verbava все записи автора The passage on Kurt Vonnegut from
Ronald Paulson. Sin and evil: moral values in literature

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is about another holocaust, but one inficted not by the Nazis but by the Allied bomber command: Billy Pilgrim and his author are both sufering the Dresden bombing and the traumatic afterefects, but they are victims, not the perpetrators, of the fre-bombing—though little distinction is made between friends and enemies. They sufer with the Germans.
The story of Slaughterhouse-Five, like that of Catch-22, is about the ways people deal with traumas—Billy Pilgrim and the Tralfamadorians, Roland Weary and the Three Musketeers. But the traumas include war as only one of man’s sufering-evils; besides wars there are glaciers and “plain old death,” accidental and natural, and the Holocaust. The odor of Billy’s breath when drunk, “mustard gas and roses,” turns out to be the odor of the decaying bodies in Dresden bomb shelters, and the description of naked feet, whether of dead soldiers or the living Billy Pilgrim, as “ivory and blue,” equates the living with their inevitable death. And there is the veteran who after surviving the war becomes an elevator operator, catches his wedding ring in the elevator’s ornamental iron lace, and “the car squashed him. So it goes.”
At the outset, Vonnegut makes clear that Slaughterhouse-Five—his own experience in Dresden—is about the Problem of Evil. Roland Weary is a fat, stupid, smelly youth who compensates for his intolerable situation frst by his fantasy of the Three Musketeers, which soon ends when the other two are killed; then he falls back on his fantasies of sadistic torture—cruelty, or a form of scapegoating, as compensation for natural evil (30–32). Is cruelty one consequence of the Problem of Evil? “Is the panic resulting from the consciousness of death the cause of cruelty?” Is cruelty compensation for sufering the evil (ultimately of death) in the world?
Paul Lazzaro, as unfortunate as Weary, carries on for Weary when he dies; he is pledged to kill Billy, which eventually he does. He is characterized by sufering “many plagues of boils” (72), recalling one of the plagues God visits upon the Egyptians (Exod. 9.9) as well as Job’s suferings at the hands of the Lord, and his name suggests the beggar Lazarus (or the picaro Lázaro de Tormes). But it is also Lazzaro who, in Slaughterhouse-Five, does the act of cruelty upon an animal—a dog, whom he feeds steak flled with steel springs: “he tried to bite out his own insides. I laughed,” says Lazzaro, explaining that his motive was revenge—the dog had bitten him (120–21).
There are also horses, in this case pulling the American POWs out of Dresden. Billy hears a keening that reminds him of “the friends of Jesus when they took His ruined body down from His cross,” but it is the Germans who are aware of the horses, whose “mouths were bleeding, gashed by the bits,” and their “hooves were broken, so that every step meant agony,” and “the horses were insane with thirst. The Americans had treated their form of transportation as though it were no more sensitive than a six-cylinder Chevrolet” (169).
“So it goes” is the most general way in which Vonnegut—or Billy Pilgrim—deals with the Problem of Evil, that is, death—all sorts of death: even when champagne is “dead,” it’s “So it goes,” and when water is “dead” (63, 88). Like so many other locutions in the novel, the phrase is eventually explained, its source given—or one source: It is “what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people” (38). But there is the bird’s equivalent—“All there is to say about a massacre, things like ‘Poo-tee-weet’” (17). The bird’s song makes “So it goes” sound upbeat, positive, and this is the word with which the novel ends.
Christianity does not seem to be a solution. For Billy’s mother compensation for the evils of the world is the crucifx she buys and for some reason hangs on Billy’s wall (33). Billy Pilgrim is a chaplain’s assistant and has “a weak faith in a loving Jesus which most soldiers found putrid” (26). Billy looks through a Gideon Bible he fnds in a hotel room for “tales of great destruction,” Old Testament stories of rewards and punishments, which he fnds in profusion. “A visitor from outer space,” Vonnegut tells us, “made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel” (94). Like West, he invokes The Brothers Karamazov: “But,” says Eliot Rosewater, who is making the allusion, “that isn’t enough anymore” (87), by which he means war, Dresden and Hiroshima.
Billy’s particular way of dealing with death after the war and Dresden is by way of the extraterrestrials, the Tralfamadorians. Their solution is to believe that people die but keep on living: “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist” (23). We can see them “all at one time” (76). Here we learn that he came at the (we might say, to use Twain’s term) “dream” of the Tralfamadorians by way of Kilgore Trout’s science fction, a novel called The Big Board (173–74).
But there is the further question, What do the Tralfamadorians do about “their wars,” according to one Tralfamadorian, “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—like today at the zoo [where Billy is on display]” (101). And so back once again to the dream and perhaps the true sense of “So it goes.”
And “coming unstuck in time” is another way to explain the Tralfamadorian dream. The frst time Billy is alone in the snow, isolated from his unit in the Battle of the Bulge, and the swing is to the YMCA swimming pool and his being dropped in by his father to sink or swim (later repeated in a visit to the Grand Canyon [86]). The second time takes him to his mother in a nursing home: “How did I get so old?” (38). The process, which involves going forward as well as back in time, illustrates the Tralfamadorian belief in “how permanent all the moments are” (23). Another way is Billy’s politeness (“Excuse me” and “I beg your pardon” [48]), and the American POWs—when they are fed by the Germans, “the human beings were quiet and trusting and beautiful. They shared” (61).
They are now, therefore, “human beings.” And politeness is summed up existentially by the English POWs: “What the Englishman said about survival was this: ‘If you stop taking pride in your appearance, you will very soon die.’ He said that he had seen several men die in the following way: ‘They ceased to stand up straight, then ceased to shave or wash, then ceased to get out of bed, then ceased to talk, then died. There is this much to be said for it: it is evidently a very easy and painless way to go.’ So it goes” (126). In other words, one way is discipline, another giving up—something presumably this side of “So it goes” and closer to Satan’s “dream” and Swift’s Grub Street hack’s happy “delusion.” But the Englishman’s English solution is undercut by Vonnegut’s irony, and later by the reductio ad absurdum of Billy’s son Robert, who is a total dropout and petty thief until he enlists in the Green Berets: “His posture was now wonderful and his shoes were shined and his trousers were pressed, and he was a leader of men”—by which Vonnegut means that he is a killing machine in Vietnam (163–64).
Vonnegut’s own way of coping is the same as Mark Twain’s. In The Mysterious Stranger, sandwiched in as almost an aside, Twain ofers his solution to the Problem of Evil—laughter. True laughter—presumably satire—is a quality Satan denies to human beings, who have, he says, only “a mongrel perception of humor, nothing more.” “This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-grade and trivial things—broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries, absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh. The ten thousand high-grade comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision.” It is precisely laughter of a higher sort—presumbly Satanic—that is the “one really efective weapon” which can take “power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution” and “blow [them] to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand” (10.735).
Life, Melville noted in chapter 49 of Moby-Dick, “The Hyena,” is “a vast practical joke”: “And as for small difculties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker,” that is, God. This as opposed to Twain’s satire as the human way of dealing with the evils of the creator.
The form death takes in Dresden is its ruins: the black ghetto of Ilium (Billy’s hometown and ancient Troy) “looked like Dresden after it was frebombed”; and one way to deal with the “fghting in Vietnam” is to bomb it “back into the stone age” (51). An Englishman tells Billy and his colleagues, “You needn’t worry about bombs, by the way. Dresden is an open city. It is undefended, and contains no war industries or troop concentrations of any importance” (127). Dresden is presented as a place of total innocence, emblematized in the treatment of the dog and the horses. The cases of the Dresden and Hiroshima bombings were distressingly similar, based on proper political (enemy vs. friend) or ideological motives—hypotheses about shortening the war. The Allies’ authority for the bombing of German cities, Vonnegut suggests, was Genesis 19:24, that “the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fre from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities” (the bombing of Hamburg was designated Operation Gomorrah).