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Studies in American Fiction, Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 1978, pp.

65-76 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/saf.1978.0031

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/saf/summary/v006/6.1.merrill.html

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 VONNEGUTS SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE:
THE REQUIREMENTS OF CHAOS
Robert Merrill and Peter A. Scholl*

I like Utopian talk, speculation about what our planet should be,
anger about what our planet is.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.1
In a recent issue of SAF, Lynn Buck presents a view of Kurt
Vonnegut which has become depressingly popular. Her very title,
"Vonnegut's World of Comic Futility," suggests the drift of her discus-
sion. Professor Buck speaks of Vonnegut's "deliberate mechanization of
mankind," "the cynicism of the comical world he has created," and his
"nihilistic message."2 She concludes at one point that "to enter Von-
negut's world, one must abide by his rules, unencumbered by man-
centered notions about the universe."3 There is some question,
however, as to whether Buck is a reliable guide concerning the nature
of these "rules." Her Vonnegut is a man who cautions against "man-
centered notions about the universe," whereas the real Kurt Vonnegut
once told a group of Bennington graduates, "Military science is pro-
bably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the
universe. Still—I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it."4
Her Vonnegut is cynical and nihilistic, whereas the real Kurt Vonnegut it is wrong
recently said, "My longer-range schemes have to do with providing all to say he is
Americans with artificial extended families of a thousand members or nihilistic
more. Only when we have overcome loneliness can we begin to share for this
wealth and work more fairly. I honestly believe that we will have those reason

families by-and-by, and I hope they will become international" (W, p.

xxiv). In short, Buck's Vonnegut is a fiction. Vonnegut's readers know
that he himself believes in certain kinds of fictions, "harmless untruths"
which he calls foma. But Buck's version of Vonnegut is not harmless,
for it leads her to distort the meaning of everything Vonnegut has writ-
ten.
This reading of Vonnegut is all too representative. Repeatedly wrong to read
Vonnegut's critics have argued that his novels embody the cynical V this way,
essence of Black Humor, a form so despairing as to contrast even with
they say
the relatively dark novels of a writer like Hemingway.5 The result has
'Professor Merrill teaches at the University of Nevada, Reno, and has published on
American fiction in American Literature, Critique, Modern Language Quarterly,
Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Professor Scholl, an Assistant Professor of
English at the University of Evansville, has written for Christianity and Literature, Last
Generation Journal, and Indiana English Journal.
 66Robert Merrill and Peter A. Scholl

been a thorough misunderstanding of Vonnegut's vision in general and

the meaning of his novels in particular. The distortion is most serious
with Vonnegut's sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), for this is his
one book that has a real claim to be taken seriously as a first-rate work a
of art. For this reason, it is crucial that the novel be interpreted proper- contradictory
ly. To do this, the notion that Vonnegut's world is one of comic futility comment: not
must be abandoned. It must be seen that Vonnegut's advice to the Ben- comic futility!
nington graduates is embodied in his novels as well.
But I continue to believe that artists— all artists— should be treasured
as alarm systems.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (W, p. 238)
they back up
It is safe to assume that novels of social protest are not written by ideas that
cynics or nihilists. Surely protest implies the belief that man's faults are social
remediable. It is relevant, then, that Vonnegut's novels, early and late, protesters are
were conceived in the spirit of social protest. Vonnegut has said that his not nihilistic
motives as a writer are "political": "I agree with Stalin and Hitler and
bcz they hope
imp! Mussolini that the writer should serve his society. I differ with dictators
for reform!
as to how writers should serve. Mainly, I think they should be—and
biologically have to be—agents of change" (W, p. 237). This belief in-
forms Vonnegut's first book, Player Piano (1952), a novel which
deserves Leslie Fiedler's elegant complaint that it is excessively com-
mitted to "proving (once more?) that machines deball and dehumanize
men."8 It is crucial to Mother Night (1961), a novel which has a rather
unquietistic "moral" if the author's 1966 introduction is to be believed:
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we
pretend to be."7 And it is no less central to God Bless You, Mr.
Rosewater (1965) , a novel in which Vonnegut's attack on capitalistic
practices is unrelenting. These books were all written by the man who
once said that he admired George Orwell "almost more than any other
man" (W, p. 94). They were written by the man who likes Utopian
talk, speculation about what Earth should be, anger about what the
planet is.
most critics
Therefore, it is hard to believe that Slaughterhouse-Five is a novel
have read it as
that recommends "resigned acceptance" as the proper response to life's
injustices. Tony Tanner is the only critic who has used the term resigned
"quietism" in discussing Slaughterhouse-Five, but most of Vonnegut's acceptance,
critics seem intent on reading the book as if it were the work of a which it is not.
quietist. The problem concerns Vonnegut's "hero," Billy Pilgrim.
Slaughterhouse-Five is about Pilgrim's response to the fire-bombing of
Dresden. This response includes Billy's supposed space-travel to the
planet Tralfamadore, where he makes the rather startling discovery
 Studies in American Fiction67

about time that Winston Niles Rumfoord first made in Vonnegut's se-
cond novel, The Sirens of Titan (1959), "that everything that ever has
been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has
been."8 This proves immensely satisfying to Pilgrim, for it means "that
when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in about the idea
the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral."9 Indeed, it is of quietism, or
very silly for people to cry about anything, including Dresden. This is acceptance!
the "wisdom" Billy achieves in the course of Vonnegut's novel. It is, of
course, the wisdom of quietism. If everything that ever has been
always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been,
nothing can be done to change the drift of human affairs. As the
Tralfamadorians tell Billy Pilgrim, the notion of free will is a quaint
Earthling illusion.
What is more disturbing, Vonnegut's critics seem to think that he
is saying the same thing. For Anthony Burgess, "Slaughterhouse is a
critics ideas
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
about the piece
everything it implies up to a level of fantasy. . . ."10 For Charles
Harris, "The main idea emerging from Slaughterhouse-Five seems to
be that the proper response to life is one of resigned acceptance."11 For
Alfred Kazin, "Vonnegut deprecates any attempt to see tragedy that
day in Dresden. ... He likes to say with arch fatalism, citing one
horror after another, 'So it goes.' "12 For Tanner, "Vonnegut has . . .
total sympathy with such quietistic impulses."13 And the same notion is
found throughout The Vonnegut Statement, a book of original essays
written and collected by Vonnegut's most loyal academic "fans."14
This view of Vonnegut's book tends to contradict what he has said
in published interviews and his earlier novels. But of course the work
itself must be examined to determine whether or not Slaughterhouse-
Five is a protest novel. Such a study should reveal Vonnegut's complex
strategy for protesting such horrors as Dresden.
If all time is eternally present This shows the article's notion
AU time is unredeemable. about V's idea of protest!
"Burnt Norton"

When you're dead you're dead.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.15
The key to Vonnegut's strategy is his striking introduction of the
Tralfamadorians into what he calls an antiwar novel (p. 3). The fire-
bombing of Dresden actually receives less emphasis than Billy Pilgrim's
space and time travel, especially his visit with the Tralfamadorians.
Vonnegut has played down the immediate impact of the war in order
to make "a powerful little statement about the kinds of social attitudes
the writers argue that V gives more emphasis to the fantasy story than to Dresden

V's point is that people pay more attention to

68Robert Merrill and Peter A . Scholl

responsible for war and its atrocities," as Harris has remarked of importnt in
Mother Night.16 By transporting his hero to Tralfamadore, Vonnegut is introduction
able to introduce the Tralfamadorian notions about time and death pf Ts: notions
which inevitably call attention to more "human" theories. The status of time and
of the Tralfamadorians is therefore the most important issue in any death as
discussion of Slaughterhouse-Five. important in
this novel
It is the status of the Tralfamadorians themselves which is in ques-
tion, not just their ideas. Vonnegut offers many hints that the
Tralfamadorians do not exist. Just before he goes on a radio talk show
to spread the Tralfamadorian gospel, Billy Pilgrim comes across several
books by Kilgore Trout in a forty-second Street porno shop:
The titles were all new to him, or he thought they were. Now he science fiction Billy
opened one. . . . The name of the book was The Big Board. He got reads takes him to this
a few paragraphs into it, and then realized that he had read it other planet! not real
before—years ago, in the veterans' hospital. It was about an Earth-
ling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials.
They were put on display on a planet called Zircon-212 (p. 201) .
It seems that the scenario of Billy's life in outer space is something less
than original. Pilgrim gets his "idea" for Tralfamadore from Kilgore
Trout, just as Dwayne Hoover gets his ideas from Trout in Breakfast of
Champions (1973). Perhaps this is what Vonnegut had in mind when Billy is
he said that "Shughterhouse and Breakfast used to be one book" (W, p. escaping his
281). The parallel is instructive, for Hoover is clearly insane. Pilgrim situation
may not literally be insane, but Vonnegut has undermined the reality
of his experience on Tralfamadore. Indeed, the conclusion is irresistible
that Pilgrim's space and time travel are modes of escape. Surely it is not whenever
coincidental that Billy first time-travels just as he is about to lie down he wants to
and die during the Battle of the Bulge, nor that he begins to speak of his escape, he
trip to Tralfamadore after his airplane crash in 1968. Faced with the fantasizes
sheer horror of life, epitomized by World War II and especially the
fire-bombing of Dresden, Billy "escapes" to Tralfamadore.
If the very existence of Tralfamadore is in doubt, one might
wonder about the ideas Billy Pilgrim encounters there. Billy takes great
comfort in these ideas, but at first glance there would seem to be
nothing very heartening in the Tralfamadorian philosophy. After all,
the Tralfamadorians think of human beings as "bugs in amber" (p. 86) .
Like bugs, human beings are trapped in structured moments that have
always existed and always will exist. For that matter, human beings
are not really human: "Tralfamadorians, of course, say that every
creature and plant in the universe is a machine" (p. 154). The
Tralfamadorians would seem to be as jovial about life as the later Mark
Twain.
 Studies in American Fiction69
benefits of Ts:
But the Tralfamadorians have much to offer in the way of consola- 1. No death
tion. Most crucially, their theory of time denies the reality of death. 2. use of time
Further, it allows man to pick and choose among the eternal moments as one wishes,
of his existence. If everything that ever has been always will be, one going
can practice the Tralfamadorian creed and "ignore the awful times, backward and
and concentrate on the good ones" (p. 117). If one concentrates hard forward
enough, he can have the same epitaph as Billy Pilgrim: "Everything 3. ignore
was beautiful and nothing hurt" (p. 122). He can be like Billy in other awful and see
ways, too. He can survive such demoralizing experiences as Dresden. good
He can return home and complete his education, marry the boss's
daughter, make $60,000 a year, father a daughter as capable as
Barbara Pilgrim and a son who finally gets "straightened out" by the
Green Berets; he can own a fifth of the new Holiday Inn in town and
half of three Tastee-Freeze stands; he can be President of the Lions
Club and drive Cadillacs with such stickers as "Impeach Earl Warren"
and "Reagan for President." He can not only get by, he can thrive.
But all this can be done only by ignoring the wisdom embodied in Billy is
successful in
Billy Pilgrim's prayer: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I later life but...
cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always
to tell the difference" (p. 60). This advice is meaningless for Billy he is not a
himself, for "among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the problem
past, the present, and the future" (p. 60). Billy is one of those people solver and not
Vonnegut was referring to when he said "there are people, particularly a changer...
dumb people, who are in terrible trouble and never get out of it,
because they're not intelligent enough. And it strikes me as gruesome
and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that a man can
always solve his problems" (W, p. 258). Billy is a man who can only
solve his problems by saying that they are insoluble. so this is all
The irony here is that the Billy Pilgrims of this world are better off an irony...
saying that everything is beautiful and nothing hurts, for they truly only
cannot change the past, the present, or the future. AU they can do is possibility is
escape zone survive. Tralfamadore is a fantasy, a desperate attempt to rationalize survival!
chaos, but one must sympathize with Billy's need to create
Tralfamadore. After all, the need for supreme fictions is a very human
trait. As one of Vonnegut's characters tells a psychiatrist, "I think you
some sort of guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or very
fictional people just aren't going to want to go on living" (p. 101). The need for important
attitude that such "lies" is almost universal in Slaughterhouse-Five. Most obviously,
tells you it lies behind Roland Weary's pathetic dramatization of himself and
more lies two companions as The Three Musketeers (p. 42). It is most poignantly
to survive... suggested in the religiosity of Billy's mother, who develops "a terrible
hankering for a crucifix" (p. 38) even though she never joins a church
70Robert Merrill and Peter A . Scholl

and in fact has no real faith. Billy's mother finally does buy a crucifix
from a Sante Fe gift shop, and Vonnegut's comment is crucial to much
else in the book: "Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct
a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops" (p. 39). Billy
Pilgrim's "lie" is no less human and a good deal more "wonderful."
Billy: Not
But finally Billy Pilgrim is not Everyman. One may sympathize everyman!
with his attempt to make sense of things, but the fact remains that some
Definitely
men have greater resources than others. Indeed, some men are like
weaker
Kurt Vonnegut. By intruding into his own tale, Vonnegut contrasts his
in contrast to
personal position with that of his protagonist. Billy Pilgrim preaches
Billy is
the Tralfamadorian theory of time until he becomes a latter-day Billy
Vonnegut
Graham (p. 142); Vonnegut looks with anguish at a clock he wants to
go faster and remarks, "There was nothing I could do about it. As an
Earthling, I had to believe whatever clocks said—and calendars"
(p. 20). Billy Pilgrim sends his sons to Vietnam and the Green Berets;
Vonnegut tells his sons "that they are not under any circumstances to
take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not
to fill them with satisfaction or glee." Vonnegut even tells his sons "not
to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express
contempt for people who think we need machinery like that" (p. 19).
Billy Pilgrim says that God was right when He commanded Lot's wife
not to look back upon Sodom and Gomorrah; Vonnegut writes a true human
Slaughterhouse-Five and so becomes "a pillar of salt" himself (p. 22). would not
As Donald Greiner has said, "while Billy can come to terms with death cope with
and Dresden, Vonnegut cannot."17 Nor can anyone who would be fully war!
human.
This should be clear from a careful reading of Vonnegut's first
chapter. Vonnegut's discussion of how he wrote Slaughterhouse-Five is
not an indulgence, for his difficulties in writing the book are as crucial the first
to its meaning as the story of Billy Pilgrim. As a "trafficker in climaxes chapter is a
and thrills and characterizations and wonderful dialogue and suspense true work
and confrontations" (p. 5), Vonnegut is supposed to create fictions with showing
beginnings, middles, and ends. But how does one create such a struc- difficulty of
ture from the materials of Dresden? One can follow Billy Pilgrim to presenting
Tralfamadore and write the Tralfamadorian equivalent-of the novel, Dresden!
books which appear to be "brief clumps of symbols separated by stars,"
where each clump of symbols is "a brief, urgent message" and "there is
no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no
effects" (p. 88) . But the burden of Vonnegut's first chapter is that to do
so would be to deny one's humanity. Vonnegut can't deny that he is an
Earthling who must believe whatever clocks and calendars tell him.
Further, he is an intelligent, sensitive Earthling who knows that from a
V shows that humanity matters, Dresden matters, even if it is difficult to write about it and reckon
about it. Escape is easier than standing and facing things!
 Studies in American Fiction71

human point of view there are causes and effects, not to mention
morals. The effects of Dresden are terrible but they can be reckoned.
The effects of helping other Earthlings are also real, so Vonnegut can
remark that it is "a lovely thing" for Mary O'Hare to be a trained
nurse. It is a lovely thing because it is so human. Vonnegut also says
that he loves Lot's wife for having spurned God's rather Tralfmadorian
advice. He himself has become a pillar of salt because, unlike his hero,
he cannot reject the burden of being human.
It may seem that Vonnegut has contradicted himself, for Billy's so it can be
"lie" apparently expresses a profoundly human need at the same time argued that
that it denies his humanity. In point of fact, the contradiction is Billy puts
Pilgrim's. Indeed, the pathos of Billy's story is captured in this paradox. himself
Because he is one of those people who are in terrible trouble and not in- before
telligent enough to get out of it, Billy is unable to imagine a saving lie humanity
except one that denies personal moral responsibility. Of course, for and tries to
I do not see shut things
those who see Vonnegut as a quietist, this is as it should be. These
any points in down not to
critics see the Tralfamadorian message as an example of foma, or
this "harmless untruths," a concept advocated in an earlier Vonnegut suffer.
controversy.
novel, Cat's Cradle (1963). Whether this is indeed the case is crucial to
To me, any interpretation of the later novel.
both can exist!
It is true that Vonnegut follows such philosophers as Vaihinger in human mind
arguing that all human ideas are fictions. As Vonnegut once said,
can make up
"everything is a lie, because our brains are two-bit computers, and we
good lies..
can't get very high-grade truths out of them." For this reason, man
and operate
must follow Vaihingens advice and live by his fictions as if they were
on that basis!
"true," as if their validity could somehow be demonstrated.18 Man
must embrace fictions that are "harmless" because their human conse-
quences are benign. In this interview, Vonnegut went on to say that
while brains are two-bit computers, "we do have the freedom to make
up comforting lies." Asked for an example of a comforting lie,
Vonnegut replied, " 'Thou shalt not kill.' That's a good lie. Whether
God said it or not, it's still a perfectly good lie" (W, p. 240).
So far as Slaughterhouse-Five is concerned, the question is Billy may
whether the theories of Tralfamadore qualify as foma. In a very escape to
limited sense the answer is yes, for these theories do provide comfort for foma, but
people like Billy Pilgrim. But what comforts Pilgrim will not do the job not all can
for everyone. Finally there is a great difference between the quietistic do it!
notions of Tralfamadore and the injunction not to kill. The latter is a
truly comforting "lie": it implies that human life is inherently
valuable, and it suggests that men are capable of choosing whether or
not they will destroy their fellow human beings. The consequences of
accepting this idea are altogether agreeable. The consequences of
if we believed in the lie not to kill, human life could be considered valuable... but events like Dresden
point in the other direction!
72Robert Merrill and Peter A. Scholl

believing in Tralfamadore and its theories are something else again.

Vonnegut is careful to show that these consequences involve more than
enabling Billy Pilgrim to achieve a sustaining serenity. They involve in
indifference to moral problems which is the ultimate "cause" of events
like Dresden.
Critics of Slaughterhouse-Five seem never to notice that it is filled
with Tralfamadorians who look very much like human beings. An ob-
vious example would be the German guards who brutalize Billy
Pilgrim and his fellow prisoners of war. The connection with
Tralfamadorian fatalism is suggested by an interesting parallel. When
he is kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians, Billy inquires of his captors,
"Why me?" The Tralfamadorians reply, "Why you? Why us for that
matter? Why anything?" (pp. 76-77). Later, one of Billy's fellow
prisoners is beaten gratuitously by a German guard. "Why me?" the
prisoner asks. "Vy you? Vy anybody?" the guard answers (p. 91). This in escaping
parallel exposes the inhumane consequences of adopting the to fiction,
Tralfamadorian point of view, for the denial of personal responsibility Billy is
easily leads to the brutal excesses of the Nazis. Vonnegut hardly sees the avoiding
problem as peculiarly Germanic, however. Early in chapter one, he human
reminisces about his experiences as a police reporter for the Chicago responsibilit
City News Bureau. One day he covered the death of a young veteran y
who had been squashed in a freak elevator accident. The woman
writer who took his report calmly asked him to contact the dead man's
wife and pretend to be a police captain. He was to do this in order to
get her response. As Vonnegut remarks, "World War II had certainly
made everybody very tough" (p. 10). This sort of complacence might
be termed quasi-Tralfamadorian. What is missing is an attempt to ra-
tionalize the status quo. This comes later from a Marine major at a
Lions Club meeting: "He said that Americans had no choice but to
keep fighting in Vietnam until they achieved victory or until the Com-
munists realized that they could not force their way of life on weak
countries" (p. 59) . It seems that America had "no choice" but to remain
in Vietnam. But then the Allies had no choice but to destroy Dresden,
either, or so Billy is told by Bertram Copeland Rumfoord, a retired
brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve and the official Air Force
historian. "It had to be done," Rumfoord tells Billy. "Pity the men who check
had to do it." Billy assures Rumfoord that he understands: "Everything blow.. (the
is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned one in the
that on Tralfamadore" (p. 198). As this reply suggests, Rumfoord's hospital)
statements are in the best spirit of Tralfamadore. The general has ob-
viously read his Pope: Whatever is, is right.
 Studies in American Fiction73

The scene involving Rumfoord and Billy Pilgrim is positioned at

the end of Slaughterhouse-Five because it is the real climax to the real
Vonnegut's complex protest novel. The object of satiric attack turns out terror: it can
to be a complacent response to the horrors of the age. The horror of happen
Dresden is not just that it could happen here, in an enlightened twen- again and
tieth century. The real horror is that events such as Dresden continue nobody cares
to occur and no one seems appalled. Slaughterhouse-Five is filled with
allusions to such postwar disasters as Vietnam, the assassinations of examples of
Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr, and the riots in American ongoing
ghettos. Vonnegut stresses the kinship between these events and atrocities
Dresden, most notably in the scene where Billy Pilgrim drives his
Cadillac through a burned-down ghetto which reminds him "of some
of the towns he had seen in the war" (p. 59) . These are the problems
Billy avoids in his life as Lions Club President, Tastee-Freeze en-
trepreneur, and Reagan supporter. These are the problems the Marine
major and Professor Rumfoord would see as "inevitable." But it is one
thing to say that human problems are insoluble if one has visited
Tralfamadore. It is quite another to support this view from a strictly
it had to be
Earthling perspective. Vonnegut's point is that insofar as men are guid-
done!
ed by the likes of Professor Rumfoord, they act as if the
justification
Tralfamadorians were real and their deterministic assumptions valid.
s
Yet Rumfoord's assertion that Dresden had to be is obviously false. The
distinguishing feature of the raid on Dresden is that there was no
strategic advantage to it whatsoever. The assertion is not a true exam-
ple oí foma because the notion of harmless untruths implies that there
so foma is not are also harmful untruths. Man must judge his lies by their conse-
just harmless quences, and the consequences are disastrous if people in power believe
untruth consequences
that Dresden was inevitable. In Vonnegut's view, the consequences are
of Dresden...
Vietnam, the ghettos, and a social order that seriously considers the
election of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States.
What Vonnegut has done in Sfoughterhouse-Five is "poison" his
readers with humanity. The term is his own:
what he wanted to
And it's been the university experience that taught me that there is a
very good reason that you catch people before they become generals do to politicians and
and presidents and so forth and you poison their minds with . . . those in charge!
humanity, and however you want to poison their minds, it's
presumably to encourage them to make a better world.1'
Vonnegut is not sanguine about the possibilities for this better world,
for he believes that the people in power really determine the quality of
life in any age. As he once told the graduating class at Bennington,
"Another great swindle is that people your age are supposed to save the
world. ... It isn't up to you. You don't have the money and the
74Robert Merrill and Peter A. Scholl

power. . . . It is up to older people to save the world" (W, p. 167).

Alas, the older people seem to respect men like Professor Rumfoord.
Yet the effort can and must be made to "poison" the young with more
humane values.
Vonnegut's Bennington speech has been grossly misrepresented by
those who would characterize him as a quietist. Glen Meeter, for ex-
ample, cites the passage just quoted as proof that Vonnegut is a
Tralfamadorian at heart.20 In doing so, Meeter ignores what Vonnegut
went on to tell the Bennington graduates: "When it really is time for
you to save the world, when you have some power and know your way
around, when people can't mock you for looking so young, I suggest
that you work for a socialist form of government" (W, pp. 167-68). He
ignores Vonnegut's blunt rejection of the Tralfamadorian view of man:
"Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in
the vastness of the universe. Still—I deny that contemptibility, and I
beg you to deny it" (W, p. 165).
note this
Slaughterhouse-Five presents much the same argument. The book
suggests that if there is any philosophical basis to the actions of men like important
Professor Rumfoord, it is a callous Social Darwinism. In this spirit part!!
Rumfoord tells his doctors "that people who were weak deserved to
die." But the doctors disagree, for they are "devoted to the idea that
weak people should be helped as much as possible" (p. 193) . Vonnegut everyone has
is devoted to the same idea. He has said again and again that whatever the power to
man's limitations he does have the power to change the conditions of effect a
human life. Slaughterhouse-Five defends this position so eloquently change!
because it blinks at none of the attendant problems. Vonnegut's self-
portrait is again crucial, for the depression he acknowledges in his own
history testifies to the terrible effort men must make if they would com-
mit themselves to an all but impossible task. No one knows better than
Vonnegut that the vast majority of comforting lies are insufficient. He
has recently redefinedfoma as "harmless untruths, intended to comfort
simple souls. An example: 'Prosperity is just around the corner' " (W, p.
xv) . It will take more than this sort of thing to defeat the "bad" illusions
of Marine majors and Air Force historians. But for those who are not
such simple souls, the alternative to concerted action is suicide.
Vonnegut's next novel, Breakfast of Champions, is about an un-
simple soul named Kurt Vonnegut who does contemplate suicide as a
viable option. It is about a man who seriously entertains the
Tralfamadorian view of man as machine, who has "come to the con-
clusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any
human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide
and collide."21 It is a novel about a man who is "rescued" from this
 Studies in American Fiction75

philosophical cul-de-sac by the assertion of one of his characters that

most of man's parts may be "dead machinery," but there is still "an un-
wavering band of light" in man, his human awareness, which must be
seen as sacred (BC, p. 226). Other men must see it this way, too, for as
Vonnegut says, ". . . there is no order to the world around us. . . .
We must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead" (BC, p.
215). Having so adapted himself, Vonnegut can say, in the subtitle to
Breakfast of Champions, "Goodbye Blue Monday!" This assertion is
dramatically unimpressive, but it does suggest that the author of
Slaughterhouse-Five knows very well that the requirements of chaos
demand human vigilance and not "resigned acceptance." Indeed, they
demand the insistence on humane practices which is the burden of
everything Vonnegut has written.22

Notes

¦Joe David Bellamy, ed., The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American
Writers (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1974), p. 206.
»Lynn Buck, "Vonnegut's World of Comic Futility," SAF, 3 (1975), 183, 196.
»Buck, p. 183.
4Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Wampeters, Foma £r Granfalloons (New York: Delacorte
Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1974), p. 165. Future references to this work will be incor-
porated into the text with the abbreviation W.
'See especially Clinton S. Burhans, Jr., "Hemingway and Vonnegut: Diminishing
Vision in a Dying Age," MFS, 21 (1975), 173-91.
"Leslie A. Fiedler, "The Divine Stupidity of Kurt Vonnegut," Esquire, 74
(September, 1970), 199.
'Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Mother Night (New York: Avon Books, 1967), p. v.
"Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., The Sirens of Titan (New York: Dell, 1970), pp. 25-26.
"Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Dell, 1971), pp. 26-27. Unless
otherwise noted, all future page references will be to this edition.
w'Playboy Interview: Anthony Burgess," Playboy, 21 (September, 1974), 74.
"Charles B. Harris, Contemporary American Novelists of the Absurd (New Haven:
College & University Press, 1971), p. 69.
"Alfred Kazin, Bright Book of Life (Boston: Little, Brownv and Co., 1973), p. 88.
13Tony Tanner, City of Words (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 200.
"See the following in The Vonnegut Statement, eds. Jerome Klinkowitz and John
Somer (New York: Delta, 1973): Jerome Klinkowitz, "Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, and
the Crime of Our Times," pp. 169, 176; Glen Meeter, "Vonnegut's Formal and Moral
Otherworldliness: Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five," pp. 217-19; John Somer,
"Geodesic Vonnegut; or, If Buckminster Fuller Wrote Novels," pp. 230, 237, 242, 251.
76Robert Merrill and Peter A . Scholl

"Mother Night, p. vii.

'"Harris, p. 51.
"Donald J. Greiner, "Vonnegut's Shughterhouse-Five and the Fiction of Atrocity,"
Critique, 14 (1973), 49.
18See Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of "As If", trans. C. K. Ogden (London,
1924) . For a discussion of this idea as it is related to literature, see Frank Kermode, The
Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967).
¦"Robert Scholes, "A Talk with Kurt Vonnegut," in The Vonnegut Statement, p. 107.
20See Meeter, p. 219.
21Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Breakfast of Champions (New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour
Lawrence, 1973), pp. 224-25. Future references to this work will be incorporated into the
text with the abbreviation BC.
22A number of this paper's conclusions are anticipated by Maurice J . O'Sullivan, Jr. in
his recent essay, "Slaughterhouse-Five: Kurt Vonnegut's Anti-Memoirs," Essays in
Literature, 3 (1976), 244-50. Published after the present essay was accepted for publica-
tion, O'Sullivan's reading of Shughterhouse-Five is much the most persuasive discussion of
the book to appear so far, though it does not go far enough in tracing either the logic or the
details of Vonnegut's fictional "argument" against quietism.