Book Returns
Life in a Feed Lot
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five
by Michael E. Bailey
Despite modernity’s centuries-long turn toward the secular, the West has never shaken off the form of the Fall and Restoration as a way of making sense of our broken world. Even the liberation-obsessed 1960s, in which Kurt Vonnegut wrote his most influential and well-received novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, had its own variations on the theme, drawn in vulgarized fashion from the writings of earlier thinkers, most prominently Rousseau (who hated civilization), Marx (who hated capitalism), Freud (who hated religion), and Nietzsche (who hated everything else).
Painted in broad strokes, the 1960s version of the Fall and Restoration goes like this: Man never experienced a fall—he is innocent still—but the abuses of society cause him to do wicked things and to become dysfunctional in his own environment. Reforming society (or dropping out of it) is therefore a necessary step to restoring personal emotional and spiritual well-being.
What made the sixties a so-called idealistic generation was its easy-going belief that society could be reengineered to our advantage at will. Why wait until death to enter heaven? If only the right brains could implement the right kinds of government policies, then humanity could be restored to its promise of full autonomy for all.
Vonnegut’s View
Vonnegut’s fiction spoke to the sixties generation, but Vonnegut is no mere product of his times. Though his novels have received uneven treatment from critics, he is widely acknowledged as an innovative and important literary figure of the last half of the twentieth century. He draws upon one part science fiction, one part gonzo journalism, and one part verbal slapstick to create an irreverent and intensely personal style of fiction that is neither so much about plot nor about character as much as it is about Vonnegut’s own sad view of the world.
And that view is that humanity suffers from God’s ineffable and strangely cruel sense of humor. Vonnegut purchases his audience’s adoration chiefly through his humor, which runs in the vein of Mark Twain. Certainly few authors of any era can match Vonnegut for the number of ironic barbs he packs into his work, and at times his writing seems propelled from punch line to punch line.
That his masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, appealed to sixties sensibilities is not surprising. On virtually every page, Vonnegut pokes authority in the eye, taking aim at the military, the government, science, business, the church—anyone who wears a uniform and claims to be in a position of responsibility. Slaughterhouse-Five treats in particular the decision some of our best and brightest made regarding the arguably criminal fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, during the last days of World War II.
Slaughterhouse-Five is the story of Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist who becomes unstuck in time. The story, like his character, jumps forwards and backwards over the course of Billy’s life. Of course, the book does have a plot, if a nonlinear one, and it artfully culminates in Billy’s experience of the fire-bombings of Dresden by the Allies. Billy also survives an airplane wreck and, apparently, abduction by Tralfamadorians, an advanced alien race.
Given all that happens to Billy, one might be tempted to call Slaughterhouse-Five an adventure. Adventure, however, implies the presence of a hero, a person whose thought and actions shape the course of the narrative. But Slaughterhouse-Five is about war, and war, says Vonnegut, is really about “listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.” And Billy is far from being a character, far less a hero.
Vonnegut suggests that, like all of us all of the time, Billy is subject to forces—not just war—that are bigger than himself. The Serenity Prayer hangs in his bedroom, but “among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.” Billy accepts his cosmic impotence through the coaching of his abductor Tralfamadorians, one of whom claims, “I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.”
Michael E. Bailey is Associate Professor of Government at Berry College in Mount Berry, Georgia. He serves as Deacon at First Presbyterian Church in Rome, Georgia, and is married and has three daughters.
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