The Rise and Fall of Idealism
Chris Hale
Kurt Vonnegut was greatly influenced by his involvement in
World War II. His entanglement with the Dresden bombing had an
unequivocal effect upon his mentality, and the horrid experience
propelled the liberal anti-war assertions that dominate many of
his novels. Throughout his life, his idealistic nature has
perceptibly undulated, and five representative novels illustrate
the forceful progression and gradual declivity of his liberal
views.
The first thirty years of his life outwardly coincided with
the average American man. He was born in Indianapolis on November
11, 1922, and lived a happy childhood with a stable family. He
then proceeded to pursue science in college, serve his country in
World War II, study under the GI Bill after the war, and land
a job in public relations before becoming a full-time writer.
Even his large and growing family seemed to capture the true
spirit of the American ideal.
However, one element of his past would affect him in a way
that would change his life forever. In December 1944, he was
captured by the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge. He and his
fellow POWs were taken to Dresden, an "open" city rich with
architectural treasures and devoid of any military value. British
and American planes needlessly firebombed the city on the night
of February 13, 1945, hoping to inspire terror in the Germans and
crush their fighting spirit. Over 135,000 civilians were
killed-twice the amount of casualties at Hiroshima. The insane
horror and absurdity of the Dresden attack remained deeply etched
into Vonnegut's mind from that day forward.
Nearly two decades later, Vonnegut published Mother Night,
a novel that displays the profound influence that the massacre
exerted upon him. It contains this stirring autobiographical
account of his Dresden experience in its preface:
We didn't get to see the fire storm. We were in a cool
meat-locker under the slaughterhouse with our six guards
and ranks and ranks of dressed cadavers of cattle, pigs,
horse and sheep. We heard the bombs walking around up
there. Now and then there would be a gentle shower of
calcimine. If we had gone above to take a look, we would
have been turned into artifacts characteristic of
firestorms: seeming pieces of charred firewood two or
three feet long-ridiculously small human beings, or
jumbo fried grasshoppers, if you will (page vi).
Although this introductory passage is a graphically horrifying
chronicle of his life, it does not precede a novel that utilizes
the experience. Vonnegut did not even insert the famous
introduction until four years later, when the novel was reissued
as a hardcover original. Throughout the entirety of Mother Night,
he simply reacts to the absurdities of Nazi Germany as any common
American would. The novel does not unleash his ferocious
satirical ability upon the principles of war, and it does not
reveal his liberal mentality as well as many of his later novels.
In 1963, Vonnegut published the acclaimed Cat's Cradle. In
this work, he attempts to deal with questions relating to the
social forces of man: Where does mankind stand in the universe?
How effective is it in taking care of itself? In an attempt to
answer these questions, he creates a religion called
"Bokononism," and the doctrine's basis is found in its "Genesis":
In the beginning, God created the earth and He looked
upon it in His cosmic loneliness.
And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud,
so the mud can see what We have done." And God created
every living creature that now moveth, and one was man.
Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as
man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked, "What
is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely.
"Everything must have a purpose?" asked God.
"Certainly," said man.
"Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,"
said God. And He went away (page 177).
This passage displays Vonnegut's seemingly cosmic observance of
humanity, and exposes a side of him that was not detected in his
previous novel. He uses mankind's discomforting search for
"purpose" to illustrate a bitter yet innovative concept of the
human race. In Cat's Cradle, he attributes the end of the world
to ice-nine, a freezing agent that is needlessly developed for
the United States Marines. Ironically, the apocalyptic chemical
is spread by the children of a renown scientist who had helped
develop the Hiroshima bomb. Using this plot, Vonnegut daringly
ridicules humanity's tragic desire for war, and the liberal
assertions in Cat's Cradle reveal a noticeable progression from
the relatively mundane views found in Mother Night.
Six years later, at the height of the Vietnam War, he
published Slaughterhouse-Five, which fully unleashed the powerful
vision of the unbelievable annihilation of Dresden that had been
behind all his work. The 1969 novel signifies his realization
that the importance of the World War II experience was not the
firebombing itself but his own reaction to it. This awareness
became apparent during a speech at Iowa City when he described
the circumstances in which he wrote the novel:
I came home in 1945, starting writing about (the war),
and wrote about it, and wrote about it, and wrote about
it. This thin book is about what it's like to write
a book about a thing like that. I couldn't get much
closer. I would head myself into my memory of it, the
circuit breakers would kick out; I'd head in again, I'd
back off. The book is a process of twenty years of this
sort of living with Dresden and the aftermath
(Klinkowitz and Lawler 29).
With these words, he explains the substantial influence that his
Dresden experience had on the novel. As one critic explains,
"(Slaughterhouse-Five) is a novel about a novelist who has been
unable to erase the memory of his wartime experience and the
Dresden fire-storm, even while he has been inventing stories and
fantasies in his role as a writer since the end of the war"
(Tanner 125).
Evidently, Vonnegut views his own role as a writer in
a dramatically different way in this novel. Unlike Cat's Cradle,
his assertions are much more bold, insinuating the idea that
mankind is hopeless. In Slaughterhouse-Five, the reader is told
that because of the horrors of war, Billy Pilgrim finds life
meaningless and therefore tries to reinvent himself and his
universe. Furthermore, Billy is portrayed as a caged animal on
a different planet, living in a zoo as if on display. One may
wonder what idea Vonnegut is attempting to convey with this
aspect of the plot. As one critic attempts to explain, "One
conclusion could be that, as a species, human beings should be
caged, studied, and advised by a higher order of life before
being set loose in the universe again. Or, perhaps, another would
be that they must stop driving themselves mad with wars"
(Richardson 4074). No matter the answer, Vonnegut's anti-war
mentality is blatantly conspicuous in Slaughterhouse-Five. No
other novel, whether written prior or subsequent to the work,
exhibits his idealistic views so forcefully.
This fact is clearly proven in his next novel, Breakfast of
Champions, which he wrote in 1971. Since he had finished his "war
book," he wrote in the opening chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, he
promised himself that his next novel was "going to be fun."
However, the time in which he wrote Breakfast of Champions was
plagued with anxiety. He grew weary of the critical acclaim and
stunning success stimulated by the prior novel, and he was afraid
that his next book would disappoint his eagerly awaiting
audience. As a result, he delayed publication until 1973 and even
included his own negative review of the novel in its preface,
stating that he felt "lousy about it" (page 4).
Without doubt, Breakfast of Champions is entirely different
from his past works. As one critic explains, "Here Vonnegut does
not protest the social attitudes that lead to wars and ultimately
to Dresden; instead, he explores the possibility that our
attitudes are irrelevant to such events" (Merrill 155). In his
attempt to be pessimistically "fun," Vonnegut purposely deviates
from the focused mentality that is clearly prevalent in many of
his past novels. He digresses upon a variety of different
subjects, ranging from the national anthem to the idea that
Columbus discovered America. As a result, he does not clearly
display the anti-war views found in Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle.
Vonnegut's sense of idealism made an even larger transition
in the years after Breakfast of Champions. This fact is proven by
the subject matter of Hocus Pocus, which he published in 1990
when he was sixty-seven years old. The years seem to have taken
their toll on the youthful and zany sense of liberalism that was
prevalent in his past novels, as suggested by Jay McInerney of
The New York Times: "As if racing against a clock, Mr. Vonnegut
is working much closer to the ground in Hocus Pocus," he says.
"Some readers may miss the wilder leaps of imagination and the
whimsy" (McInerney 12). Vonnegut's deviation from anti-war
idealism in the novel becomes strikingly apparent when he inserts
a commendation of West Point:
Let me say further to the chance young reader that
I would probably have wrecked my body and been thrown
out of the University of Michigan and died on Skid Row
somewhere if I had not been subjected to the discipline
of West Point.I entered the Point a young punk with bad
posture and a sunken chest, and no history of sports
participation, save for a few fights after dances where
our band had played. When I graduated and received my
commission as a Second Lieutenant in the Regular Army,
and tossed my hat in the air, and bought a red Corvette
with the back pay the Academy had put aside for me, my
spine was as straight as a ramrod, my lungs were as
capacious as the bellows of the forge of Vulcan, I was
captain of the judo and wrestling teams, and I had not
smoked any sort of cigarette or swallowed a drop of
alcohol for four whole years! Nor was I sexually
promiscuous anymore. I never felt better in my life
(page 60).
This passage is a paradox of an earlier assertion from Breakfast
of Champions, when Vonnegut disdained West Point as "a military
academy which turned young men into homicidal maniacs for use in
war" (page 153). Clearly, Hocus Pocus serves as a perfect example
of the degeneration of his liberal views.
Evidently, Vonnegut's anti-war mentality has changed
dramatically throughout the years of his life. Five of his
novels, published over a span of thirty years, illustrate the
transition perfectly. Mother Night and Cat's Cradle display the
progressive growth of his visionary mentality toward the nature
of Slaughterhouse-Five, which illustrates his idealism at its
prime. Breakfast of Champions and Hocus Pocus subsequently depict
the visible decline of his youth-minded notions. Although these
works collectively portray Vonnegut as an author with
a perpetually variant mentality, he will always remain one of the
most innovate novelists of the twentieth century.
Bibliography:
Klinkowitz, Jerome, and Donald L. Lawler. Vonnegut in America.
New York: Delacorte
Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1977.
McInerney, Jay. "Still Asking the Embarrassing Questions." The
New York Times
9 September 1990, late ed., sec. 7: 12.
Merrill, Robert. "Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions: The
Conversion of Heliogabalus."
Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut. Ed. Robert Merrill. Boston: G.
K. Hall & Co., 1990. 153-161.
Richardson, Jack. "Easy Writer." The Chelsea House Library of
Literary Criticism. Ed.
Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 1988.
4074-4076.
Tanner, Tony. "The Uncertain Messenger: A Reading of
Slaughterhouse-Five." Critical
Essays on Kurt Vonnegut. Ed. Robert Merrill. Boston: G. K. Hall
& Co., 1990. 125-130.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions. New York: Dell
Publishing, 1973.
---. Cat's Cradle. New York: Dell Publishing, 1963.
---. Hocus Pocus. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1990.
---. Mother Night. New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence,
1966.
---. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Dell Publishing, 1968.
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Last modified: March 11, 2002