Yayabiko

The first time I read Kurt Vonnegut’s classic, Slaughterhouse Five, was twenty or so years ago when I was sitting in Harry Cargas’ Protest Literature course at college.  In the years since, I’ve picked up the book two or three times for another read.  It’s a quick book, the writing light, the pages thin.  A book that can be polished off in just a couple sittings.  But an important book as well.  A book that nearly always shows up in various 100 best English novels lists that get churned out by University Literary departments or various critic’s circles.

The fact that the book could exist at all is a marvel.  What are the chances that one of the most unique writing voices of the 20th century would be on hand to witness one of the worst firebombing in the history of humans beings doing nasty things to other human beings?  This actually happened, Kurt Vonnegut was a POW in Dresden when it was flattened, a city of no military significance, hundreds of years of history wiped clean just to prove a point, just to break the will of the waining Nazi regime.      

A lessor writer would write a heavy book, the importance and severity of the topic compelling them to do so, and it shows a bit of Vonnegut’s genius that he was able to deal with the topic with a light hand.  He struggled with the book, mulling it over in his brain for over twenty years before he could set it to paper.  His conclusions?  What meaning did he walk away with after seeing the worst that human beings could do to each other?

People die, so it goes.

The book is meditation on the inevitability of death, encouraging the reader to take the broad view, not to make too big of a deal about it.  Lots of people die in the book, each one getting the light hand of the author and the tag line “so it goes” after they die.  This includes the protagonists’ own death, which we see through a narrative trick of time travel.  He regards his own death with as much significance as we might use trying to decide which shirt to wear for the day.

There is one death however, that gets chewed and mulled over by the narrator, a death so absurd that clearly it has touched the narrator (and perhaps the author as well) in such a way that it cannot be explained away with a simple “so it goes.”  The death of the school teacher Edgar Derby.

In the landscape of a flattened Dresden, with tens of thousands corpses rotting under the rubble which used to be their homes, their schools, their churches, their fire departments, their grocery stores, Edgar Derby stole a tea pot as a souvenir for after the war, and being caught by his German captors, was sentenced to death by firing squad.  This actually happened, Vonnegut talks about it in the introduction.  Perhaps the absurdity of this one death, in the midst of so much death, was too much for even Vonnegut’s warped mind, and perhaps it is why it is the one death that lingers throughout the book, like a chorus repeated several times through the song.

Vonnegut mixes sci-fi aspects into the novel.  “Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time,” the novel begins.  Our narrator, Billy Pilgrim, can travel to various points in his life and has been kidnapped by aliens and taken to live in a zoo on another planet.  These revelations come about chronologically after a plane wreck which fractures Billy’s skull, and we’re not really sure as readers if we should treat these as real events or as delusions of someone who’s had his skull fractured in a terrible accident, killing everyone on the plane but him.  In the end it doesn’t matter.  Like a traveler going to another country to better understand his own, it’s hard to put understanding to death without calling on an outside resource, whether that outside resource is God, Mohammed, Buddha, or aliens from the planet Tralfamadorian.  Billy Pilgram’s aliens are millions of light years away from Earth, just far enough to give us some perspective.

The Tralfamadorians teach Billy that time isn’t a one time event the way we humans on Earth see it; once the present is over it’s over, never to return.  Rather, they see it spread before them as a mountain range, allowing them to pick and choose which parts to visit.  In their view, once a moment happens, it remains forever and can be visited again and again.  When you’re dead you’re still alive, just in another part of the mountain range.

Their suggestion?  Keep visiting the good parts.

They also have a different view on free will.  “I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited plants in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more.  Only on Earth is there any talk of free will,” one of the Tralfamadorians tells Billy.  Events are just events that cannot be avoided.

As human beings, as Westerners, we believe we are a slave to time but have full control over our actions.  Vonnegut is introducing us to a world where we are a slave to our actions but have a full control over time.  It is in this light that he’s looking back through time, through 20+ years of reflection, back to he day he witnessed one of the worst firebombing in history.