Why “Slaughterhouse-Five” is the ‘True Novel’ of Kurt Vonnegut
By Luca Cavallo (Arts & Lit Editor)
Kurt Vonnegut wrote the most bizarrely original and varied works, yet they always revolved around a handful of complex themes, hitting them from a different angle every time. It’s said that a writer only ever writes one novel. Everything they write, even in the slightest of ways, is influenced by that one novel, the “true” novel. Of course, it’s easy to contest this theory, as many writers display masterful range in their careers, like Margaret Atwood, author of both The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace. But Vonnegut would probably agree that in the writing of his five novels before Slaughterhouse-Five (1965), he felt increasingly obliged with every book to face his experience in World War Two, specifically his witness to the Dresden Firebombing in 1945.
Vonnegut never wrote about war. He never treated it as something worthy of accounting in his writing. Some of his short stories, such as “Great Day” and “All the King’s Horses”, deal with battle and violence directly, but his novels almost always take a philosophical, retrospective view of war. We can see this in Cat’s Cradle, a novel for which Vonnegut was awarded a master’s degree in anthropology. Cat’s Cradle involves the grown children of Felix Hoenikker, the inventor of a doomsday weapon, “ice-nine”. In his writing, Vonnegut is seething at the thought of how little attention is paid to those who suffered from the advanced warfare of WWII. He includes a faux religion in the novel, “Bokononism”. This religion introduces the reader to a handful of Bokonist terms, including “karass”, a group of people who, willingly or not, influence your destiny. Vonnegut himself assembled his own karass with his characters. Their purpose was, I believe, to help him come to terms with how he would approach Dresden.
The novels leading up to Slaughterhouse-Five, arguably Vonnegut’s greatest triumph, are a perfect example of how a writer gradually progresses to their true novel. This can be seen through the karass of recurring characters that Vonnegut created. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) introduced the eponymous Eliot Rosewater, who played a role later on in Slaughterhouse-Five, as well as Vonnegut’s most frequently reappearing character, the weird and wonderful Kilgore Trout. Mr. Rosewater holds the first instance of Vonnegut’s many renditions of the Dresden Firebombing. He treats it as nothing more than a hallucination in Mr. Rosewater, though he imagines it in his hometown of Indianapolis, not Germany.
“It was the largest massacre in European history, by the way. And so what?” Vonnegut wrote of Dresden in his introduction to the 1966 edition of Mother Night (1961). This novel introduces Howard W. Campbell, Jr., who poses as a Nazi, spying for the Allies, but can never find the truth about who he really was. Campbell is an example of what ignorance and a lack of hindsight can do to a person. It’s possible that Vonnegut could have ended up like Campbell, had he not chosen to grapple with his trauma. Not literally speaking, as Campbell ends up on trial as a Nazi propagandist. But as a writer, Campbell abandons his playwriting in favour of speeches to aid Joseph Goebbels. He could not balance enjoyment and serious work. Vonnegut never let this happen to himself. He has been praised for subverting the expectations of both high and low art, writing wild, irreverent stories with profound themes. Campbell is another character to recur in Slaughterhouse-Five. In retrospect, Campbell now appears as the foolish Nazi he never wished to become, and Vonnegut’s narrative can now mock him.
Slaughterhouse-Five assembles two components of his previous work. The karass, Vonnegut’s most prominent characters, as well as the “Tramalfadorians”, an alien race introduced in The Sirens of Titan (1959). Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck in time”, and the chronological order of his lifetime is chopped up and spread out at random. He encounters Kilgore Trout, introduced to him by Trout’s single fan, Eliot Rosewater. Billy and Rosewater have a unique connection, “dealing with similar crises in similar ways”, each referring to what they had seen and done in the war. Billy’s crisis, of course, is Dresden.
Hauled back to Dresden at any given moment of his life, Billy struggles to move on. As Lazzaro tells him, “nothing’s gonna happen for maybe five, ten, fifteen, twenty years”, but Billy literally relives his trauma regularly in a harrowing analogy of P.T.S.D. With his previous work at his side, Vonnegut gained the confidence to write his true novel, and face the damage that Dresden left upon him. For a writer of his generation, this is a triumph like no other.
