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-teeweet?) 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.
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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 106th Infantry 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:
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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
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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
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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
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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 Shaw calls 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 could also be said, however, that this blurring of the lines between fantasy
and reality serves to further the argument of Slaughterhouse-Five as a Postmodern
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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
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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-Five as all these characters are
doing in their respective works; that is, attempting to find a place for himself in the
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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
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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:
While it is not possible to determine with certainty when or if Pilgrim is
imagining events, some readers have been too quick to explain away his
abduction and confinement on Tralfamadore as the fantasy of a distressed
mind, an escape from reality. In fact, Vonnegut offers strong evidence to the
contrary by outlining distinctions between Pilgrim’s “time-tripping” and three
psychological states: drug-induced vision, memories, and dreams (9).
The only thing that is certain is that it is uncertain if Pilgrim’s experiences are “valid”
or not.
There is also in Slaughterhouse-Five a tendency on the part of Vonnegut to
oscillate between scenes of intense bleakness and despair to those of comedy and
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satire. The contrast in scenes – sometimes almost comparable to quick jump cuts in
movie parlance – is startling at times, such as when Vonnegut switches suddenly from
Pilgrim suffering as a POW to being in bed with his wife in one sentence (160). This
crazy seesawing of form and the will to ignore the typical conventions of a narrative
style are also very Postmodern. The Tralfamadorian segments provide the comic
relief to the misery of Billy’s life, especially the parts that deal with his experiences
in the war. Moreover, the Tralfamadorian philosophy of looking only at the good
times in life, while ignoring the bad, seems less cynical and more escapist (Reed 33).
Other aspects of Slaughterhouse-Five can be said to contribute to its belonging
in the Postmodern movement. However, one could write an entire book in detailing
them all (and some have). It is the ones discussed thus far that are the most
dominant, most prevalent, Postmodern themes in Slaughterhouse-Five, and these are
certainly sufficient to justify its inclusion. It should be clear that most of these
themes derive from Vonnegut’s unique perspective on the subject based on his own
personal experiences in Dresden in 1945. The nihilistic lack of any transcendent
meaning, the metafictional element, the existentialism, the (debated) examination of
madness, the mixing of high and pop culture, even the actual form of the novel itself,
with its lack of any clear beginning, middle, end, hero or villain; these things all point
to its being Postmodern. Slaughterhouse-Five has and will most likely continue to be
a widely known and influential work, and it certainly compares favorably to the other
works of noted Postmodern authors, from Barth and O’Brien to Palahniuk and Mailer.
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References
Bergenholtz, Rita, and John R. Clark. "Food for Thought in Slaughterhouse-Five."
Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor 18(1998): 84-93.
Boon, Kevin A. "The Problem with Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five."
Notes on Contemporary Literature 26(1996): 8-10.
Fiedler, Leslie A. "The Divine Stupidity of Kurt Vonnegut." Kurt Vonnegut: Images and
Representations. Ed. Marc Leeds and Peter J. Reed. Westport: Greenwood
Press, 2000.
Freese, Peter. "Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five; Or, How to Storify an Atrocity."
Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian literature (1994):
209-222.
Meyer, William E., Jr. "Kurt Vonnegut: The Man with Nothing to Say." Critique
29(1988): 95-109.
Reed, Peter J. "Hurting 'Til It Laughs." Kurt Vonnegut: Images and Representations.
Ed. Marc Leeds and Peter J. Reed. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000.
Shaw, Patrick W. "Too Many Pilgrimages; Travel and Point of View in Kurt Vonnegut's
Slaughterhouse-Five." CCTE Studies 58(1993): 14-19.
Stralen, Hans van. "Slaughterhouse-Five, Existentialist Themes Elaborated in a
Postmodern Way." Neophilogous 79(1995): 3-12.
Vernon, Alex. "Salvation, Storytelling, and Pilgrimage in Tim O'Brien's The Things
They Carried." Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature
36(2003): 171.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Dell, 1969.