Jarrod Neff
EN286
Final Essay
From Birth to Battlefield: War and the Victimized in Slaughterhouse Five
War and violence are inseparable. War is an act of immeasurable violence that is
rationalized in the name of a human goal, whatever that goal may be. The goal may
differ by family, it may differ by political ideology, or it may differ based upon the luck
that determined what spot of land in this vast world you would be born upon, but one
thing remains the same regardless of circumstance; those who initiate war claim that their
goal is the one worth dying for. Kurt Vonnegut points out the absurdity of this claim in
his novel Slaughterhouse Five. In order to rationalize war one must be able to rationalize
violence, and in order to rationalize violence one must find reason in the suffering of its
victims; to rationalize war is to attempt to make sense of the absurd. For many people, a
“successful war” is deemed a victory in battle coupled with a lower body count than your
enemy, implying that the significance of death is dictated in part by the location of your
birth. Many readers (this one included) will align themselves with Vonnegut in their
attitudes towards war; we can no more consider ourselves “anti-war” than we can
consider ourselves “anti-glacier”. Our time is better spent elsewhere rather than asking
for an end to all war. But also like Vonnegut, we may realize that the cost of war extends
far beyond the graves of those who die in it. It is the living who are lastingly affected by
war, for they must live in a world that would attempt to justify it. Slaughterhouse Five
shows us what it means to be a victim of war, a victim of senseless violence, in the hopes
that we as living people will stop trying to justify absurdity and instead realize that those
who live on in the shadow of war are victims as well.
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The most prominent victim of war in the novel is the protagonist Billy Pilgrim.
Billy is a married man, a father, and a successful optometrist who, superficially, lives a
very enviable if unexciting life, but Billy is also a World War II veteran and thus a victim
of war. Specifically, he is a survivor of the firebombing of Dresden, a real life tragedy
that claimed the lives of over 130,000 people. Billy is the survivor of a massacre beyond
the scope of words and the novel’s fragmented narrative mirrors his circular concept of
time, a concept that is likely the product of a traumatized mind. Billy shows many
symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a mental disorder that is most often
associated with the survivors of war. Vonnegut paints a tragically pathetic picture of a
man tainted by the violence of war:
Billy took off his tri-focals and his coat and his necktie and his shoes, and
he closed the Venetian blinds and then the drapes, and he lay down on the
outside of the coverlet. But sleep would not come. Tears came instead.
They seeped. Billy turned on the Magic Fingers, and he was jiggled as he
wept. (79)
Billy’s post-war trauma has caused him to randomly doze off at work, endangering his
ability to maintain his job; yet at night when he should be sleeping he can find no respite.
This scene presents a tragic picture of Billy, a man reduced to a child-like state. Weeping
while he is rocked, he is unable to find an escape from the horrors of war even in sleep.
It is no coincidence that Billy appears child-like in many scenes within the book.
The name Billy is even used most often as a boyhood version of the name William. The
people who have to bear the consequences of war the longest are the children of war.
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Final Essay
Mary O’Hare understands this fact as much as anyone, as she attests to early in the novel
when cautioning Vonnegut about the book he is writing:
“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.” (18)
Mary O’Hare’s fear is that Vonnegut’s book will glorify violence and turn villains into
heroes, inspiring the pride that will force her babies to grow up to be murderers just like
those who fought and died before. The children are victims of war. They are handed a
world that was broken by their fathers and expected to fix it but they, or their children, or
their children’s children will inevitably repeat the same mistakes. They are victimized
because free will is stolen from them in the womb. They emerge to a world ravaged by
violence and must pick up the pieces in the hopes of starting anew. This is one trait that
all victims of war share; their free will, the will to live as they choose and die as their
choices dictate, is stolen from them in order to fulfill someone else’s goal.
Roland Weary is one man that is willing to sacrifice the lives of many to fulfill a
twisted goal. Weary is a soldier who has fallen into the exact role that Mary O’Hare fears
the most. He is an overwhelmingly violent young man who grew up in a home where
violence was akin to entertainment. He speaks to Billy about torture instruments as if
they were his playthings. Weary is a man blind to the value of human life. He seeks only
the fame that will be bestowed upon him by other “Roland Wearys” for every person
killed by his hand:
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Final Essay
His vision of the outside world was limited to what he could see through a
narrow slit between the rim of his helmet and his scarf from home, which
concealed his baby face from the bridge of his nose on down. He was so
snug in there that he was able to pretend that he was safe at home, having
survived the war, and that he was telling his parents and his sister a true
war story—whereas the true war story was still going on.
(53)
Weary is delusionary in his visions of heroism. He associates the violence of war with
fame and imagines himself as one of the Three Musketeers. Unfortunately, Weary will
not get a second chance to break free of his delusions. He ultimately becomes captured
by German soldiers and subjected to cruelty similar to that which fueled his false war
stories. Weary represents the kind of person that would attempt to justify the incineration
of over one hundred thousand people as a way to hasten the end of a war. Weary seeks to
be a hero at the expense of any in his path. There can be no heroes without villains and
victims, and Weary revels in the sadistic possibilities of that certainty.
The victims of war are given attention throughout every chapter of the novel. It is
rare that we read for more than a few minutes without finding the catalogue of yet
another death. Vonnegut utters “So it goes” after every death in the book, an odd
pronouncement that at first seems like a cold-hearted denial of the importance of life.
Upon closer examination, however, we see that in this utterance Vonnegut calls attention
to the equality of every person in death, the “great equalizer”. We cannot rightfully
dictate the value of human life. No single person killed in the war is any more valuable
than the next. The last death mentioned in the book is that of Edgar Derby, as Vonnegut
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Final Essay
recounts it, “Somewhere in there the poor old high school teacher, Edgar Derby, was
caught with a teapot he had taken from the catacombs. He was arrested for plundering.
He was tried and shot. So it goes” (274). Derby was killed for a teapot only days after
thousands had been slaughtered. Though we might see his death as a particularly tragic
and pointless one, his death was no more or less than anyone else’s, because his life was
just as valuable. Edgar Derby was a victim just like everyone else; he stole a teapot and
they stole his life.
It is difficult to analyze the victimized in the shadow of war, the ultimate
demonstration of violence. Victims cannot be measured by property values or body
counts. The most tormented victims of war are those who live through it. They have
forfeited their lives whether or not they still draw breath after the last shot is fired,
because their lives are no longer solely theirs to shape. The taint of war lives on long
after those who initiate it are buried in their graves. War is a lasting violence, a tragic
echo that must be endured for generations. In order to progress, we must begin by
recognizing that the value of life cannot be measured in materialistic desires. We must
realize that the victimized extend beyond the battlefield lines. Only then will we be freed
from absurdity.
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