Understanding Kurt Vonnegut - Essay Example

In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut uses a disjointed style of time travel to characterize the natural workings of the human experience. Long before Quentin Tarantino familiarized audiences with the flash-back / flash-forward style of storytelling Vonnegut used it brilliantly to develop his main character in Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim. Billy is an ordinary guy, with an ordinary life who finds living fairly difficult. The course of Billy's story is completely changed on the night of his daughter's wedding when he is abducted by a group of time traveling aliens who are shaped like toilet plungers. Vonnegut uses time travel throughout the novel and this allowed him to relate seemingly unrelated events. In Slaughterhouse Five: Reforming the Novel and the World Jerome Klinkowitz says the time traveling narrative style of Slaughterhouse Five revolutionized the novel and had a profound impact on literary style around the world (76). But first, in order to fully explore how and perhaps why Vonnegut used time travel to tell the story of Billy Pilgrim, it is important to first understand a bit about Vonnegut himself. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born 11/11/1922 into a prominent midwestern family. The family saw significant financial hardships during the Depression that led Vonnegut's father to discourage him from a career "in the arts". He majored in chemistry and biochemistry at Cornell University but lost his draft deferment in 1943 at the height of WW II so he enlisted in army. His mother committed suicide on Mother's Day in 1944 right before the young Vonnegut was shipped to Europe (Klinkowitz iix). On 12/19/1944 he was captured and put to work in a factory in Dresden where he lived with fellow prisoners of war in an underground meat locker. It was this unlikely shelter that proved to be salvation for Vonnegut during the controversial firebombing of Dresden on February 13th 1945. German casualties were estimated at 135,000 to 250,000 and Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners inherited the grisly job of helping the German army clean up the dead (Klinkowitz 93).After the war he resumed his education at the University of Chicago, where he studied anthropology, Vonnegut spent the next twenty-five years writing with varying degrees of success but the desire to write a novel about the nightmares of Dresden never left him. He struggled to tell this horrific story and even remarks in the book that "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre" (Allen 77). In 1969, during the height of the Vietnam War, Slaughterhouse Five was published and embraced by the war weary American public. Vonnegut's tale of life, death, war and the tragic human experience became a best seller and is considered a modern literary classic. Kurt Vonnegut's black comedic style makes Slaughterhouse Five a sardonic epic about the human experience. The unique use of time travel allows for a depth of character development in Billy Pilgrim that a chronological tale simply would not accommodate. Vonnegut also uses time to incorporate himself into the story using the first and last chapters of the book as his monologue. This allowed him to personally comment on issues ranging from alcohol, getting old, life, death, war and even Bobby Kennedy. It seems he used Slaughterhouse Five as a way to explore his own humanity and in various ways he lets his audience know that he and Pilgrim are one in the same. For instance, he talks about the character Lazzaro as someone he knew in Dresden. The knapsack, the plaster Eiffel Tower, the wagon full of clocks, the birds, all snips of images to come later in the book. In the first chapter of Slaughterhouse Five Vonnegut discusses the difficulty he had writing the book and eludes to the demons he has faced since his Dresden experience. He talks about getting too drunk and calling old friends late at night and it seems neither his friends nor his wife really understands. The reader gets the feeling right at the outset that Vonnegut, like Pilgrim feels out of place in the world, like a "foreigner" or a "pilgrim" wandering a strange land. Webster defines "pilgrim" as "one who journeys", "wayfarer" or "one who travels" (870). The significance of these definitions and their relationship to Billy's character becomes clear as the novel unfolds. Another interesting thing about the first chapter in relation to the rest of the novel is the introduction of Vonnegut's problems with "time". The first mention of time found in the novel is "And so on to infinity" (Slaughterhouse Five 3) this is significant since ultimately the purpose of time in Slaughterhouse Five is to produce an infinite destiny for the main character and for that matter the whole universe. Vonnegut talks about time in both simple and complicated terms. He talks about not knowing what time it is when he goes to bed drunk and talks about how he might be turned into a pillar of salt like Lot's wife in the Bible for looking back on his life. These time driven anecdotes set the stage for Billy Pilgrim's time travel odyssey. Billy Pilgrim is a complex character that longs for more simplicity. He is a befuddled reluctant hero who is puzzled by the tragic human condition and it seems that Vonnegut uses Pilgrim to make sense out of his own life experience. One of the central storylines in the novel involves the hero, Billy Pilgrim being abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. He is kept in a zoo and put on display but in spite of this he develops a "student - teacher" relationship with his captors and find that they are very wise and advanced in many surprising ways. "The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to dieAll moments past present and future always has existed, always will exist." (Slaughterhouse Five 23) This view of time is the essence of Slaughterhouse Five. Time is an illusion and moments do not follow one another in a linear fashion. The Tralfamadorian view of time opens up Billy's mind to the idea that all moments are significant and insignificant at the same time. Put most simply, time does not necessarily point in only one direction. Instead of a straight line, the narrative chronology of Slaughterhouse Five is more like "an ascending widening spiral that circles over the same territory, yet does so from an ever higher perspective." (Allen 85). Vonnegut uses the "panoramic view" to explore the comedy and the tragedy of the human experience. Vonnegut was clearly ahead of his time since recently scientists like Steven Hawking have proposed this very idea (Allen 81). In using time travel as the narrative mode Vonnegut creates a type of "pseudo immortality" for Billy Pilgrim. Tralfadadorian time travel is like a profound theology to Billy and it gives him comfort by lending meaning to his seemingly ordinary, pointless existence. Despite it's seemingly somber tone and seriousness of purpose Slaughterhouse Five is not without it's humor. One of the most comical passages in the book is when Vonnegut uses a "narrative rewind" to describe Billy becoming "unstuck in time" and watching a war movie backwards. The planes fly backwards, bombs are sucked back up into the planes and soldiers turn back into high school kid. Vonnegut takes the illustration to the extreme and the narrative ends with "two perfect people named Adam and Eve" (Slaughterhouse Five 65) Vonnegut uses irony to explain the destiny of the universe. Billy Pilgrim asks the aliens "How-how does the universe end" (Slaughterhouse Five 101) They explain that they accidentally blow it up while experimenting with new flying saucer fuels. One of their pilots presses the starter button and "boom". Billy can't understand why they wouldn't try to do something to keep the pilot from pressing the button and save the universe since they can travel through time. They answer very simply: "He has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way." (Slaughterhouse Five 101) This is where Vonnegut reveals his own sense of resignation about the human race and his sense of inevitability when it comes to war. He had lived through the bombings of Dresden and much like Billy Pilgrim it seems he was scarred. Vonnegut himself minimized the impact of Dresden and with his wry wit he joked that Dresden was only significant because Slaughterhouse Five was a bestseller (Allen 79). Clearly the experiences of Dresden and his tale of Billy Pilgrim did much to define him as an author. Billy Pilgrim lived Vonnegut's surrogate life. Billy was an extension of Vonnegut and through him and Tralfamadorian time travel Billy and Vonnegut seemed to find some peace and perhaps even "eternal life". This passage is yet another example of how Vonnegut uses time travel to explain the eternal nature of time in relationship to the human experience. Vonnegut's unique combination of anthropological and scientific background allowed him to give the novel a quality that eludes most human beingsnon-judgmental acceptance of the human experience (Klinkowski 87). It's interesting to note that in referring once again to Webster, the definition of anthropology is the "science of man" (49). Vonnegut certainly can be categorized as a student of the natural workings of being human. Vonnegut reports that his father had once commented that he never wrote a story with a villain and in Slaughterhouse Five he talks about the idea of "all people being the same", very much an anthropological view. But it is clearly his scientific background that makes the central theme of time travel in Slaughterhouse Five really come to life. Somehow Vonnegut makes it all sound very possible. Vonnegut was certainly not without his opinions and later in his life he became even more outspoken about his views on the darker side being human. In his last book Man Without a Country he writes: "Do you realize that all great literature - Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, A farwell to Arms, The Scarlet Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, The Illiad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, The Bible, and The Charge of the Light Brigade - are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being" (9). He also reveals in his last work that he was raised a "humanist". He says humanists behave as fairly and as decently as possible without a belief in an afterlife (Vonnegut 79). Humanists value being human. These core beliefs likely account for Vonnegut's non-judgmental approach to storytelling and perhaps also partially explain the nature of Tralfamadorian time travel. Essentially, time travel in Slaughterhouse Five becomes a theology that holds out the hope of eternal life through a series of moments that remain forever in the past present and future. Though somewhat metaphysical the concept of time as described in Slaughterhouse Five is also spiritual in nature and has many parallels to the Christian concept of eternal life. Vonnegut ultimately seems to use the novel as a vehicle to make sense of his life experiences. Through the miracle of Tralthatmadorian time travel Vonnegut was able to examine two lives profoundly touched by tragedy, Billy Pilgrim's and his own. Kurt Vonnegut died this year at the age of eighty four. So it goes. Bibliography Bibliography Allen, William Rodney. Understanding Kurt Vonnegut. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Klinkowitz, Jerome. Slaughterhouse Five: Reforming the Novel and the World. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990. Vonnegut, Kurt. A Man Without a Country. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005. ------- Slaughterhouse Five. Seymore: Delacorte Press, 1969. Webster, Miriam, Inc. Miriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Springfield: Miriam-Webster Inc. 2003 Read More