Love and Time and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

 My 12th Grade Honors English teacher had us read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse -Five. The test was to put the book in chronological order. I cannot recall how well I did on the test, but I think I gave the wrong answers. During prison, I thought about this and came up with this answer: it all happens at the same time.

I What shaped Kurt Vonnegut’s warped conception of time (and death)? by Tim Brinkhof agrees with me.

First, an aside:

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“Stephen Hawking, in his 1988 bestseller A Brief History of Time, found it tantalizing that we could not remember the future,” Kurt Vonnegut writes in the introduction of his book Slaughterhouse-Five. “But remembering the future is child’s play for me now. I know what will become of my helpless, trusting babies because they are grown-ups now. I know how my closest friends will end up because so many of them are retired or dead now…”

Kurt Vonnegut, a prominent American literary writer from the 20th century, uses simple diction and sentence structure to tackle infinitely complex questions. From Harrison Bergeron — set in a dystopian U.S. where smart people are made dumber to promote intellectual equality — to Cat’s Cradle, which is about the search for a world-ending superweapon, Vonnegut’s novels are typically about characters grappling with the idea that they lack control over their own destinies.

Slaughterhouse-Five, his most famous work, follows a World War II soldier who is taken prisoner by the Nazis and narrowly survives Allied bombings on the city of Dresden. Years later, the soldier — named Billy Pilgrim — is abducted by flying saucer and taken to the planet Tralfamadore, where he is placed inside a zoo for the entertainment of plumber-shaped aliens capable of perceiving all of the spacetime continuum at once.

Dresden bombing

The ruins of Dresden. (Credit: Bundesarchiv / Wikipedia)

Because Vonnegut is a deeply ironic and black-humored writer, some readers believe Billy, whom we are told suffers from PTSD, did not actually visit Tralfamadore. Rather, they argue that the episode is a hallucination created by his mind to process traumatic memories from the war. However, according to Salman Rushdie, who wrote an article about Slaughterhouse-Five for The New Yorker, this interpretation does not hold up.

“The truth,” writes Rushdie, “is that ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ is a great realist novel.” Kurt Vonnegut not only appears inside the novel as narrator, but also bases the plot on his own wartime experiences. Like Billy, Vonnegut was drafted into the Second World War and sent to Europe, taken prisoner after the Battle of the Bulge, and thrown into a subterranean slaughterhouse in Dresden, which, in an absurd twist of fate, allowed him to survive the bombing.

I have thought it only a partially realistic novel, but (and I will hate it when I tell this to KH) it may have been an influence on my "Chasing Ashes." KH thinks my protagonist is delusional when what I have tried to do is bring alive our cultural baggage.

But about time, think on this:

Vonnegut’s non-linear understanding of time, expressed through Rumfoord in Sirens of Titan and the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five has its advantages. “Time,” argues one critic, “since it leads inevitably to death—is the real enemy of Vonnegut-as-character. Death seems too real for Vonnegut to omit from his reinvented cosmos, but by reinventing the nature of time, Vonnegut deprives death of its sting.” 

Again, Kurt Vonnegut’s characters help illustrate this abstract concept through their choice of words. “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore,” says Billy, “was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past (…) All moments past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist…When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.”

I did not get to read all of Vonnegut while in prison; COVID got in the way. This was to make up for having shied away from him as I got older.  What I found was he was better than I recalled and what was best about him was his humanism, his sad love for humanity and life. We all can keep in mind those we loved when the times were best. It is not rank sentimentality. It is what keeps us alive this loving other people.

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