Slaughterhouse-Five: Effing awesome

*Be warned:  Spoilers ahead!*

To  me, black humor is one of the trickiest things to pull off.  There is a lot of black humor that I don’t enjoy, and it is hard to put my finger on what contributes to a piece’s success or failure.  What I do know is that Kurt Vonnegut always does it right, and Slaughterhouse-Five doesn’t take a single misstep, in spite of the fact that it is exceptionally dark.

The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, has had the tar beaten out of him by life and World War II.  After the war, he slides right back into his life as a student of optometry and has a nervous breakdown soon thereafter.  Twenty years after the war, he is in a plane accident, of which he is one of two survivors and in which he has his head bust open.  There is so much senseless violence, suffering, and cruelty in the world that Billy recedes into his own mind and science fiction to make sense of it.

One of the things that makes Slaughterhouse-Five such an incredible read is the way that Vonnegut marries his form with the function it serves.  The simple sentence structures and short paragraphs make the writing itself seem like the product of a mind suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.  Everything is stilted and brief, like a man walking on wounded legs, unsure when a knee might give way and send him crashing to the earth.  Each element of the story is like a geometric proof, one laid out after another as though at the end something logical will be constructed and a Q.E.D. can be found.  But of course, logic falls apart, and B does not follow A, let alone C follow B.  In fact, due to Billy’s being unstuck in time, even the simple logic of chronology is unable to remain in place.

Billy’s getting unstuck in time is brilliant at every level.  From a pure storytelling perspective, it allows Vonnegut to place his climax in 1945 and the bombing of Dresden while at the same time telling us about the life Billy lived afterwards.  Even more meaningful, though, is the way it reflects the fracturing of Billy’s mind in the ugliness of human-made atrocities.  Billy is trying to find a way to come to terms with all the meaningless death and destruction around him, and through the help of Kilgore Trout’s science fiction novels, he dwells on the concept of time as the fourth dimension and the way in which events could be viewed with the permanence of a landscape.  If you were to walk over a mountain range, you would start at the foothills, where the mountain is “born.”  Then, you would move over the collection of peaks and crags as though experiencing the life of the mountain range.  When you come to the end, back into the foothills on the other side, the mountain has “died,” and if you could only walk in one direction, that mountain would be forever “dead” to you.  But we have the ability to step back and see the whole mountain range from a distance; we do not celebrate its birth or death in space because it is forever revisitable by us.  If time worked the same way, we would have no need to celebrate a birth or death in time because we could revisit any portion of the life as easily as we vacation in the Rockies.  This approach cleverly reduces “death” to a mere inevitability and just a small portion of an entire structure.

How perfect to put that in a novel, where time is literally fixed.  We can revisit any portion of Billy’s life in the novel, and it will always be the same, word for word.  Nothing will ever change between those two covers.

The ramifications of this approach to time is that it, like a mountain range, is a permanent structure, unchanging.  What has happened has always happened and always will happen.  You cannot do anything other than what you have always done.  Free will, and the notion that we somehow make decisions that influence the course of things to come, is done away with.  The solution, then, to one problem, forces us into another.  But for Billy, who feels out of control anyways, he much prefers the notion of permanence in time to the notion of free will. 

Slaughterhouse-Five is, of course, an anti-war novel.  And as I’ve said in my posts about Animal Farm, 1984, and The Grapes of Wrath, a political novel is only as good as its artistry.  Nobody wants to read a lecture, and nobody turns to novels for a collection of facts.  We want characters and drama and thought, and philosophy to chew on about how life works and how we are to live it.  If Slaughterhouse-Five were simply a collection of all the ways in which war destroys lives and culture, it would be a crappy book.  It is the humor and the characters and the messiness of life that make this such a wonderful book.

Early in the novel, Vonnegut discusses this idea of an anti-war book and is told by someone that he might as well write an “anti-glacier book.”   

What he meant of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers.  I believe that too.  And even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.

He’s under no illusion that a book can stop wars, or that wars are the only source of death and mayhem.  Still, he knows that novels (and other forms of entertainment) do have an effect on people and their willingness to support or go to war.  Mary, his friend’s wife, is angry at the narrator for wanting to write a book about the war because he’s likely to ennoble the acts: 

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.

So Vonnegut promises Mary that “there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne” in his novel.  And there is not.  Nothing is glorified about the war.  There are no great speeches or rousing of the troops.  There are no flag-waving moments of intense patriotism.  He observes in the final third of the novel: 

There are almost no characters in this story, almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces.  One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

Which brings us back to the lack of free will in the Tralfamodorian construct of time.  Wars, like glaciers, advance on us, and the machinery cannot be stopped by any art or even any individuals for that matter—we are no more than “listless playthings of enormous forces.”  Nothing we do can change anything anyways.

Now that is some dark shit right there.  I’m not sure you can get much darker, so why isn’t this the most depressing novel on the shelves?  Because Vonnegut fights against those enormous forces with humor, wit, and powerful observations about people.  In that humor and laughter that is thrown in the face of the inevitable, there is something incredibly uplifting.  It is the dance band on the Titanic playing as the ship scuppers.  There is an element of hope that says that if only enough people could see the ridiculousness of what is happening, maybe something could happen.  Okay, we know it won’t.  But, what if?!  But, it won’t. 

And that’s what makes Slaughterhouse-Five, and all the Vonnegut novels I have read, successful black humor stories.  That cycle of despair and hope . . . it’s so human.  He says in the first chapter that he loved Lot’s wife for looking back as Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, “because it was so human.”  That’s how I feel about Vonnegut through his writings: I love him because he was so human.  All his wisdom and wit never come as an attack from the outside, because he always knows that the massive mess that is humanity is his own lot, his own home.  He is the uncle at a large family gathering who is scathing in his comments, but who makes us all laugh and understand ourselves.  He can say what he says because he is part of the family; he still comes to the gatherings, unlike some other family members who have sworn us off completely.  And when I think of the human being I want to be in this life, I want to make Uncle Kurt proud.