This post is part of a series on Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. For an introduction and link to other posts, refer to this Introduction.
Don’t Look Back (in Anger or Otherwise)
As I’ve established in a previous post, Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five to tell us about his life experiences. This begs the question: why do this in the form of a novel instead of an autobiography? While the answer to this question is likely multi-faceted, I want to focus on one potential reason: writing a science fiction novel allowed Vonnegut to relive his traumatic past while maintaining a certain mental distance from and control over the events.
In the first chapter Vonnegut, through the narrator, tells the reader a bit about why he wrote this novel. First, it seems that he wanted to write an anti-war novel — a book about war where there “won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne,” one that showed the absurdity of a “Children’s Crusade,” one that said war was a massacre and that “there’s nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.”¹ Second, writing this novel forced him to look back, to relive these painful memories over and over, and to try to put them to page. One gets the impression that Vonnegut found himself slowly absorbed by his experiences and unable to escape reflecting on them. Perhaps writing them down was a form of therapy more than anything else. Or, maybe, Vonnegut felt “destined” to write this novel in the Trafalmadorian sense of the word.
Nowhere is this dual motivation more obvious than in the story of Lot’s wife, as told by the narrator. In the Bible, Lot and his family are directed by God to leave the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah before they are destroyed by divine wrath. The cities are being punished for their sin: “those were vile people in both those cities… The world was better off without them”.² Echoing the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Lot and his family were told to not look back at their city, their home, their old life as they escaped. Lot’s wife disobeyed and was turned to a pillar of salt for her trouble. The narrator praises this defiance and relates it to his own struggles in writing the book: “I loved her for that, because it was so human… People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore… This one is a failure, and it had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt”.³
The narrator is casting himself as Lot’s wife, looking back at his experiences in war when he knows he should not. Although he knows reflection will only bring him pain (metaphorically turning him into a pillar of salt), he can’t help but turn around and contemplate it anyway. Even the imagery of destruction (“Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven”⁵) summons to mind Allied bombers raining high-explosive and incendiary bombs upon Dresden from thousands of feet in the air.
The story begins with horror and destruction meant to serve as a warning. In the religious context, Sodom and Gomorrah were experiencing retribution for their “sins”. God was “justly” punishing them for disobeying his will. Vonnegut’s story also serves as a warning, but it complicates the narrative. A cynical, die-hard advocate of total war may see the situations as exactly the same: the German people, by supporting the Nazi war effort, had “sinned” and so their punishment was justified. Vonnegut is like Lot’s wife — an innocent who witnesses the destruction and is harmed because he has too much empathy for people who “should” be his enemy. However, it’s clear that this is not at all what Vonnegut is trying to communicate. He sees this story as a warning against the war and violence. War in any form is irreconcilably terrible and, more often than not, the people who suffer the most are simply caught in the gears of history. The civilians of Dresden didn’t really have a choice but to support their country, just as Vonnegut (and most soldiers) didn’t have a choice in going to fight. In both cases, it was simply their lot in life. Because of it they were punished by a power far beyond their control. Vonnegut warns that war destroys the lives of the vanquished and, quite often, the lives of the victors as well.
Perhaps this novel, like The Great Gatsby, also serves as a warning about allowing the past to consume us. Lot’s wife literally turned into a pillar of salt and Vonnegut claims to have done so figuratively. The Trafalmadorians on the other hand don’t really look back at all. They experience the past, the present, and the future and simply accept it. The refrain of the novel, so it goes, feels like a numb sigh of resignation. So often great and terrible events happen and we are powerless to control them. What’s the point on dwelling on them then, if this obsession will only destroy ourselves? But, as humans, how can we not dwell on them? How can we not rage against the tide of history and strive to make sure these atrocities never happen again, even as we know our endeavors are largely futile? This is a tension of the novel, which continually reminds us that we have so little control while also imploring us to remember, and to feel. Perhaps this is why Vonnegut gives the Trafalmadorians this calm, neutral perspective — it’s so human to look back that only aliens can totally let go of it.
We still haven’t answered why this warning is better delivered as a novel than as a biography. I believe the novelization serves two purposes. Firstly, it gives Vonnegut complete narrative control that he would not have in a work of non-fiction. He can use imagery of aliens, absurd characters, and unlikely events to get his point across because he is trying to communicate a personal, moral truth rather than the facts of his life. He can still weave these historical truths in and out as he pleases, but he can craft the warning through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim and the Trafalmadorians. He doesn’t need to try to diagnose or put precise, clinical words to what he’s learned and felt and experienced because he can communicate them indirectly through motifs and imagery. This leads to the second point: the novelization distances Vonnegut slightly from the events he’s telling. He introduces the novel through a narrator who begins it through the story of Lot’s wife and continues it through the story of Billy Pilgrim. These multiple layers shield Vonnegut from reliving the experiences directly. The thin veneer of fictionalization creates a distance from the likely visceral and taxing process of recounting his experience. By placing himself within the story but invariably slightly removed from the main events, Vonnegut is able to step outside of his memories and emotions enough to put them to paper.
Conclusion
Vonnegut meant this novel to serve as a warning, a warning he felt compelled to deliver because of his history. By writing a work of fiction, Vonnegut at once freed his narrative from the realm of fact and concreteness to a wholly controllable world of imagery and grand truths. He also placed a layer of distance between his painful experiences and the story he shared.
Footnotes/Citations
- Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, New York: Random, 1991, Print, pgs. 14, 15, 19.
- Ibid., pg. 21.
- Ibid., pg 22.
- Ibid., pg 21.
“Kurt Vonnegut.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation. Web. 30 May 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut. Used for biographical details on Vonnegut.
