KURT VONNEGUT'S SLAUGHTER-HOUSE-FIVE:
A CHILDREN'S CRUSADE
KURT VONNEGUT'S LIFE:
-began writing in the 1950's
-parents destroyed by the Depression: Kurt grew up poor
-Kurt's sister died and her husband was killed in a car accident
-Vonnegut took care of his sister's three children
-published SLAUGHTER-HOUSE-FIVE in 1969: height of the Vietnam War
-"so it goes" became apart of the 1970's lexicon
#1 NO VILLAINS: -Vonnegut studied anthropology at The University of Chicago: presents
characters as exhibiting characteristics constructed by their environment. Amoral social environment is the villain.
#2 RADICAL TEXT:
crude drawings, diddies, vulgar language, time travel, sex,
martians, science fiction,
metatextuality: novel is aware of itself as a novel, as a work of fiction, confessional:
Vonnegut is a character as a writer and as a character in the "fictional story:
-WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP OF BILLY PILGRIM / Vonnegut TO DRESDEN?
-Dresden is "lovely, intricate, enchanted, voluptuous, absurd,
a Sunday School picture of Heaven" to Billy: establishes the
Romantic, otherworldly beauty of Dresden before the bombing.
-"Oz"-Vonnegut, as a character, says it looks like Oz. Vonnegut
enters into his own text as a character.
#3 SEARCH FOR NEW PERSPECTIVE ON PREPONDERANCE OF WAR
WHY DID HE WRITE ABOUT DRESDEN IN THIS WAY?
-could not find the language (NEITHER HISTORICAL NOR ROMANTIC) in the normal narrative structure to give voice to the horrors of the Dresden bombing and the horrible irony that they were saved by being prisoners of war
-Vonnegut struggled to show the absurdity of the experience of being a prisoner of war and then being bombed by his own country.
-Basement meat locker of a German slaughterhouse was safer than the German houses.
-Dresden was unnecessarily and excessively bombed:
The English soldiers tell the American soldiers:
"...you needn't worry about being shipped to Dresden, it won't be
bombed, it is undefended, it is an open city, it contains no war
industries or troop concentrations of any importance"
-40,00---135,000 civilians were killed: dwarfs all the other atrocities of WWII
-Air Force PR man claims that Dreden bombing is top secret still in 1969. (page 11)
"What can you say about a massacre?"
-Vonnegut describes Dresden after the bombing as a moonscape; he
employs his science fiction bent to describe the ineffable:
"it was like the moon...there was no food Nor water...survivors
would have to climb over curve after curve on the face of the
moon...nobody talked much as the expedition moved across the moon."
-dry wit: "I have told my sons not to take part in
massacres...and that the news of massacres is not to fill them
with satisfaction or glee."
-Vonnegut tells us that he cannot write the Dreden story.
-How can writing create a narrative that would be commensurate with the experience in WWII?
-science fiction allows for a new, objective perspective
-satire: the exposure of incorrect thinking of others by humor, dramatic irony, and hyperbole
#4 BLENDS PAST WITH PRESENT AND FUTUTE:
Vonnegut wanted to show that violence, hatred, narrow-mindedness continues "to go" in America (and in the world) by interweaving the story of the violence in WWII with the contemporary violence in race riots at home in American in the 1960's and abroad in the napalm scorchings in Vietnam.
-HOW MUCH OF THE PRESENT WAS MINE TO KEEP?
-black ghetto burned down in 1960's: "it reminded Billy of the cities in the war, National Guard tanks crushed curbs and sidewalks"
-Billy's son becomes a Green Beret and fights in Vietnam after being a terrible adolescent. Vonnegut describes the dropping of napalm as the events in a science fiction novel, "The Gutless Wonder," in which a robot predicts the dropping of "burning, jellied gasoline" on humans from airplanes. "The dropping is done by robots, because they had no conscience and no circuits to allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground."
-this is a criticism of the Vietnam War and the ongoingness of violence, war, evil in the name of good. "So it goes."
#5 VONNEGUT'S WRITER'S BLOCK:
-openly admits to not being able to write the story
-vivits O'Hare who was with him in Dresden
-Ohare's wife says "you were just babies in the war...but you are not going to write it that way...you're gonna pretend you were
men and war will look wonderful and we'll have a lot more of them and they'll be fought by babies like one's upstairs." (14)
-SOLUTION?: tells the story from a child's perspective and a martian's perspective
Neither Romantic War nor Motiveless War:
LANGUAGE AND WAR:
"history informs us that the crusaders were ignorant and savage
men and motives were bigotry and blood and tears" (15)
romantic view: "Romance dilates upon their piety and
heroism...their virtue and magnanimity, the imperishable honor
they acquired for themselves, and the great services they provided."
-Vonnegut finds that neither historical perspective will do.
English sentimentalize the war: "Gerry was on the run,... good
Americans: Wild Bob says "Are you one of my boys? It's me...Wild
Bob. The Colonel told them that they had nothing to be ashamed
of, that there were dead Germans all over the battlefield that
wish to God they had never heard of the 441st battalion."
-Wild Bob was going to have a bbq in his hometown in Cody,
-this is American Romantism and bravado that sees the war through the
eyes of the Boy Scouts with a bbq when all is over. The irony
here is that Colonel Wild Bob is not speaking to his men because they are dead.
-Soldiers are constructed by the war and speak in a completely constructed manner.
-Roland Weary fantasizes that he is one of the Three Musketeers before the Americans become prisoners of war (16)
Romantic view of the war:
"how'd you like to be hit with this? hmmm? no why that blade is
triangular? makes a wound that won't close up. makes a three
sided hole in a guy...shit what do You know. what the hell'd they
-"Billy after all had contemplated hideous wounds and
torture...he had a gruesome crucifix as a boy...clinical fidelity
of all of Christ's wounds...Billy's Christ died horribly. He was
pitiful. So it goes."
-Lazarro: "people fuck with me Jesus Christ they'll be fucking
sorry, i'll laugh like hell. i don't care of it's a guy or dame,
President of the United States...i'll fix him good"
-unconscious violent tendency
-Major in the Marines at the Lion's Club meeting: "...Americans
have no choice but to keep fighting in Vietnam until they
achieved victory or at least until the Communists that they
cannot force their way of life on weak countries. Bomb N. Vietnam
back into the Stone Age, if they refused to see reason."
-the irony here is that the Major fails to use reason and fails
to see that the American are guilty of the same imposition of "a
way of life" upon the Vietnamese as the Communists.
-personal opinions have been scripted by war, media, dominant
opinions...
understatment:
"There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground."
Sex from a martian's perspective:
"Billy was on top of Valencia...Billy made a noise like a small,
rusty hinge. He had just empied his seminal vesicles into
Valencia. He just attributed his share of the Green Beret."
-this is an objective, unromantic perspective of sex and the
inevitablility of making a life that will participate in war.
-WHAT IS THE TENSION BETWEEN VONNEGUT'S DESIRE TO TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT DRESDEN AND PROFESSOR RUMFOORD'S DISMISSAL THAT DRESDEN WAS NOT SIGNIFICANT?
-Billy tells the professor that he was there and that civilians
were killed and that American fighter pilots shot at American
prisoners of war to underscore the absurdity of war.