And So It Goes – Reacting to Slaughterhouse-Five
When I read Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, I am drawn into a world where time at once rushes onward like a rapid, rushing stream and yet drags in circles like a lazy, dying snail. I am struck by the bitterness, the sardonicism, the rage of a man who went through hell only to find that no one knew or understood his experience. I find myself confronted by the incongruously winking humour of an author who understood that his meaning would be confused by his readers. In Slaughterhouse-Five, I hear the voice of my German, American, human brothers’ blood calling up to me from the ground, asking why we still fight wars, wondering whether the world had any purpose at all, war or no. And so on. So it goes.
Vonnegut opens the story of Billy Pilgrim, the man unhinged from time, with an autobiographical chapter detailing whatever purpose could be gleaned from his “war book.” “All this happened, more or less,” he tells the reader nonchalantly. During his days as a prisoner of war in Dresden as the sky collapsed in flame and in the days there after his liberation, he witnessed many pointless, painfully ironic deaths, “and so on.” In Dresden, Vonnegut remembers, “A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot… and then he’s shot by a firing squad.” The climax of the conflagration is a pointless casualty. I feel the sense of dehumanization palpably in these tone-setting paragraphs, alongside the unmistakable truth that Vonnegut, despite his sardonicism, still intends his message to demand attention and change. The same man who shrugged and penned, “So it goes,” wrote, “I hope we’ll meet again in a world of peace and freedom…” In the midst of the dark humour and futility, indeed, because of them, Vonnegut is able to convey a gospel for the twentieth century. And so on.
“‘You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?’ ‘No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?’ ‘I say, “Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?”’” Over the post-war years, Vonnegut relates, he has accumulated a sense that his book is both necessary and pointless. Initially he “thought it would be easy… to write about the destruction of Dresden,” but he would strike obstacles ahead, not least of which his own pessimism. Though he would oppose them in his prose, he could not but believe “that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers.” In addition to laughing darkly at the author’s gallows humour, I become drawn into the repetitive downward spiral Vonnegut weaves in his prose, a spiral accentuated in the cyclical nature of Billy Pilgrim’s story. This cycle is alluded to in the doggerel, “My name is Yon Yonson,/I work in Wisconsin,/I work in a lumbermill there./The people I meet when I walk down the street,/They say, ‘What’s your name?’/ And I say,/ ‘My name is Yon Yonson,/I work in Wisconsin…’ And so on to infinity.” Attempting to wrench out of the futility of war is just as pointless as the “song” of Yon Yonson, a chasing after the wind. And so it goes.
Vonnegut strives against ignorance and callousness in Slaughterhouse-Five. Writing in a world where the rapidly developing 24 hour news cycle was devoted to mushrooming nuclear threats and cultural memories were clouded by visions of Hiroshima, he brought word of a slaughter that was to him even more futile. Even he, a prisoner in Germany’s Schlachthof Fünf, for which the book is titled, barely “knew how much worse [the fire-bombing of Dresden] had been than Hiroshima.” In the face of the immolation of the city, no human-inflicted suffering, even the Holocaust, can measure up to what he has witnessed. I am challenged by Vonnegut’s comparison of Dresden to Sodom and Gomorrah. In his mind, the blazes were both equally evil, though he caustically points out that, “Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them.” With his words burning in my mind, I cannot but wonder whether any death at all can be considered worthwhile or any man righteous. And so it goes.
Slaughterhouse-Five is subtitled The Children’s Crusade, named for a war which history has deemed as brutally meaningless as the fire-bombing of Dresden. In his novel, Vonnegut reports two accounts of the crusaders, either their motives were “those of bigotry unmitigated, and that their pathway was one of blood and tears,” or they were marked by “piety and heroism… virtue and magnanimity… imperishable honor.” There is no mistaking which way the wind blows for Vonnegut. In response to the anger of his friend’s wife, Mary O’Hare, who “didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars,” and who was convinced that “wars were partly encouraged by books and movies,” he vowed that should he finish his book, “there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.” Though he and his companions had been “foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood,” Vonnegut wrote so that his children would “not under any circumstance take part in massacres” or delight in the news that someone else had. He would work against the forces of The Children’s Crusade. And so on.
In Vonnegut, I find an American prophet of Biblical proportions, a man willing to look back, something which I love him for “because it is so human.” Beneath the black wit and sardonic dismay of Slaughterhouse-Five, I catch sight of an ancient vision, swords beaten into plowshares and lions with lambs, an era when we send no longer our sons and daughters to be butchered and consumed in sacrifice. I hear a bitter laugh that somehow sighs for the hope underlying its scoffing. I vow with him to stand against the glacial slide of war despite the futility of that fight. Suffering moves forward and the glacier slides on, but still I push against its bloody trail. And so it goes.
