camps, and about how the Germans had made soap and candles out of the fat of dead Jews and so on. All I could say was, “I know, I know, I know.” (10)

These incidents illustrate the novel’s complacency in the face of death and destruction. The phrase “So it goes” is repeated over one hundred times throughout the novel, every time a death is mentioned, as if it were really of no consequence. The novel ends with the simple yet nihilistic “poo-tee-weet” of a bird, ostensibly directed at Billy Pilgrim, leaving the reader to assume that this, perhaps, is the only knowledge to be gained from it (215). It is, as Vernon says, “ … like divine judgment, [which] hangs in the air after the firebombing of Dresden, the question itself (much less the non-existent answer) beyond human articulation” (171). In fact, besides the seeming inconsequentiality of death,what is supposedly the central aspect of the novel itself, namely, the firebombing of Dresden, is barely acknowledged by any of the characters in the course of the novel (Broer, as cited by Bergenholtz and Clark 85). Or, as Van Stralen put it, “Slaughterhouse-Five suggests that the Second World War brought about an absurd situation, but the implication is … that one cannot come to grips with this chaos” (4).

This lack of a transcendent meaning or moral is a very common attribute of Postmodern literature. One of the most obvious examples is Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which, though not necessarily of the Postmodern movement, is heavily influenced by it. This work is not in fact a book about the Vietnam War, as it may seem at first, but about how Tim O’Brien – like Vonnegut, acting as both author/narrator and character, in World War II – is still dealing with the horrors of Vietnam over twenty years later. Both books, Vernon says, “invoke Bunyan’s ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ to forever obliterate the idea of attaining any spiritual grace through the absurd inhumanity of modern warfare” (172). Billy Pilgrim is “yet another Ishmael shipping to ‘see the world’” (Meyer 96). How could he not be, with the name “Pilgrim”? What the reader takes away from both books is the idea that regardless of the songs, slogans, banners, ribbons, flags, songs, and propaganda, in the end, war is all about boys killing other boys and getting killed themselves, and any attempt to find any higher meaning in the act of war is doomed to fail. Given the political and cultural climate of the late 1960’s, when Slaughterhouse-Five was published, such a message (or lack thereof) was almost certain to resonate among the American public.

The other major Postmodern attribute of Slaughterhouse-Five is its element of metafiction, and the questions it raises regarding identity and truth. Like many other works by Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five is, to an extent, a book about writing a book. The first and last chapters of the book serve as a framing device, in which Vonnegut, as author-narrator, doles out autobiographical tidbits and talks about the actual writing of his “Dresden book.” Three different voices narrate the book: Vonnegut himself as first-person narrator, Billy Pilgrim as the central intelligence, and a third voice, which is neither of the two (Shaw 16). Not only this, but there are very clear parallels between the lives of Vonnegut and Pilgrim, even down to the year of their birth. Vonnegut himself makes several cameos in the book, effectively breaking the literary “fourth wall,” and drawing attention to his factual presence at events in the fictional novel. Such as when, after the feast prepared by the British POWs, the newly arrived American POWs are violently ill. Pilgrim reports that someone exclaims that he had excreted everything but his brains, and then, a moment later, “There they go.” The next line is, “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book” (160).

This, of course, raises all kinds of questions regarding the reliability of Vonnegut/Pilgrim as narrator, and violates certain basic presumptions that are made by readers when engaging in the consumption of fiction (what Shawcalls the “space of accommodation – that is the space in which the reader assumes a work of fiction takes place when they begin reading it, be it one that is “real” or one that is “fantasy” (16)). To some, this breach of the lines between fantasy and reality displaces the reader, and renders ineffectual any intent at satire or even effective storytelling (Shaw 16). Even the first sentence of the book raises questions: “All this happened, more or less” (1). Freese states:

Taken together, his bewildering blend of fact and fiction, his disturbing mixture of different time-levels, his illusion-breaking intrusions, his deft manipulation of the point of view, his sweeping value judgments and biting comments, his careful explanations and bothered reflections make the narrator a mediating instance that is insistently present between the protagonist and the reader, prevents the latter’s identification with the former, and makes the customary quasi-pragmatic reception of the novel impossible.

… This violation of generic conventions in a self-reflexive tale that blends autobiography with realistic narration, satirical exaggeration, and “science-fiction of an obviously kidding sort” is by no means the only problem, since it is impossible to decide whether Billy really travels in time or only hallucinates his extragalactic journeys, whether Slaughterhouse-Five is a science-fiction novel or a novel with a mentally disturbed protagonist who is haunted by science-fiction fantasies. (211)

It couldalso be said, however, that this blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality serves to further the argument of Slaughterhouse-Five as a Postmodern work. The contention that the blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality in Slaughterhouse-Five somehow displaces the reader seems a spurious argument, and does not give sufficient credit to the book’s audience. The experienced reader can easily overcome these obstacles through the mundane suspension of disbelief that is invoked with the consumption of any form of fiction. To the less-experienced reader, these issues may never even arise in the course of reading the book.

This breach of form regarding fiction and “reality” is well explored. Nabokov’s Lolita presumes to present itself as a non-fictional account of the misadventures of a now-deceased pedophile. This is accomplished by a forward, which is presented as ostensibly non-fiction, written by a psychoanalyst who had been examining the protagonist of the novel, Humbert Humbert. This forward then proclaims that what follows are the actual writings of the late Humbert himself. As a framing device, this forward works well, as it instills in the reader the idea that all that follows is somehow true. It is a sort of kick-start to the engine of suspension of disbelief.

Another example of this would be O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which is at its core an examination of the nature of truth. Tim O’Brien is the author of the book, but he is also a character and occasional narrator. O'Brien dedicates the book to the characters within its pages, but they are presumably fictional. There are sections in the book, like “Notes,” where O’Brien speaks directly to the reader regarding the difficulty of the actual creation of the stories within the book, and whether or not they are true (or if it is possible for them to be true). The Things They Carried is O’Brien’s attempt, twenty years later, to deal with what he witnessed and experienced while in Vietnam. In this same vein, Fiedler says:

Perhaps Vonnegut does not know what he is doing in his last book [Slaughterhouse-Five]. Perhaps he even believes what he so stoutly maintains in those sections of it which are more reminiscence and editorial than invention and fantasy; believes that he is at last writing the book he ascribed to John-Jonah in Cat’s Cradle, the book which he precisely cannot, should not write, which is called archetypically The Day the World Ended, and which comes to him not out of his writer’s imagination, but out of the duty he feels imposed on him by the fact that he himself lived through the fire-bombing of Dresden (17).

If Lolita and The Things They Carried are the two extremes, Slaughterhouse-Five falls between these two other works in regards to its treatment of identity, truth, fact, and fiction as a Postmodern device.

In addition to these, issues of identity are explored at length – and to varying degrees - in many other works, such as Chabon’s Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Ellison’s Invisible Man, Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (yet another book about an author writing a book), Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies,and Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Though not all of these are Postmodern per se, they all to some extent contain many Postmodern elements and themes, specifically the search for identity or belonging, especially in times of hardship or confusion. Though Pilgrim’s wartime trials and tribulations are more extreme in nature than most, parallels can be drawn to Chabon’s Art Bechstein, Ellison’s nameless protagonist, Barth’s Ambrose, Morrison’s Pecola and several of Lahiri’s characters. Billy Pilgrim – and by extension, maybe, Vonnegut himself - can be said to be doing the same thing in Slaughterhouse-Fiveas all these characters are doing in their respective works; that is, attempting to find a place for himself in the what is the seeming utter pointlessness of his existence. In examining the sheer pointlessness of the war, and his experiences after, Pilgrim is looking for where he fits into the scheme of things. When he begins to spread the word as he sees it from his experiences on Tralfamadore, he believes that he has finally come up with a raison d’être.

Besides these most obvious ones, Slaughterhouse-Five contains many more themes and motifs of Postmodernism throughout its pages. One is Vonnegut’s seeming attempt to mix both high and pop culture. Many have pointed to Slaughterhouse-Five as the beginning of Vonnegut’s (failed?) transition from mere pop science fiction to more analytical “high” literature. Some have stated that Vonnegut may be going even farther than that. As Fiedler states, “But disengaging from science fiction, Vonnegut seems on the point of disengaging entirely from words, and perhaps it is a weariness with the craft of fiction itself, with, at any rate, telling stories, i.e., making plots or myths, that impels him; as if he suspects the Pop Novel may be as dead as the Art Novel” (10). There is also a strong inter-textual element to the novel as well, as many of the characters from Vonnegut’s other works make repeated appearances, such as Kilgore Trout, Elliot Rosewater, and Howard Campbell.

Another bit of Postmodernism in Slaughterhouse-Five is its (debated) treatment of madness. Many have long assumed that Billy Pilgrim's sense of being "unstuck in time" and his extragalactic trips to Tralfamadore to be the hallucinations of a traumatized mind. Among other trials, Pilgrim experiences the horrors of war and captivity, suffers two nervous breakdowns, is the severely injured sole survivor of an airplane crash, and then loses his wife in a freak accident. It is only after this that Billy begins to attempt to spread the gospel of Tralfamadore. As Freese points out, this “sounds suspiciously like the biography of a man who develops schizophrenia as what Laing calls ‘a special strategy in order to live in an unlivable situation’” (212). Billy then spends time in a mental hospital, where he is introduced to the science fiction writings of Kilgore Trout (by a character from another Vonnegut book, Elliot Rosewater). The plot of one of these books is suspiciously close to what Billy later describes as his experiences on Tralfamadore.

To a meek, passive man with almost no self-esteem who has lived his entire life just trying to not be in the way, the life he describes on Tralfamadore – where he lives in perpetual nudity with a famous porn starlet named Montana Wildhack, with all of his needs provided for, and where everything he does is applauded by his audience of Tralfamadorians - can easily be interpreted as the delusional fantasies of a disturbed mind looking for some kind of peace and satisfaction. It is pure wish fulfillment (Reed 33). Boon, however, disagrees: