This page hosted by
Get your own Free Home Page
Chapter 2 - Philosophy and Opinions
War
Above all else, Kurt Vonnegut is a pacifist, and his
pacifistic views are the major theme of Slaughterhouse-Five. They
form a definite undercurrent in the other three novels that are
under study as well.
The tone of Slaughterhouse-Five is set early. Vonnegut
recounts the friendship he and Bernard V. O'Hare established in
Dresden in 1967 with a taxi cab driver. That Christmas the cab
driver sent holiday greetings saying that he hoped they would all
meet again in a world of peace and freedom (1-2). Thus is the
pacifistic dash that is Slaughterhouse-Five begun.
Not that Vonnegut is racing with blinders on. He quickly
follows up the mentioning of the cab driver with his encounter
with Harrison Starr, the movie-maker. When Starr finds out that
Vonnegut is writing an anti-war book Starr tells him he may as
well write an anti-glacier book because glaciers are about as
easy to stop as wars. Vonnegut agrees with him (3).
A recurring view of war in Slaughterhouse-Five is that wars
are fought by babies. This is first discussed when Vonnegut
writes about going to visit O'Hare as he tries to collect
information and stories for the book he's working on. O'Hare's
wife, Mary, is seething with anger at Vonnegut, and he can't
figure out why. She eventually lets him know. She accuses
Vonnegut of planning to write a story that will pretend that they
who fought World War II were men instead of babies, and that
war-loving, dirty old glamorous men like Frank Sinatra and John
Wayne will play them in movies and make everything look
wonderful, so a lot more wars will be fought, because they are so
wonderful, and they'll continue to be fought by babies, just like
her and Vonnegut's own children. Vonnegut promises her his book
will have no part that Frank Sinatra or John Wayne could or would
play (14-5).
Vonnegut returns to this thought when Billy Pilgrim is being
held as a POW by the Germans. Due to the long train trip before
reaching a prison camp, the soldier's faces all become hidden by
beards. After they are left to stay with some British POW's who
give them razors to shave with, the U.S. soldiers are revealed to
be mere children. The British colonel who is in charge says to
himself, "'My God, my God - It's the Children's Crusade'" (106).
Their youth is reinforced when it's pointed out that, while they
are quartered in Dresden, Billy Pilgrim and Werner Gluck,
a childish German soldier who is helping to watch over the U.S.
POW's, have never seen naked women before (158-9).
It is apt that Vonnegut subtitles Slaughterhouse-Five The
Children's Crusade, for that is a metaphor for all wars, for they
are hopeless ventures fought by deluded children (Priest 3385).
Vonnegut points out that the Children's Crusade was a scheme
started by two monks to delude children into thinking that they
were going to Palestine to fight for their God. This harkens back
to Mary O'Hare's earlier point, agreed with by Vonnegut, that
we're always being told how wonderful war is, and it also brings
up the fact that religions love wars (SF 16), because what better
method can the church use to obtain money and power than to
convince its members that they are fighting a holy war, a war for
their God?
Since this book is about the firebombing of Dresden, it is
short, because there is nothing intelligent to say about
massacres (SF 19). Vonnegut has told his sons (what about his
daughters?) that they are not to take part in massacres under any
circumstances, nor are they to work for companies which make
massacre machinery. They are also not to be filled with
satisfaction or glee when they hear news of the massacre of
enemies, and they are to express contempt for people who think we
need massacre machinery (19).
Vonnegut throws a satirical barb at the rules of warfare when
Billy, who has just been fired upon, stands politely where he is
to allow the marksman another chance to kill him (33). This only
seems fair to Billy, but the point is well made that there are no
rules, morals, or justice in war.
Vonnegut further satirizes war when Billy watches a war movie
in reverse (74-5). The war going backwards is silly and
wonderful, humorous and beautiful. It shows people using common
sense, showing compassion, using common decency, and
demonstrating intelligence, four things that are always missing
from warfare and massacres. Then, just a short while later in the
book, Vonnegut uses more satire to reinforce the ignorance of war
when he has Elliot Rosewater say that the attractive thing about
war is that absolutely everybody gets a little something out of
it (SF 111). Somehow Rosewater has failed to remember that
135,000 Dresdeners who got absolutely nothing out of the war.
A very subtle comment is made on the destructive capabilities
of war when Billy and the Three Musketeers are forced to leave an
unambiguous trail behind them due to the fact that there is no
undergrowth beneath the pine trees, and four inches of snow is
blanketing the ground (39). Since the pines were "planted in
ranks and files," it becomes apparent that the pines were planted
as part of a reforestation project undertaken since World War
I had destroyed much of Europe. Even though more than two decades
have passed since this forest was replanted, it still hasn't
fully rejuvenated itself, as the lack of undergrowth shows.
Vonnegut realizes that while a war may last but a few years, its
consequences, in many different manifestations, go on for
decades.
One of the best metaphors in Slaughterhouse-Five is the
recurring use of tying together sex and war. The first time these
two acts are mentioned as nearly being twins is when Vonnegut
mentions that both war and sex use the term "mopping up" in the
same sort of post-coital, satisfied way (52). Both are done after
a successful conquest. We then come across the close relationship
between sex and war when Vonnegut writes about Billy's wedding
night. He and Valencia have just made love for the first time,
and shortly after the sex act she asks Billy about the war, which
is "a simple-minded thing for a female Earthling to do, to
associate sex and glamor with war" (121). Not that women alone
are guilty of associating sex and war together. Harvard history
professor Bertram Copeland Rumfoord ends up in the same hospital
room as Billy, and it happens that Rumfoord is writing a history
of the Dresden firebombing, the first such history of it, even
though it occurred twenty-three years earlier. When Rumfoord's
wife asks him why the government kept the bombing a secret for so
long, Rumfoord replies that the government was afraid that a lot
of people wouldn't agree that what they did was such a wonderful
thing (191). This is very indicative of a juvenile approach to
a sexual conquest. A nineteen-year old boy who has sex with
a sixteen-year old girl might gain great satisfaction from his
act; however, he realizes that should his or her parents find out
about it, he could face some dire repercussions. Thus, he only
tells a couple of close, trusted peers of his macho triumph.
Subtly, Vonnegut has managed to show how war and sex are so
closely tied together psychologically.
One of the worst atrocities of war is that those in one's
regiment become family, and, too, too often, many members of
a soldier's family end up getting killed, often right in front of
the soldier (66). This is usually a tremendous hardship for
a person to bear, and in the military, one is to take it like
a man; in other words, suppress all emotions, which leads to
psycholgical instability.
Other perils of war tend to the physical. As a POW, great
pain is felt as the prisoners get little to eat, and their
stomachs shrivel and become as sore as a boil (92). POW's tend to
become so dilapidated that when the general public is exposed to
them, they have no fear, because the POW's are no longer fighting
and killing machines; they have become fools. They have become
light opera (150).
When Billy is on Tralfamadore he brings up the subject of
war. He hasn't noticed any conflict on Tralfamadore, and after
speaking to the crowd of Tralfamadorians that have come to see
him in their zoo about how evil and ignorant Earthlings are with
their wars and massacres, and how Earthlings must be the terrors
of the Universe, and then asks the Tralfamadorians for the secret
of peace, they inform him by their actions that he is being
stupid (116). Harkening back to the anti-glacier book idea,
Vonnegut is showing how the human race will always partake of the
evil venture of war, even though it's the Tralfamadorians, and
not Earthlings, who will cause the destruction of the Universe.
Billy is given a hint, though, as to how Earth could be more
peaceful: "'Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good
ones'" (117). Vonnegut realizes that we take the opposite
approach. We spend billions of dollars making war movies that are
glamorous, we spend most of our time in history classes focused
on wars, conflicts, and massacres, and we go to great lengths to
erect statues and monuments to bring glory to our greatest
generals - the ones who were most adept at murdering other
people.
An unnamed German major makes a brief but important
appearance when Billy and his fellow POW's are staying with the
British POW's. The German major has become a close friend of the
Englishmen, visiting them nearly every day, playing games with
them, teaching them conversational German, and playing their
piano (128). Because these people have taken the time to get to
know each other, they have torn down the walls of animosity and
hatred, they have reached beyond the political and governmental
propaganda to find out that they are more like each other than
they ever would have realized otherwise. Vonnegut is aware of the
power of communication and how we can use it to form a more
peaceful world. He returns to this thought in Slapstick. With the
establishment of government-issue middle names and numbers, it
has now become impossible for a battle to rage between strangers
- no matter who fights whom, everybody will have relatives on the
other side - and this will help keep the scope of wars to
a minimum, though it won't abolish them, for peace is always
being found, then lost, then found again, only to be lost once
more (219-20). The saddest thing about all of this losing and
finding and losing is that so many people, if not everybody, ends
up paying a price, especially the children of those who are
killed (SF 134-5). Because of the huge government machines that
run our planet, wars are always breaking out, and Vonnegut uses
Paul Lazzarro as a microcosm to show this. Lazzarro liked to kill
his enemies, whether his enemy was a dog or Billy Pilgrim, but
only if the person or animal had it coming to them (SF 140). As
far as Lazzarro was concerned, if a person had it coming to them,
his having them murdered was justified. Likewise for
a government. If the oligarchy that runs our democracy decides it
doesn't like Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, another country's economic
advantage over us in a certain area (i.e. Iraq), or another
country's political ideology, then the oligarchy will convince
itself that justice will be served if we defeat the other country
in a military confrontation, and the political machine will set
to work, through the media's assistance, in convincing the
country that military action isn't just needed, it's right.
One of the sad things about war is that it strips away
individuality; it turns people into machines that merely obey
orders and kill (SF 164), which the military hierarchy thinks is
wonderful, being as they see people as nothing more than the
necessary means towards achieving the end they desire (SF 192,
193). There isn't much that pleases a high-ranking military
official more than seeing a weak or inconvenient person die;
it's one less factor in their equation. War provides these
officials with a legal, even justified, means for murdering
people, for getting them out of their way (SF 180). Ironically,
the use of mass murdering techniques is justified by saying that
they are stopping other people from mass murdering (SF 186,
187). It is here that Vonnegut would have made one of his revered
influences, George Orwell, proud, for Vonnegut skillfully uses
double-speak to make his point.
In Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut doesn't deal nearly as
much with war, but he still lets his views of it be known, not
wasting any time getting to it. In the preface, Vonnegut mentions
that his birthday happened to fall on a day that used to be known
as Armistice Day. That was the day that millions upon millions of
human beings stopped butchering one another (6). This is one of
the few proper ways to refer to a war. Guns, the major instrument
of this butchering, have only one use, which is to make holes in
human beings (49). It seems safe to say that Vonnegut would agree
with some form of gun control legislation to limit the
destruction done with these butchering instruments.
Another comment Vonnegut makes about war in Breakfast of
Champions returns to the environmental consequences of it that he
touched upon in Slaughterhouse-Five. We blatantly used chemicals
in Vietnam with the expressed purpose of destroying as many of
the plants and trees that we could so that it would be harder for
communists in that country to hide from our airplanes (85-6). The
truck driver who mentions this says that producing chemicals like
that is tantamount to committing suicide. Through this little
scene, Vonnegut has brought to the reader's attention the
genocidic aspects of our culture, in that so many of the
seemingly insignificant acts of our lives are going a long way to
destroying our world.
The rest of Vonnegut's comments on war in Breakfast of
Champions don't deal with war itself, but with the military
apparatus that prepares people for war. Vonnegut starts by making
the passing comment that West Point is a place that turns young
men into homicidal maniacs for use in war (153). He later turns
to Bunny Hoover, the homosexual son of co-lead character Dwayne
Hoover, who Dwayne had sent away to military school, "an
institution to homicide and absolutely humorless obedience"
(179). The reason Dwayne had sent little ten- year old Bunny
there was that Bunny had said he wished he was a woman because
men so often did cruel and ugly things (180). In sending Bunny to
military school, Dwayne reinforced to his son just how cruel and
ugly men can be. Vonnegut goes on to point out that so much of
what the military teaches is silly, like creeping and crawling
through shrubbery, and being able to peek around a corner without
being seen (180), but that that is all part of the brainwashing
involved in making people into insufferably brainless, humorless,
heartless soldiers (184).
In Slapstick, Vonnegut makes only a few comments in regards
to war, and he saves them for the end of the novel, which is part
of the reason that the conclusion is the most powerful section of
the book. His most stinging comment is when several people scold
a man for his military ardor (213). The man is chastised for
approaching war as something that is fun when it is actually of
the most tragic nature. This man is further admonished as being
no better than a deadly germ if he can kill for joy, for all
people are human beings, no better or worse than anyone else
(214).
Jailbird doesn't say too much about war either, but in it
Vonnegut points out that there is nothing else in life that is
nearly so obsessive as war, that people become fanatical monks in
the service of it (71). He also hints that the mere act of
putting a gun in a person's hands is enough to lead that person
to suspend their use of common sense, which Vonnegut relates
through his recounting of the Kent State tragedy during the
Vietnam conflict (75-6).
The pacifism of Vonnegut, and his contempt for all things
military, becomes quite clear upon reading any of these four
novels. He presents his pacifism by being subtle, brash,
satirical, and honest. Regardless of his method, his views are
clearly heard and understood.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
(the main page, abstract, evaluation form...)
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 - AUTOBIOGRAPHY
CHAPTER 2 - PHILOSOPHY AND OPINIONS
CHAPTER 3 - STYLE
WORKS CITED
Get your own Free Home Page