Aliens, Time Travel, and Dresden – “Slaughterhouse Five” (Part 1) #20

Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course Literature, and today we’re gonna
talk about Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Mr. Green, Mr. Green! You
mean, like the Motown group that sings that song - glad all over! No singing,
Me From the Past! And no, it is not a Motown group! You’re thinking of the
Dave Clark Five, and for the record, they were not a Motown group, they
were British. [Theme Song] So, Slaughterhouse Five, also known by its
underappreciated alternate title, The Children’s Crusade, is one of the most
widely read antiwar books of the late twentieth century. It was written by
Kurt Vonnegut during the height of the Vietnam War, but this novel is an
attempt to chronicle the violence of the World War II bombing of Dresden
and modern warfare more broadly. But it’s important to understand, again,
those two historical contexts. The one in which the book was written and
the one the book is about. And the question at the heart of Slaughterhouse
Five is what role can literature, particularly works of literary fiction, play in
addressing large scale acts of violence? What is the role of literature in
examining war? But of course that makes Slaughterhouse Five sound very
sad and serious, which it is, but it’s also a surprisingly and very weirdly funny
book. Let’s start with an outline of the main events of Slaughterhouse Five.
in the Thought Bubble. So, Vonnegut’s protagonist is Billy Pilgrim. But rather
than being on a linear journey toward a holy place, as his name might
suggest, Pilgrim has flashbacks (and fantasies) that he believes are actual
time travel. Pilgrim describes himself as being “unstuck in time.” And rather
than describing his life events in chronological order, he jumps between
times and places. The events that comprise Pilgrim’s disjointed narrative
actually have quite a logical progression. Like a rough outline of them looks
like this: Pilgrim fought in World War II. He was a prisoner of war in
Germany. He was being held in Dresden when that city was largely
destroyed by Allied bombing toward the end of the war. And Pilgrim
survived because he and his fellow prisoners were held sixty feet
underground in a former slaughterhouse. After the firestorm, Pilgrim and his
fellow detainees are put to work cleaning up the charred remains of bodies.
And then after the war, Billy Pilgrim has trouble returning to civilian life,
spends some time in a mental institution, but then eventually marries and
becomes an optometrist. A profession, it rather goes without saying, that
involves sight. Anyway, then Pilgrim has a breakdown while listening to a
barbershop quartet, whose expressions remind him of his guards at
Dresden. He becomes convinced that aliens (Tralfamadorians) abducted him
and increasingly unmoored, Pilgrim publicly professes the Tralfamadorian
vision of time and space. Now Pilgrim’s narrative sounds a little crazy
(especially since it’s delivered in such a nonlinear manner), but Vonnegut
makes the logic of his mental breakdown perfectly clear. As such, Vonnegut
creates a novel that demonstrates how war trauma affects the individual
psyche. Thanks, Thought Bubble. So, where did Vonnegut get all of these
insights? Well in part, they came from Vonnegut’s own experience in the
war, as he acknowledges in the book. It’s very interesting that the first and
last chapters of Slaughterhouse Five are written in first person from the
perspective of Kurt Vonnegut. In the very beginning of the novel and at the
very end, he calls attention to the fact that we are reading a novel. That’s an
unusual and bold choice because generally as readers we want to forget that
we’re reading a story, right? And feel like we’re living inside reality. But
Vonnegut wants to unmoor us from our expectations of fiction, just as Billy
Pilgrim is unmoored from time. Kurt Vonnegut was born -- Oh, it’s time for
the open letter! Hey there, Kurt Vonnegut. Dear Kurt Vonnegut, I actually
met you once at the University of Alabama. My primary memory of that
evening is that someone came up to you and said, “Sir, you can’t smoke in
here.” And you replied, “Well, I can smoke or I can leave!” You were and
remain a great inspiration to me as a writer and one thing that I always think
about with you is that even though obviously you had a pretty screwed-up
life, I always felt like you had it figured out. Long story short, I love you Kurt
Vonnegut. Kurt Puppet: I love you too! John: Aw, thank you Kurt! Best
wishes, John Green. Anyway, Vonnegut was born in beautiful Indianapolis in
1922, he spent some time at Cornell University before entering the United
States army at the age of twenty. Like Billy Pilgrim, he was shipped to
Europe, had a very brief combat experience, and then became a prisoner of
war during the Battle of the Bulge, which you’ll remember from Crash
Course history. And then like Pilgrim, Vonnegut was sent to Dresden, where
he was interred at a former slaughterhouse. At the time, Dresden was
considered a relatively safe place to be. In Slaughterhouse Five, an English
officer envies the American prisoners who are sent to Dresden, he says: You
needn’t worry about bombs […] Dresden is an open city. It is undefended,
and contains no war industries or troop concentrations of any importance.
But it turns out, of course, that in World War II, such things were not
prerequisites for getting bombed. Between February 13th and 15th of 1945,
British and American bombers dropped nearly 4,000 tons of bombs and
incendiary devices on Dresden. This created a firestorm that destroyed an
enormous part of the city and cost tens of thousands of lives. And then
Dresden was subject to more air raids of this sort in March and April. Now
by all accounts, the suffering on the ground was tremendous. But writers,
artists, and historians have found it difficult to adequately convey the
horrors that took place. Vonnegut approaches the need to testify to these
events in Slaughterhouse Five by using a fictional narrative that seeks to
both understand and evade the past. Like although his narrator was in
Dresden during the bombing and firestorm, he learns what took place by
eavesdropping on whispering guards. And that’s a way of diminishing the
immediacy of violence to rumor. Like Pilgrim reports the guards’
conversation as follows: There was a fire-storm out there. Dresden was one
big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would
burn. This conversation of whispers, transmitted in a foreign language, and
translated by the author is remembered many years after the fact. And as
readers, we have plenty of reason to question it. I mean, just look at the
vague nature of the language used. Consider the repetition of “everything”
(“…everything organic, everything that would burn”). Well, “everything” is a
pretty broad concept. And in this context, it allows the narrator not to
imagine the specific, horrible details. Like here, vague language provides a
stand-in for detailed testimony. But there’s also something horrific and
visceral about that idea generally. The idea of “everything organic” burning.
It implies the loss of not just our lives but all life. Slaughterhouse Five also
uses figures of speech as a means of evasion. The sun was an angry little
pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. I mean, just
as you can’t look directly at the sun, Billy Pilgrim can’t look directly at the
destruction of Dresden. He has to tell us what it’s like because what it is is
unspeakable. And this sort of evasion is very common in eyewitness reports
of violence. In fact, Sebald chronicled how often eyewitness reports of the
bombing of German cities contained “stereotypical phrases.” These clichés,
he explains, “cover up and neutralize experiences beyond our ability to
comprehend." The quote “unreal effect” that they produce is a very real
depiction of how the human mind reacts to extreme suffering. Here’s
another example of trying to see the horror of war by not looking directly at
it. Vonnegut describes the post-bombing Dresden as a mute reflection in the
contorted faces of prison guards, and he creates a shocking and memorable
image: The guards drew together instinctively, rolled their eyes. They
experimented with one expression and then another, said nothing, though
their mouths were often open. They looked like a silent film of a barbershop
quartet. So what does this say about the guards? What are we to make of
the silence in this scene? Why is it that the guards say nothing? Finally, why
might Vonnegut use this goofy metaphor of a barbershop quartet in a silent
film at this particular moment? Are we supposed to laugh at absurd
moments like this or the repetition of the phrase “so it goes” whenever
someone dies? And if we do feel that instinct to laugh, are we then meant to
cringe at ourselves for having had that impulse? Regardless, that image
doesn’t go where we expect it to and so it’s designed to make us
uncomfortable. And that’s its power. That’s its beauty. And it’s worth
remembering that Vonnegut describes himself as often feeling speechless
when thinking about the bombing of Dresden. Like in the first chapter of
Slaughterhouse Five, he writes: I thought it would be easy for me to write
about the destruction of Dresden since all I would have to do would be to
report what I had seen. And I thought too it would be a masterpiece, or at
least make me a lot of money since the subject was so big. But not many
words about Dresden came from my mind then… and not many words come
now, either. And it’s clear that Vonnegut has a pretty complicated
relationship with the words that eventually do, in fact, come. Like his novel,
famously, opens with the following lines: All this happened, more or less.
The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. Pretty much true? That’s
another phrase that’s designed to make us uncomfortable. And as Vonnegut
hints at in that passage I just read, what does it mean for Vonnegut to gain
acclaim and wealth for what he has written? In an introduction to the 1976
edition of Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut expresses some guilt at having
benefited from its publication: The Dresden atrocity, tremendously
expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only
one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I
wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my
reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for
every person killed. Some business I'm in. Now that’s a classic example of
Vonnegut’s self-deprecating humor, but the “business” of providing
testimony does remain important work, I would argue — even if it is through
the flawed vehicle of narrative fiction. Precisely because it struggles to look
directly at the firebombing of Dresden, Slaughterhouse Five provides ways
of thinking about how we live and love and fight and heal. And it makes us
think about how we frame the stories that we tell ourselves about the past.
And Billy Pilgrim’s unstuckness in time reminds us that, as the great William
Faulkner wrote, “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.” Next week, we’ll
talk about Billy Pilgrim’s alternate universe filled with toilet-plunger aliens
who offer a new perspective on the violence of mankind. And we’ll discuss
the philosophy of Tralfamadorians (a philosophy summed up by the phrase,
“and so it goes”). And, finally, we will consider what, if anything, an “anti-
war” can do about war, or really about anything else.