When one begins
to analyze a military novel it is important to first look at the historical
context in which the book was written. On the nights of February 13-14 in 1944
the city of Dresden, Germany was subjected to one of the worst air attacks in
the history of man. By the end of the bombing 135,000 to 250,000 people had
been killed by the combined forces of the United States and the United Kingdom.
Dresden was different then Berlin or many of the other military targets which
were attacked during World War II because it was never fortified or used for
strategic purposes and, therefore, was not considered a
military target.
Because of it's apparent safety, thousands of refugees from all over Europe converged on Dresden for
protection (Klinkowitz 2-3). Dresden's neutrality was broken and the resulting
attacks laid waste, what Vonnegut called, "the Florence of the Elbe."
Kurt Vonnegut was a witness to this event and because of fate, had been spared.
He wrote Slaughterhouse Five to answer the question that resounded through his
head long after the bombs could no longer be heard. "Why me?"- a
frequent question asked by survivors of war.
Vonnegut was
tormented by this question and through Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist in
Slaughterhouse Five, he attempts to reconcile the guilt which one feels when
one is randomly saved from death, while one's friends and loved ones perish.
Billy Pilgrim's own life was spared, but was never able to live with himself
knowing that so many others had died. The feelings of guilt which emerged from
his having survived the bombing of Dresden and from Billy's fortunate escape
from death under the shelter of the fifth Slaughterhouse haunted Billy through
much of his life. Billy Pilgrim did not consider his survival a blessing, but a
curse. A curse to be forced to live on with the guilt of survival. Billy
Pilgrim faced such tremendous guilt, that he spent his entire life after
Dresden trying to alleviate himself of it. His guilt is in many ways comparable
to the guilt felt by the survivors of the Holocaust. Many Holocaust survivors
had to face their own "Why me?" question. However, many Holocaust
survivors were able to reconcile their feelings of guilt or put it out of their
minds. This solution was never viable for Billy Pilgrim. Billy's guilt made life so unbearable that he could no
longer live with himself and he rejected the life that had been granted to him.
There was no answer to Billy's question because war is not logical, nor is it
just. Never could one give a justification for the fortuitous slaughtering of
the innocent, which claimed the lives of
Dresden's inhabitants. This idea is exemplified in the secondary title
Slaughterhouse Five is known by, The Children's Crusade. The Children's Crusade
was one of the many Christian "Holy" Wars which aimed on destroying
the Muslim people. The Children's Crusade was really a ploy by entrepreneurs to
sell Christian children into slavery. Thousands of children were killed on
ships en-route to the slave market and many others were sold, never to be seen
again. Vonnegut gives the Children's "Crusade" as an example of the
atrocities and in-humane acts which transpire under the auspices of War. That
is why Billy Pilgrim invents a world where a justification can be given, where
life and death are meaningless and feelings of guilt disappear. The only way
Billy Pilgrim can confront this guilt is to excuse his survival and trivialize
the gift of life and the cruelty of death. He creates a new world where he can
be free from his guilt. That world is called Tralfamador.
The Traflamadorian world provided Billy Pilgrim
with the escape that he needed from his guilt. The Traflamadorian people are
not locked in a three dimensional realm. They are not locked in the frames of
time to which the human world is forced to live in. Traflamadorians can
"shift" through time as seamlessly as humans can walk towards a
point. This ability allows them to focus on the pleasant moments in the history
of the Universe and ignore the aspects of time they dislike. Thus, the
fire-bombing of Dresden is just a tiny frame in the vast space time continuum.
The guilt of Billy's being saved is reconciled by eliminating the existence of
a past, present, and future. Since any fraction of time is accessible in the
Tralfamadorian world death is just a tiny part of existence that is ignored
like the fire-bombing of Dresden. Billy Pilgrim reinvents himself and his
universe to gain purpose in his guilt ridden life (Lundquist 82).
The Tralfamadorians are real to Billy because
without them he cannot live with himself (Lundquist 82). Billy believes that he
was taken by a Tralfamdorian ship to be an exhibit of a human being in a
Tralfamdorian Zoo. On Tralfamador, Billy is exposed to an entire new way of
thinking which neutralizes the "Why me?" question. In the
Tralfamdorian view of the Universe, guilt does not exist because in their view
one is not responsible for one's actions. Whatever will, or has happened will
always happen and did always happen. There is no way to change the course of events.
Everything is predetermined. Billy is told by the Tralfamadores (regarding Tralfamador) that:
Today we do (have peace). On other days
we have wars as horrible as any you've ever seen or read about. There
isn't anything we can do about them, so we simply don't look at them. We
ignore them. We spend eternity
looking at pleasant moments (Vonnegut 101).
The
Tralfamadorians even now when and who will destroy the Universe, yet they make
no attempt to stop it because in their eyes it cannot be stopped. Billy, by
accepting the Tralfamadorian view, frees himself from the guilt which one feels
when one is locked in time and responsible for one's actions. Billy Pilgrim
grasps the Tralfamadorian philosophy and insists the Tralfamadorian world exists
because it eliminates the "Why me?" question. Guilt is a feeling of
responsibility or remorse for some offense, crime wrong ;a feeling of
culpability. For example if one steals a hundred dollars, one would feel
remorse over that action and wish one had not done it. Under the Tralfamadorian
outlook Billy Pilgrim does not have to feel remorse for being saved because
that is how it was and always will happen. He does not have to feel guilt or
remorse because there is no reason to. There is nothing that can be done about
war and death, "they are as easy to stop as glaciers." (Vonnegut
3) The death of all those innocent
people could not be stopped, it was predetermined by some unknown force just as
the destruction of the Universe, by a Tralfamadorian testing a new fuel, is
also predetermined and unstoppable.
Vonnegut uses irony by having Billy Pilgrim an
Optometrist, whose job it is to help others see the world more clearly with
greater acuity and sensitivity. Billy believes it his job to "prescribe
corrective lenses for Earthling souls. So many of those souls were lost and
wretched, Billy believed, because they could not see as well as his little
green friends on Tralfamdore." (Vonnegut 25) This is in essence what the
Tralfamadorians teach him that the Human view of time is erroneous (Tanner
198). The Tralfamdorians give Billy an analogy of how humans perceive time:
Human vision is something so narrow and
restricted...to convey to themselves what it must be like they
have to imagine a creature with a metal sphere around his head who looks
down a long, thin pipe seeing only a tiny speck at the end. He cannot
turn his head around and he is strapped to a flatcar on rails which goes
in one direction (Vonnegut).
Billy by
accepting the Tralfamadorian view of the world frees himself from the metal
sphere and from his guilt. Much of Billy's guilt rested on his view of time and
nature. Before he was introduced to the Tralfamadorian viewpoint he believed in
crusading against war and the death of the innocent and felt guilty and upset
when another human's life was blindly taken. After coming to newly understand
the limits of human vision and the naiveté of human-kind, namely that one can
change what will happen and guide one's actions Billy felt no sympathy for
death and made no attempt to right injustice and stop the atrocities of war.
Although Billy finds peace in the many positive
aspects of the Tralfamadorian mind-set, there also exist many negatives to his
new vision. The many aspects of Billy's life which his new vision touch are
clearly outlined in Slaughterhouse-Five. For example, whenever there is a
tragic death or an entire city is destroyed Billy says what all Tralfamdorians
say "so it goes." Billy does
not feel remorse or anger when he hears of the war in Vietnam because it is
just a frame in time, which has, is and always will happen. Just as the
universe will be destroyed by the Tralfamdorians but no attempt is made to stop
it. At one point in the novel Billy sees a war movie in reverse, he describes
it as follows:
The formation flew over a German city
that was in flames. The bombers opened their
bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered
them into cylindrical steel containers and lifted the containers into the
bellies of the planes. The containers were stored in neatly racks..When the
bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were shipped to factories
where operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the
dangerous contents...so they would never hurt anybody again. (Vonnegut 64)
Vonnegut uses
this imagery to dramatize effectively the cruelty of bombing. Billy's
Tralfamadorian view of this war film is an obvious improvement over the forward
version. However, with the Tralfamdorian view also comes a heavy price. The
cost of this new vision is the human conscience and the concern for life (Tanner 198). The Tralfamdorian view extracts
the human conscience, which separates humans from the rest of the animal world.
The price for a "guilt free"
life is the most precious part
of human life, emotions. (Tanner 198)
With the Tralfamdorian view comes another steep
price, free will. Billy is told by the Tralfamadorians that free will is a
uniquely human belief. (Schatt 82) He is told that war, disease, and even the
end of the universe is all pre-determined, and that nothing he does can change
what will happen. The notion of free will is what gives human life meaning.
Part of the "spice" of life is the feeling of accomplishment one has
when he succeeds or the feeling of sorrow when he fails. These feelings cannot
exist when one's actions are not of one's own choice but pre-determined. When
all that happens, is decided by an unknown force, failure, triumph and sorrow
cannot exist because one is not responsible any longer for bringing about those
emotions. This can easily explain why Billy's life is so dreary and depressing.
His acceptance of the Tralfamdorian world has freed him from his guilt, but it
has also freed him from "living.". On his tombstone it is written
"everything was beautiful and nothing hurt." Although this message on
the surface would seem perfect, it in reality points to the short-comings of
Billy's life. One cannot enjoy life and happiness, if he has no feelings and
lacks all remorse. In the end of his life Billy is "unenthusiastic about
living, while stoically enduring it, which may be a sign of the accidie which
settles on a man with an atrophied conscience." (Tanner 199) Billy pilgrim
has full knowledge, of who, when and where he will be murdered, yet he does
nothing about it. While this could be looked at as an acceptance of the
Tralfamdorian way of life, it also points to the fact that Billy does not want to stop it because life
offers him nothing. The price of for Billy's release from guilt, was Billy's
release from humanity.
Slaughterhouse-Five clearly expresses
Vonengut's terrible outrage at the catastrophic fire-bombing of Dresden. But it
does more than that. It's underlying theme is not just against the atrocities
of Dresden but against all War. Vonnegut's unorthodox stylistic approach which
lacks any sequential path, draws the reader deeper into the Tralfamadorian
world. Although Vonnegut's character was able to reconcile his life to some
extent, Vonnegut was not. Vonnegut was never able to answer his own "Why
me?" but in truth a broader question exists "Why any of us?"
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