Flying saucepans

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut | Laughing through trauma

None other than Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five can make your eyes wobble in utter confusion as to whether your urge to well up is from laughter or sadness. No fluid in the tear ducts, only the aqueous humour keeping your eyes inflated. You end up gulping a lot.

Black humour is not to sway from tragedy to comedy, to tragedy, to… and so—there’s no swaying. It simultaneously plummets from its heaviness into the depths of your heart and skyrockets from its lightness into the outer space of comic relief. The only balancing act is that between your cortisol and endorphins. You’re all right.

Slaughterhouse-Five is about many things: part historical, part time travel, part flying saucepans, part dying in a sentence, part 106 “so it goes”. When a book breaks most rules the mass responds with enthusiasm, love or hate, and quite some misunderstanding. This piece will be about everything Slaughterhouse-Five is not, from someone who loves it.

Slaughterhouse-Five is not quite about war

It’s about PTSD.

The misunderstanding lies in its branding, as an anti-war historical fiction. Not that it’s not—it is; but whether its anti-war messages are conspicuously conveyed—well, they are not. That, with satire, makes for more allusive references than clear deterrence against war. What then happens is great writers such as Anthony Burgess (who wrote A Clockwork Orange) would criticise it for being “a kind of evasion—in a sense, like J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan—in which we're being told to carry the horror of the Dresden bombing, and everything it implies, up to a level of fantasy.” Burgess is not wrong about the evasion, but any implication that Vonnegut has accidentally written a pro-war book, in the sense of accepting the inevitability of war, may have literally (dis)missed the plot (in Chapter One):

So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.

She, the narrator’s (essentially, Vonnegut’s) friend’s wife, is against another war book being written. Narrator: I’ll call it The Children’s Crusade. She’s no longer upset. Vonnegut is aware that bringing light to warfare might generate unintended reactions or accidental glorification—the opposite effect.

Burgess and the likeminded might then say: That Vonnegut didn’t intend for it to be pro-war doesn’t bypass his conclusion as one of resignation; that we can only surrender to what’s predetermined; that there will always be wars as there will be “glaciers”. Again, Burgess would not be wrong. Billy, our main character, does not have much resolve in ending/preventing/starting a war. He’s a bit of a potato. He’s merely reacting to its effect. He’s been fried. He’s okay with being potato fries. Yet Vonnegut never intended to intellectualise with anti-war sentiments. Slaughterhouse-Five is about a man processing his trauma as a prisoner of war. Vonnegut is feeling.

Isn’t the potential misunderstanding dangerous? Shouldn’t Vonnegut be more accountable? Any form of art is dangerous, or not. Rather, who’s reading it?

Slaughterhouse-Five is not about determinism

It’s about PTSD.

There are many layers at play.

In its uppermost layer (Vonnegut’s past): Vonnegut, our dark social satirist who fought in World War II, was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and imprisoned in a slaughterhouse in Dresden, the same city which was later bombed by the British and Americans between 13 and 15 February 1945—he was 22 years old—a death toll of 135,000, as in David Irving’s The Destruction of Dresden. Vonnegut processed his time at war by writing Slaughterhouse-Five…