Chapter 1: World War II and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. Within days, France and Great Britain had
declared war against Germany. Over the course of the next six years, World War II touched
every continent on the globe, with the exception of unpopulated Antarctica (“World War II
Timeline”). The effects of this “great war” are still felt throughout the world today in both
tangible and intangible ways.
The field of trauma studies was in its infancy at the onset of this war. Sigmund Freud, Josef
Breuer, and a handful of other European physicians and psychologists had recently begun to
study and theorize upon the potential effects of war on the human psyche. The concept of
traumatic neurosis, which was “discovered” through the study of hysteria in women, had just
recently been applied to some of the returning soldiers of World War I. But while Freud’s
theories, in particular, raised awareness of this condition throughout the field of psychology,
soldiers and the public still only had access to the negatively loaded terms of “shell shock” and
“combat fatigue.” General awareness of an actual medical condition brought on by trauma was
still several decades away. It is with this historical framework in mind that I will begin my
examination of trauma in World War II narratives.
It is not uncommon to find Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or The
Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death on the “Science Fiction” shelf of the local
bookstore or library. But while some readers will see the elements of fantasy in this novel as just
that, others will recognize them as representations of the internal dissociation and detachment
from reality experienced by the narrative’s protagonist. In this chapter, I will examine the
representation of trauma as dissociation in Slaughterhouse-Five. I will focus on Vonnegut and
Slaughterhouse-Five for a number of reasons. First, the representations of trauma found within
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this text are similar to those in many other World War II narratives in that emotional and
cognitive dissociation are central to the depiction of war-related trauma. Second, the lag time
from Vonnegut’s war experiences to his writing of Slaughterhouse-Five is indicative of the
intense dissociation he suffered during war. Lastly, Slaughterhouse-Five has had a major cultural
and literary impact through its large readership and adaptation into a major motion picture.
Through this examination of Slaughterhouse-Five, I contend that dissociation was the most
common mode of trauma representation for World War II narratives largely because it was
identified as the primary symptom of traumatic neurosis at the time of World War II. I further
contend that the lack of interpretive consensus over this novel is due to the lack of public
knowledge about trauma prior to the Vietnam War.
Before I begin my investigation of Slaughterhouse-Five, I will briefly discuss traumatic
dissociation and its representation through the literature of World War II. Dissociation can be
simply described as the emotional and cognitive constriction or detachment from a traumatic
event or memory. The act of forgetting or repressing the initial experience and its memory are
often considered to be at the core of psychological trauma (Farrell 14). This is one of the earliest
continuities observed between the many cases of shell shock and combat fatigue. Soldiers who
suffered from these conditions, labeled as “exhaustion” by the U. S. Army during World War II,
often exhibited delayed reflexes and reactions as well as trouble focusing on even simple tasks.
Memories of traumatic incidents are left largely inaccessible or overwhelming while an
individual is suffering from the effects dissociation. This brand of emotional and mental escape
from intense war experiences is represented through many of the numerous portrayals of
soldiering in World War II.
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Among the first wave of World War II narratives to address trauma as a dissociative
phenomena were Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), Herman Wouk’s The Caine
Mutiny (1951), and James Jones’ From Here to Eternity (1951). Each of these works are marked
by characters who, through their thoughts or actions, momentarily “escape” from their war
experiences. Other, more salient, examples of literary representations of dissociation appeared in
the decades following the end of the war, such as Jones’ The Thin Red Line (1962), Joseph
Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). These books, like
Slaughterhouse-Five, were written after each of their respective authors had time to reflect on the
immense psychological effects of World War II. In The Thin Red Line, for example, the reader is
given insight into the inner workings of a large number of characters. Each of these characters
becomes lost in their own thoughts, memories, and fears while intense battle scenes are being
played out. This later boom of World War II texts is heavily effected by the developing conflict
in Vietnam, more widespread knowledge of the traumatic experience of warfare, and the rise of
postmodernism as a literary movement. Slaughterhouse-Five fits amongst this group in both the
time period it was written and its focus on dissociation as a symptom of trauma.
Slaughterhouse-Five follows the life and war experiences of a seemingly inadequate and
incompetent soldier named Billy Pilgrim. The narrative about Pilgrim begins, curiously, as
follows:
Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He
has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has
gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and
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death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all events in between.
(Slaughterhouse-Five 23)
This strange beginning to Pilgrim’s story previews, for the reader, the narrative structure that this
book will follow. Pilgrim’s life and war experiences are revealed in short, non-linear vignettes.
This structure, as I will show, is a representation of the traumatic dissociation that was popular
among depictions of World War II. Pilgrim slips off into different points in his life because he is
unable to cope with the traumatic experiences that he has encountered.
Piecing together this complex narrative, we learn that Pilgrim was born in Ilium, New York,
in 1922. He is described as “funny-looking” and “weak” (23). After a mediocre high school
career, Pilgrim enrolled in optometry school. He was then drafted into the military and began
training as an assistant chaplain. Almost immediately following Pilgrim’s deployment to Europe
during the Second World War, he was separated from his regiment and eventually taken prisoner
by the Germans. It is around this time that he first experiences his slippage in time. He begins to
jump backwards into his past and forward into his future almost simultaneously.
We then learn that he and other prisoners of war (POW) are taken to the German city of
Dresden, where they are put to work. While the group of POW’s is stationed in Dresden, the
Allied Forces firebomb the city, killing over 130,000 people. This bombing, although largely
unknown to the American public, was the most successful bombing executed by the Allied
Forces, killing more people than the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. The POW’s only survived
because they were kept in an airtight slaughterhouse cooler during the attack. After the attack,
they are forced, by the few surviving German soldiers, to excavate and bury the bodies of the
dead Germans, who were mostly civilians.
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We are then shown, through Pilgrim’s time travels into the future, that after the war he returns
to Ilium, where he becomes an optometrist. He is engaged to Valencia Merble, the daughter of
the optometry school’s founder. After recovering from a nervous breakdown that lands him in a
mental institution, Pilgrim marries Valencia. The two live an opulent life and raise two children
together.
On the night of their daughter’s wedding some years later, Pilgrim is abducted by aliens who
are from a planet called Tralfamadore (hence the Science Fiction label). They place him in a zoo
on their home planet, along with a woman with whom he can mate, and reveal to him the secrets
of time. They tell him that they experience time in a fourth dimension where everything happens
simultaneously, not chronologically. At any point in time, one is experiencing every moment of
his or her life. It seems, then, that Pilgrim is experiencing time in this fourth dimension.
Pilgrim returns to Earth and, after surviving a plane crash and the death of his wife, he reveals
through letters and phone calls to a national radio station the secrets of time that he learned on
Tralfamadore. This revelation wins him celebrity status. He eventually experiences his own
death, at the hands of a man who blamed Pilgrim for his friend’s death during the war. This is the
basic chronology of Pilgrim’s life, as we know it through the skipping in time. This certainly is
not, as I stated before, the chronology of the novel. We are given bits and pieces of Pilgrim’s life,
completely out of order.
Every description of Billy Pilgrim points to the absurdity of his presence in a war. The first
time he becomes unstuck in time, while wandering behind enemy lines after the Battle of the
Bulge, he travels back to his childhood. He experiences a memory in which his father, in an
attempt to teach young Billy to swim, throws him into a pool, telling him to “sink-or-swim”
(Slaughterhouse-Five 43). This experience “was like an execution” and Pilgrim feels “numb”
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leading up to it (44). Not surprisingly, he immediately sinks to the bottom of the pool and has to
be rescued after he loses consciousness.
This complete lack of action is repeated by the passive and weak Pilgrim throughout the
narrative. When he is bullied by his fellow soldiers, he does not utter a word in his own defense.
When he first arrives in Dresden as a POW, the Germans hand him a woman’s coat in an
obvious attempt to humiliate him. Yet, Pilgrim unquestioningly accepts the coat and, although it
is too small, wears it. This is how Pilgrim moves through the war: oblivious and apparently
unharmed while better soldiers are dying around him.
It is clear that this construction of Pilgrim, as a weak and unaware soldier, has enhanced
Vonnegut’s representation of war trauma. Every action and description of Pilgrim suggests that
he is an innocent (Tanner 126).The idea of innocence is further developed by the novel’s second
title, The Children’s Crusade, which suggests that Pilgrim and his fellow soldiers are mere
children fighting a war. It is also important to note that Pilgrim is drafted; he does not volunteer
for the war. He “seems to be merely an entity to which things happen” (Lundquist 73). He also
chooses to become an assistant chaplain in the military, forgoing the use of a weapon. Even
Pilgrim’s identification with the name “Billy” rather than the adult counterpart “William” hints
at his childlike naivety. The juxtaposition of the innocence of the novel’s central character and
the death and horror of the surrounding war is striking.
The trauma that is experienced by Pilgrim is represented through the dissociation evidenced
by his slippages in time and his visits to Tralfamadore. The first instance of either of these effects
occurs just before Pilgrim is taken prisoner by the Germans, an event that would obviously prove
to be traumatic, since it marked the start of his experiences in Dresden. The fact that the time
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slippage indicates trauma is also confirmed by where he goes in this initial “time travel.” It is
here that we learn of Pilgrim’s childhood swimming lesson in which he nearly drowns.
It is important to note that “when Billy first came unstuck in time” we are given the
descriptions of two, seemingly unrelated, traumatic events. Pilgrim is haunted by many of the
memories of his life. Obviously, his war experiences play the central role in this trauma.
However, it would be short-sighted to claim that no other events contributed to Pilgrim’s intense
dissociation. This representation of dissociation and trauma by Vonnegut is consistent with the
early theories on traumatic neurosis by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer. They recognized early
on that traumatic memories often get connected with other traumatic memories as part of their
“great complex of associations” (“On the Physical” 9). That is, when one dissociates from a
traumatic experience, the memory of that experience may be revisited through the memories of
other traumatic events. In Slaughterhouse-Five, World War II and Dresden serve as a central
point for all of Pilgrim’s slippages in time while memories of many other traumatic events,
whether near-death experiences, the death of Pilgrim’s wife, or his stay in a mental hospital, also
encroach on his daily life. While Pilgrim’s slippages in time force him to revisit the traumatic
horrors he has witnessed in his life, they also reveal a mechanism that allows him to escape from
them. We can further see just how far this escape really goes through his ‘visits’ to
Tralfamadore.
The trips to Tralfamadore, as I mentioned earlier, are a source of critical contention. Some
readers believe that such elements of Slaughterhouse-Five are to be read fantastically and not as
a representation of traumatic dissociation; they are what allow for Vonnegut’s work to be
categorized as Science Fiction. As Robert Merrill and Peter A. Scholl point out in their essay
“Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: The Requirements of Chaos,” the Tralfamadore scenes may
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be not just fantastical but imaginary: “Vonnegut offers many hints that the Tralfamadorians do
not exist” (Merrill 144). The most palpable example of the nonexistence of Tralfamadore can be
seen through Vonnegut’s inclusion of his often-used character, Kilgore Trout.
Kilgore Trout is Vonnegut’s own self described “alter-ego.” He appears in almost all of
Vonnegut’s novels as a failed science fiction writer. Within several of his books Vonnegut
describes many of the plots of Trout’s books, and these books often influence Vonnegut’s other
characters, most notably in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine and Breakfast
of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday. While Trout appears to be a peripheral character in
Slaughterhouse-Five, his influence is the root of Pilgrim’s Tralfamadore fantasies. When Pilgrim
admits himself to a mental hospital after returning from the war, he shares a room with Eliot
Rosewater (another character who appears in multiple Vonnegut novels). Rosewater introduces
Pilgrim to the works of Kilgore Trout at this time, many years before his apparent abduction.
Later in his life, Pilgrim walks by a “porno shop” and notices several Kilgore Trout books in the
front window:
He was thrilled by the Kilgore Trout novels in the front. The titles were all new to
him, or he thought they were. Now he opened one…The name of the book was
The Big Board. He got a few paragraphs into it, and then he realized that he had
read it before – years ago, in the veterans’ hospital. It was about an Earthling man
and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in
a zoo. (Slaughterhouse-Five 201)
This episode shows that “the scenario of Billy’s life in outer space is something less than
original” (Merrill 145), and suggests that it was Trout’s influence that helped to create Pilgrim’s
intricate fantasy world.
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To further show that the Tralfamadore experiences are something of Pilgrim’s own creation,
and not to be taken as straightforward Science Fiction, one could turn to the woman who shares
with him the zoo display during his stay on the planet. This woman, Montana Wildhack, is an
actress whom Pilgrim lustily admires before his trip to Tralfamadore. The fact that she shares in
his abduction further posits this experience as his personal fantasy.
Lastly, the ideas that Pilgrim learns during his time in Tralfamadore also prove that this
experience is part of his dissociative escape. The Tralfamadorians reveal to Pilgrim their concept
of time, in which all events happen simultaneously. For them, “[a]ll moments, past, present, and
future, always have existed, always will exist” (Slaughterhouse-Five 27). They tell Pilgrim that
he, like all humans, is like “a bug trapped in amber” (77). These ideas, although they seem
discomforting because they eliminate free will and choice, prove to be very comforting for
Pilgrim. The most comforting aspect of Tralfamadorian time for Pilgrim is that “their theory of
time denies the reality of death” (Merrill 145). Pilgrim can see and experience his own death, and
then he returns to other parts of his life. This allows him to no longer fear death or mourn for
those who have died around him. It also allows for Pilgrim to absolve himself of blame for
causing the pain and horror of his life. But most important, Pilgrim now has a theory from these
enlightened extra-terrestrials that matches his own experience of becoming unstuck in time. His
Tralfamadore fantasy has provided a narrative that makes him believe himself to be enlightened,
rather than severely traumatized.
Once the science fiction label is ruled out, through the close examination of Pilgrim’s
fantasies, it is clear that Vonnegut has constructed a character who has suffered from the
dissociative effects of trauma. As James Lundquist argues in his book Kurt Vonnegut, Pilgrim’s
experiences of becoming unstuck in time and his visits to Tralfamadore have “enable[d] him to
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deal with the horror of Dresden and to get around the question of ‘Why me?’ that echoes through
the novel” (Lundquist 82). He cannot cognitively address the traumatic events of his life, so he
constructs a world that fits his personal experience of dissociation.
The character of Billy Pilgrim provides an abundant source for the study of trauma in
Slaughterhouse-Five. However, it is the relationship of Vonnegut, himself, to the text that helps
to illuminate the weight of this trauma. Vonnegut bookends the narrative about Pilgrim with an
opening and a closing chapter that are each a mix of memoir and nonfiction addressed to the
reader. Vonnegut also inserts himself into the narrative of Slaughterhouse-Five in several
instances. An examination of these authorial interruptions, along with the first and last chapters,
reveals Vonnegut’s own experiences of trauma and how they relate to the fictional experiences
of Billy Pilgrim.
The first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five begins with the disclaimer that “[a]ll of this
happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true” (Slaughterhouse-Five 1).
Vonnegut explicitly states that the narrative which follows is rooted in his own past. He reveals
to the reader that he was a POW in Dresden during the firebombing, and that he and his fellow
POW’s only survived because they were forced into a meat locker. They were then ordered to
find and dispose of the thousands of dead bodies that were left in the city’s wreckage. The war
experiences of Billy Pilgrim are closely modeled after the experiences of Vonnegut. Also,
Vonnegut steps out of Pilgrim’s story at times to inform the reader that “I [Vonnegut] was there”
(67). In one such example, Pilgrim is listening to the painful cries of a sick American POW in
the latrine. Vonnegut then identifies himself as the pained POW saying, “That was I. That was
me. That was the author of this book” (125).
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In an even more clever insertion of himself into the narrative, Vonnegut accidentally
telephones Billy Pilgrim late one evening. This would be easily missed if not for a clue planted
in the first chapter, where Vonnegut reveals to the reader that he sometimes gets drunk and
makes late-night calls to long-lost friends:
I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I
get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses.
And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the operator to
connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years. (4)
Later, on the night of Pilgrim’s daughter’s wedding, just before he is abducted by the
Tralfamadorians, that Pilgrim answers the phone to find “a drunk on the other end. Billy could
almost smell his breath – mustard gas and roses. It was a wrong number” (73).
This episode, as well as all of the other insertions of the author into his fiction, serves two
purposes. First, Vonnegut grounds the story of Pilgrim in the experiences of his own life. He
wants the reader to know that these things “more or less” happened to him. Just the same, the
reader sees that although their experiences were similar, Vonnegut and Pilgrim are not one in the
same. Vonnegut lets the reader know that he was there, but he was outside of Billy Pilgrim, next
to him. Billy Pilgrim is not a literary representation of Vonnegut; rather he has just had the
shared experience of being a witness to the firebombing of Dresden. However, this is not the
only similarity between the author and his protagonist.
Vonnegut’s mode of narration in the first and last chapters closely mirrors that of the rest of
the novel. That is, his relation of his past jumps from one moment to another, in non-linear
fashion. He begins by telling the reader that he and his war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare, returned
to Dresden in 1967. Then he talks about his various struggles over the years with trying to write
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a book about Dresden. He then recalls going to visit O’Hare some years before. From there, he
discusses small details about his war experiences, being at home with his wife, attending college
after the war, teaching at the University of Iowa, working for the Chicago City News Bureau,
talking with his children. Finally, he revisits the story of his return trip to Dresden.
It seems that Vonnegut, like Pilgrim, has become unstuck in time. He sees his own life, or at
least his past, as the Tralfamadorians do. When they take Pilgrim captive they allow him to read
some of their novels, but warn that he will not be able to understand them because they are made
up of “clumps of symbols” with each clump “describing a situation, a scene” (SlaughterhouseFive 88). The Tralfamadorians explain that all of the situations should be read simultaneously.
The situations are not in any order, but once they are all read “they produce an image of life that
is beautiful and surprising and deep” (88). Vonnegut utilizes the same writing technique as the
Tralfamadorians. In his nonfiction address to the reader, as well as his tale of Billy Pilgrim, he
presents short scenes and situations from the present and the past to tell his story. This “timetripping,” concludes Lundquist, “both by Billy and the narrator, produces an effect somewhat
like that achieved in the Tralfamadorian novel – to see many moments at once” (Lundquist 72).
Some readers may be inclined to view the Tralfamadorian structure of Vonnegut’s work as a
mere artistic device. However, several critics have argued that this it is representative of
Vonnegut’s personal struggles with trauma. Lundquist claims that “Slaughterhouse-Five …
gains its structure from Vonnegut’s essential aesthetic problem – how to describe a reality that is
beyond human imagination” (Lundquist 71). Vonnegut himself discusses in the opening chapter
the immense difficulty he had in trying to write a book about his experiences in Dresden:
I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety
and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I
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thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since
all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen…But not many words
about Dresden came from my mind then – not enough of them to make a book,
anyway. And not many words come now, either, when I have become an old fart
with his memories and his Pall Malls, with his sons full grown. (SlaughterhouseFive 2)
Vonnegut felt a need to represent the events he had seen in Dresden then, but “he discovered that
the spectacle of the Dresden fire-storm was somehow beyond language” (Tanner 125).
The problem of speaking about trauma, of expressing it adequately with language, has been a
preoccupation for many trauma theorists. To begin to address this issue, it is first necessary to
describe the “double wound” nature of trauma, and particularly traumatic dissociation. Freud was
the first to discuss the double wound of trauma in his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Since
then, many theorists have further commented on this aspect of trauma, including Cathy Caruth,
who, in her book Unclaimed Experience, states that:
a wound of the mind – the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the
world [dissociation] – is not, like the wound of the body, a simple and healable
event, but rather an event that…is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be
fully known and is therefore not available to the consciousness until it imposes
itself again, repeatedly. (Unclaimed 4)
The initial traumatic event, in this case the fire-bombing of Dresden, cannot be fully processed at
the time of the event. It is this failure of cognitive processing, and the dissociation that it causes,
that prevent the event from being addressed or represented through language. However, the
lingering painful memories of the event reappear in the mind of the sufferer, repeatedly. This is
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the double wound that Freud first noticed. This also points to the difficulty that Vonnegut had in
trying to represent the source of his trauma, and the years it took before he could do so
adequately.
We can find many concrete examples of this double wound in Slaughterhouse-Five, as well as
other works by Vonnegut. Obviously, Slaughterhouse-Five revolves around Vonnegut’s
experiences in Dresden. However, as David H. Goldsmith points out in Kurt Vonnegut: Fantasist
of Fire and Ice, “[r]arely has a single incident [the bombing of Dresden] so dominated the work
of a writer” (Goldsmith ix). Vonnegut admits in his first chapter that he had been unsuccessfully
attempting to write about Dresden for all of the 25 years since he had returned home from the
war. While he may have been unable to explicitly represent the fire-bombing of Dresden, “he
was never able to exclude it entirely” from his five novels written prior to Slaughterhouse-Five
(Goldsmith x). His second novel, The Sirens of Titan (1959), involves a mass execution during
war, similar to Dresden in the number of casualties. The same catastrophic war machinery is
discussed during his fourth novel, Cat’s Cradle (1963). And the lasting traumatic effects of war,
most notably survivor guilt, play an important role for his protagonists in both Mother Night
(1961) and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine (1965). In fact, in God Bless
You, Mr. Rosewater the protagonist, Eliot Rosewater (who appears in Slaughterhouse-Five), is in
the midst of reading a book called The Bombing of Germany that details the fire-bombing of
Dresden. All of these references to Dresden point to their immense impact on the psyche of the
author and their reoccurring nature in his mind, as well.
Nearly two decades after Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut revisited trauma and dissociation
with his novel Bluebeard: The Autobiography of Rabo Karabekian (1916-1988), showing, once
again, the impact of dissociation. This novel is a “hoax autobiography” about an abstract painter
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named Rabo Karabekian (Bluebeard Author’s Note). Karabekian, like Vonnegut and Billy
Pilgrim, is forced to relive his war experiences. He, too, was a POW during World War II.
Karabekian speaks throughout the “autobiography” about his one distinct memory of the war: the
day the war ended, thousands of POW’s and concentration camp survivors were gathered in a
large valley to begin their respective journeys back home. Karabekian is haunted by the image of
the sun coming up over the valley full of sick and dying individuals, as well as a large number of
corpses. Through the autobiography, we learn that Karabekian has not produced a piece of art for
decades, but has been working on one piece in secret, which is locked in a barn on his property.
At the finale, we are finally ‘shown’ the painting, a huge, realistic depiction, “that might have
been a photograph,” of the image of the valley on the last day of the war (Bluebeard 298).
Karabekian, like Vonnegut, has been continually troubled by the desire to represent his horrific
war experiences. He, also like Vonnegut, has been unable to ‘find the words’ for a number of
years. This is a further example of the double wound nature of trauma and dissociation.
Vonnegut’s preoccupation with his memories of Dresden, and the ensuing trauma, is clearly
shown in most of his writing. In the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, he compares himself to
Lot’s wife, who was told not to look back at the burning wreckage of Sodom and Gomorrah.
When she chooses not to follow this warning, she is turned to a pillar of salt. Vonnegut
empathizes with her saying, “I love her for that [looking back], because it was so human”
(Slaughterhouse-Five 22). Later, he confesses that Slaughterhouse-Five “is a failure, and had to
be, since it was written by a pillar of salt” (22). He, like Lot’s wife or anyone suffering trauma
induced dissociation, cannot help but look back.
The work of Vonnegut expresses an inherent paradox in speaking about dissociation. He
shows through his work that the memories of a traumatic event repeatedly return to the mind of
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the sufferer; they become unstuck in time. However, the memory itself is tied to the act of
forgetting, since dissociation (as evidenced by Pilgrim’s fantasies) is a kind of escape. So, we are
left with a trauma sufferer who yearns to address a haunting event, yet cannot fully address the
event because it is left inaccessible by its dissociation. This seems to prevent Vonnegut from
representing his trauma in a realistic, straightforward way. However, Vonnegut gets around this
difficulty by not representing the event itself, but rather the experience of dissociating from the
event.
It is in this way that we can read Slaughterhouse-Five not as an anti-war book but as a book
about the trouble of representing trauma when dissociation has occurred. Vonnegut himself
dispels the notion that Slaughterhouse-Five is an anti-war book by comparing anti-war books to
anti-glacier books, in that both wars and glaciers are equally hard to stop (Slaughterhouse-Five
3). He creates in Billy Pilgrim:
an unheroic man who is wanderer and prisoner in an absurd universe, a perpetual
child dominated by forces he scarce understands, shocked and stunned by
incomprehensible horrors, yet somehow finding happiness in moments of joy and
love, and doggedly persisting in the effort to be a decent person and to find
meaning in existence. (Reed 193)
Vonnegut creates an absurd universe for Pilgrim that mimics his own experiences, which have
Dresden at their center. Both Vonnegut and his character are trying to live good, normal lives
while constantly looking back at the terrible and abnormal event they never got to “process” in
the first place.
Vonnegut’s representation of dissociation, while fantastic, is consistent with the early findings
of Freud and his contemporaries. Pilgrim experiences fantasy and reality side by side, because
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for him the two are equally real (Meeter 205). He is forced to escape from his experiences
because the reality is too horrifying and damaging to be mentally processed in a normal way.
Dissociation provides a safe haven for Pilgrim. He comes out of the other end of the Dresden
massacre with inescapable, partial memories and later develops an intricate fantasy world.
Vonnegut is consumed by similar memories, but seems finally, in Slaughterhouse-Five, able to
address them. As a starting point for exploring representations of trauma in literature, Vonnegut
is useful in that both the process of writing and the text itself accurately depict the effects of
dissociation and our growing understandings of trauma in the field of psychology. By making the
effects of psychological trauma known to the public and helping readers to identify with the
trauma suffering protagonists of his novels, Vonnegut would set the stage for a number of
literary trauma narratives to come.