Vonnegut's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Reality
Paul Young (2003)

 

            In 1945 Kurt Vonnegut witnessed a horrific series of bombings that led to the destruction of the German city of Dresden, where he was taken as a prisoner of war. The controversial fire-storm raid, carried out by bombers of the Royal Air Force and US Air Force, took casualties of up to a quarter million people (Klinkowitz x-xi). As a prisoner of war, Vonnegut was forced to participate as a corpse miner in the city’s cleanup process. Upon his return from the Second World War, Vonnegut decided to write a book describing his traumatic war experiences. After twenty years of struggling with research, failing to recall personal experiences, and publishing two novels and countless short stories, Kurt Vonnegut finally published—as what he frequently refers to as—the “book about Dresden.” It was titled Slaughterhouse Five or the Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance With Death, or more simply: Slaughterhouse Five. The result of twenty years of work is a biography that has been bizarrely fictionalized by Vonnegut’s incorporation of anecdotes about alien abduction and time travel.

            Prior to the publication of Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut invented the terminology “Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum,” defined as a phenomenon in the universe where matter scatters through space and time, resulting in their simultaneous existence in multiple places and times.  Consequently multiple notions—often contradicting each other—can exist and consume the same space. While this strange yet imaginative “space” was conceived in a previous novel, The Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut crafted the structure and progression of Slaughterhouse Five with his new invention closely in mind. In many respects Slaughterhouse Five is a Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum where multiple contradicting notions intertwine: it is a place where elements of autobiography and science fiction coexist, as the result of Vonnegut’s usage of time travel to challenge linear-time progression. Although drastic presentations such as space and time travel potentially hinder the plausibility of the storyline and detach the reader from the text, it is this exact element in Slaughterhouse Five that returns the reader back into the story, bringing closer the relationship between the reader and Vonnegut himself. In this sense, this experimental form of narrative creates another Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum: a place in the novel where both the reader and the author coexist. With this new form of storytelling Vonnegut commits himself to a novel that could possibly fail. However he takes this risk in order to produce a novel that reflects his personal experiences more closely than if he had abided with conventional styles. By inserting the readers and himself into the novel, Vonnegut thus subjects the readers to his personal experiences more directly; the act of reading Slaughterhouse Five becomes a simulation of Vonnegut’s past in Dresden.

            While Slaughterhouse Five was a novel intended to reflect Vonnegut’s personal experiences in Dresden, the delivery of the storyline suggests that the novel is anything but an autobiography. Instead, with space and time travel placed into the novel—without any scientific explanation—Slaughterhouse Five reads like a science fiction novel. Yet such a classification would again be somewhat inappropriate, as Vonnegut violates the traditional rules of science fiction. As pointed out by English Professor James Lundquist, science fiction pioneer Hugo Gernsback began writing science fiction novels thirty years prior to Vonnegut’s novel. He “had the notion of ‘scientifiction’ as a way of educating the masses in science” (Lundquist 88). This pedagogical quality persisted as a prime element in science fiction novels, even after the publication of Slaughterhouse Five. Science fiction novels by authors such as Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov continue to educate the public. Thus when Vonnegut begins his tale (in the second chapter) by writing,

 

LISTEN: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door [my emphasis] in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between (“Slaughterhouse-Five” 22)

 

he does not allow the reader to understand how or why Billy has this supernatural ability. While Billy becomes a time traveler by becoming “unstuck in time,” Vonnegut never explains why this magical “door” allowing time-travel exists or how it works scientifically. Furthermore the reader is not granted access to reasons why Billy can see his birth and death. Does he see his own birth and death in first person or third person? Such questions perhaps come to mind for readers who seek scientific justification to the premise of Slaughterhouse Five. Thus when one compares Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five with The Martian Chronicles or 2001: A Space Odyssey, one can see that Slaughterhouse Five was never intended to be a work of science-fiction. Then why does Vonnegut risk detaching the reader, without the reward of writing a legitimate science fiction novel?

            When one examines the first chapter of Slaughterhouse Five, more contradictions surface. The first chapter of the novel discusses Vonnegut’s tribulations in writing the novel. The novel begins as: “All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war.” (“Slaughterhouse-Five” 1). Although this message resembles that of a forward or an introduction, Vonnegut makes the decision of placing it as the first chapter. Consequently, Vonnegut leads the reader to believe that the book is autobiographical. Yet in saying that “the war parts, anyway, are pretty much true,” the reader is left to question which parts of the novel are not true—besides the obvious science fiction elements. But what follows is the actual story. As a result of Vonnegut introducing the unique structure of Slaughterhouse Five, the reader no longer perceives the novel as autobiographical, but as fiction.

            Interestingly enough, the synthesis of autobiography and science fiction within the same novel describes Vonnegut’s personal experiences perfectly. Lundquist states:

 

Science fiction is in a major sense a reaction against realism or the “single reality” fiction of the nineteenth century, when the Victorian notion that the universe could be comprehended in terms of easily understood formulas and that life was earnest and real was generally accepted. ‘Today, after Einstein, Freud, quantum mechanics, McLuhan, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and a few other little vision-expanders, we’re back where we were before the Victorians defined reality as a rigid Tinker Toy construct […]’ (Lundquist 87)

 

Science that used to characterize and model real life phenomena is now used to deconstruct our preconceived notions of reality. This breakdown of a “single reality” is exactly what drives Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut forces the reader to question not only the novel’s realism, but reality itself. “This is just the point implied by Vonnegut’s cosmic irony with its continuous laughter at systems and philosophies and its paradoxically pragmatic attempts at dealing with the new view of reality” (Lundquist 88). The reader is left with an uncertainty of where the actual experience ends and imagination begins. The novel forces the reader to become more involved with the text, suspecting the validity of every piece of the novel; the reader is brought closer into the text, closing the gap between the reader and the author. Thus Vonnegut transforms the novel into a space where both he and the reader can exist; he has created an Infundibulum.

            This Infundibulum can also be seen as a space where Vonnegut uses his readers as subjects to his thought-experiment. One major effect which Vonnegut deliberately exposes the readers to is the sense of déjà vu. The sense of déjà vu can be seen as early as the first chapter, as Vonnegut deliberately introduces a song:

And I’m reminded, too, of the song that goes:

My name is Yon Yonson,

I work in Wisconsin,

I work in a lumber mill 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. (“Slaughterhouse-Five” 3)

 

Vonnegut’s purpose in introducing this song is to resonate one of the major themes of the novel: the structure of the novel forms small clusters of linear time-progression, separated by space and time travel. But upon arriving to a next time or place, Vonnegut forces the reader to recall where that portion of the story left off, perhaps several chapters ago. In the process of remembering the previous episode, the reader is subjected to repetition: he read it once before and now he must remember what happened again. This repetition—similar to that of Yon Yonson’s song—perhaps triggers the readers to question which episode is real. Vonnegut induces this illusion once again through his usage of the two sentences: “So it goes,” and “And so on.” These two sentences consistently saturate every chapter of Slaughterhouse Five, forcing the reader to tirelessly absorb these two uncomfortably short sentences, and placing them into their subconscious. After a while the reader begins to read these six syllables without thoroughly thinking about them; they slowly become a chant or a metered mantra, rather than two significant sentences. Through repetition, the process of reading this novel begins to induce déjà vu, silently and repeatedly cueing the reader to go back and wonder if he’s read the same page twice, or is he witnessing two distinct events. The importance of repetition strikes harder when the reader acknowledges that Slaughterhouse Five was published in 1968, during the height of another war: The Vietnam War.

While the usage of “So it goes” and “And so on” induces dizziness in the reader’s head, the long-standing effects of their repetition goes beyond simple déjà vu. The sentence “So it goes,” occurring over a hundred times throughout the novel, places the reader is several awkward positions. First, this repetition forces the reader to wonder how does it really go. Often tagged at the end of a paragraph, “So it goes” acts as a way for Vonnegut to conclude a narrative related to death. Critic Thomas F. Marvin indicates that such a usage of this terse sentence forces the reader to interrupt.

While it is true that the novel adopts the Tralfamadorian custom of saying “so it goes” every time a death occurs, this relentless repetition shows that the fatalistic attitude behind the saying is ridiculous. Eventually readers must rebel and insist that no, it did not have to go that way. Something could and should have been done to make things turn out differently. Death is inevitable, but some deaths are preventable […] (Marvin 128)

 

The usage of “So it goes” then becomes Vonnegut’s way of cheapening death, setting off the readers to wonder why Vonnegut perceives death to be insignificant—to the degree of using such a short sentence as a form of eulogy. Yet in the horrific setting of war, in sight of a quarter million deaths, one can only feel numb from such a massive and inconceivable tragedy. Perhaps this was how Vonnegut felt. Thus the best thing Vonnegut does to convey his calloused reaction, is to simply say: “So it goes.” Secondly, the usage of this sentence sounds very much like verbal static, such as ‘like’ and ‘um.’ The repetitious nature of verbal static, artificially mimicked in this novel, compels the reader to wonder if the usage of “So it goes” is frequently unavoidable—like verbal static—or instead, thoughtfully placed before or after crucial points in Slaughterhouse Five. If death, which often is the most dramatic scene in novels, can be summarized by “So it goes,” then Vonnegut leaves the reader in an awkward position of simultaneously feeling sorrow and apathy. However Vonnegut seems to be unsatisfied with the effects left by the usage of “So it goes-” he decides to use the same trick with the sentence “And so on,” which occurs perhaps as frequently as “So it goes.”

            In allowing instances of death to trail off into oblivion with “So it goes,” Vonnegut conveys to the readers that death, the ultimate sacrifice in war, can be a rather indifferent matter. Allowing no moment of silence to the victims in his novel, Vonnegut is hasty to move the reader right along to the rest of the story. While “it” (in “So it goes”) refers to death, its implication can also point to the progress of the novel: “So it goes” could have easily expanded to “So it goes on, and so on, and so on...,” and perhaps as far as, “Life goes on,” rather than stopping every time death occurs.

            Although death is often glorified and dramatized, Kurt Vonnegut suggests its insignificance in comparison to history in its entirety. Vonnegut is as quick to introduce the bombing of Dresden as he is to remove the reader from the scene, as Billy instantaneously travels light years away to another time and another place in the universe- to the planet of Tralfamadore. The setting of Slaughterhouse Five first takes place in the city of Dresden, but is instantaneously expanded into a space infinitely larger than before, as it now also contains earth as a whole, and any other cosmic objects Billy sees along the way to Tralfamadore. When the reader accepts this massive expansion of the setting, the importance of one man’s existence, or one man’s death, becomes questionable. In fact, the importance of earth, a whole planet populated by billions of people, is perhaps moot. In this case, Vonnegut subjects the reader to a deliberately insensitive perspective of death, perhaps from the bombs’ point of view—or lack thereof—in mindlessly rendering the total destruction of Dresden. Perhaps this point of view can be applied to the airplane pilots’ objective efforts of carrying out a mission, a mission that will lead to far more casualties than the atomic bombs on Hiroshima or Nagasaki (Bloom 96).

Also, as space and time travel is used as a tool for Vonnegut to remove traces of human compassion from the horrors of a massacre, they are also tools to express his pessimistic views on technology. Instantaneous space travel (disregarding time travel) is impossible, according to the Special Theory of Relativity[1]. Yet it is the lack of justification of this fantastic trip to another planet that expresses Vonnegut’s sentiments toward technology: instantaneous space and time travel is not justified in Slaughterhouse Five not because it is impossible; it is because even if it was possible, it would be incomprehensible to the layman, thus leaving its development unchecked by the masses. Here Vonnegut expresses his pessimism towards technology and its development that could potentially lead to the end of the world. U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Peter G. Jones points out that:

Kurt Vonnegut’s work displays uniquely the thematic fusion of technology (or science) and war. Both elements dominate: war consistently demands spectacular new achievements from science; and technology flourishes in the hothouse of conflict. In addition, war provides an immediate focus for all the ingenuity that science and “progerse” [sic] can muster. Finally, in a special way synonymous with science and the idea of progress, war provides a milieu particularly suited to Vonnegut’s depictions of modern life. (Bloom 27)

 

Jones’ understanding of the interrelationship between war and technology accurately reflects that of Kurt Vonnegut. As the primary factor in both World Wars, technology has unleashed massive results; while war causes massive casualties, technology only fuels this process and amplifies its results. Thus in Vonnegut’s point of view, science, technology, and war all have become interdependent. Vonnegut clearly expresses his thought of war in the first chapter of Slaughter-House Five: “[…] there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds” (Vonnegut 18). Although technological developments are propelled by intelligent human beings, there is nothing intelligent or even humane about what technology yields. In the end, when the bombs strike Dresden, and “everybody is supposed to be dead,” Vonnegut has survived and witnessed the only thing humane or natural about the whole event: the birds. Thus while everybody is supposed to be dead, life really goes on.

            In the end, Slaughterhouse Five, as a final product of Vonnegut’s twenty years of hardship, becomes his most famous and widely studied work. Its avant-garde style consequently puts the reader in a thought-experiment where the novel can no longer be perceived as a fictional work, but rather an imaginary space where contradicting notions exist. This Infundibulum very much resembles Vonnegut’s description of the Tralfamadorian novels:

The Tralfamadorians allow [Billy] to look at some of their novels […] he can see that the novels consist of clumps of symbols with stars in between. Billy is told that the clumps function something like telegrams, with each clump a message about a situation or scene. But the clumps are not read sequentially as the chapters are in an earthling novel of the ordinary sort. They are read simultaneously. [...] ‘There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.’ (Lundquist 72)

 

Thus the novel that Kurt Vonnegut has struggled so long to write is a Tralfamadorian novel. While the readers can subject themselves to an incoherent linear read of Slaughterhouse Five, they would not understand the novel any less if it was read perhaps backwards, or even in a random ordering of the chapters. With the usage of repetition such as “So it goes,” “And so on,” and even frequently inserting the sentence “My name is Yon Yonson” into various parts of the novel, Kurt Vonnegut has created a novel that has reflected his personal experiences in the War: he only remembers patches of that horrifying period in his life. Although many critics would share similar views with Lundquist when he suggest that Vonnegut sought to “conceptualize and define the night terrors of an era so unreal, so unbelievable, that the very term fiction seems no longer to have any currency,” (Lundquist 69) the emphasis of Vonnegut’s stray from fiction seems to be exactly what Vonnegut requires in order to produce the effects he desired. Kurt Vonnegut’s “vision required its fiction,” English Professor Robert Scholes indicates, “That is what justifies his activity […]” (Merrill 39). His activity of relaying his personal experience to the readers required him to stray from conventional fiction and produce a new form of fiction: one where the author and the readers are all, to an extent, characters of the novel. He has created a Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum where reality is as relative as one’s imagination. It is a place where life is cheap and death is ridiculous by “the chirping of the birds.” It is also a place where science, a tool used to seek out truths, is used to end life. Though the initial description of a Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum seems to be bizarre and far-fetched, all these ideas that Vonnegut tackles do occur in everyday life. Ultimately, the readers do not simply read a “book about Dresden,” but they have gone through a series of thought-experiments that simulate exactly how Vonnegut felt during his time in Dresden.

Bibliography

Allen, William Rodney. “Slaughterhouse-Five” Modern Critical Interpretations Slaughterhouse Five Ed. Harold Bloom.

Jones, Peter G. “The End of the Road: Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade” Modern Critical Interpretations Slaughterhouse-Five Ed. Harold Bloom.

Klinkowitz, Jerome. Slaughterhouse-Give Reforming the Novel and the World. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Lundquist, James. Kurt Vonnegut. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1977.

Marvin, Thomas F. Kurt Vonnegut A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Sholes, Robert. “Slaughterhouse-Five.” New York Times Book Review 6 April 1969, 1, 23.

Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Delacorte Press, 1994.

Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. The Sirens of Titan. New York: Dell, 1974.