| A Duty Dance
with Death
To further explain Vonnegut's cosmic view on life as absurd, I will
discuss Vonnegut's perception on death with Billy as an example of the
absurdity in life. It is without doubt that SF is a war novel about
the historical incident of the Dresden firebombing, but as the subtitle
suggests it is also ''A Duty Dance with Death," which means ''No art is
possible without a dance with death" (21). As Klinkowitz clearly observes,
'' . . . death . . . pervades the novel¡Xone hundred deaths, of all
forms of life, do appear, an average of ten per chapter, far more separate
incidents of death than in even conventional war stories" (Reforming
87). Death is the most painful experience in war; therefore, to find out
the true nature of death is important in the discussion of the Dresden
firestorm.
Death does appear in various forms throughout the novel, which is exactly
the way death approaches and surrounds us. Whether it is the death of a
minor fictional character or the death of an important historical figure,
it is unpredictable and unavoidable. As the war story of Billy Pilgrim
proceeds, we encounter several minor characters' death. Roland Weary, the
torture maniac dies of ''gangrene that had started on his mangled feet"
(79). Edgar Derby, the high school teacher, is put on a trial and shot
dead for stealing a tea pot, which the author wants to put as the climax
of the story because the ''irony is so great" (5). Though Billy can fortunately
escape the firebombing of Dresden and survives from an airplane crash,
Billy is doomed to be killed by Paul Lazzaro, who wants to revenge Billy
for Weary's death. Billy's father dies in a hunting accident and his wife,
Valencia, dies from a car accident while she is driving to see Billy in
the hospital injured by an airplane crash. Billy's mother dies of disease
and old age, and she asks Billy an unanswerable question in her last few
words ''How did I get so old?"" The narrator's father dies from ''natural
causes "(210). From these various causes of death, Vonnegut reminds readers
the reality of human existence that ''even if wars didn't keep coming like
glaciers, there would still be plain old death" (4).
In addition to the fictional reality, Vonnegut also offers deaths of
the historical reality. There were about 135,000 people killed in the Dresden
firebombing; Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King are both shot dead;
'' . . . every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by
military science in Vietnam" (210). Moreover, there are other forms of
death that we usually don't pay any attention to or feel sorry for. ''The
champagne was dead" because ''it didn't make a pop" (73). ''Body lice and
bacteria and fleas were dying by the billions" (84). ''The water was dead"
as ''bubbles were clinging to the walls of the glass, too weak to climb
out" (101).
No matter what kind of death the author is describing, whether it is
the natural, the disastrous, or the grotesque, he gives the brief statement
''So it goes" as conclusion. It seems that the author does not care any
more about the death of the hundreds of victims killed in the war than
a lifeless object, such as a bottle of champagne. The painful experiences
of death and the tragedy of the war seem to be simplified and trivialized
by the overly reductive sentence. However, if we truly understand the nature
of death and human existence, then ''So it goes" is never reductive or
redundant. It functions as the wisdom to realize human mortality and the
necessity to accept it. No matter the kind of death mentioned is tragic
or trivial, natural or accidental, heroic or pathetic, they all co-exist
with other kinds of human experience and have the same ending. Thus, there
is nothing particular and extraordinary about death since we have been
living with it and will finally have to face it. The purpose of the juxtaposition
of the various forms of death and to give the same comment on them is to
remind readers the commonness of death. As Schriber suggests, '' War is
simply the absurdity of daily life raised to its highest power, and Slaughterhouse-Five
is peppered with daily and wartime absurdities until its innards become
a series of anti-norms, or ordering principles at variance with the expected,
the reasonable" (183).
William Rodney Allen also points out this perception of death projected
in the novel to affirm the positive and unsentimental function of the seemingly
nihilistic and pessimistic ''So it goes:"
¡¥So it goes' means [Vonnegut's] response to his reading
of Celine's
Journey to the End of Night: ¡¥It was a clumsy
way of saying what Celine managed to imply¡Kin every thing he wrote,
in effect: Death and suffering can't matter nearly as much as I think they
do. Since they are so common, my taking them so seriously must mean that
I am insane'. (Understanding 96)
A Black Humorist
Consequently, the repetitive ''So it goes" is no longer a phrase which
can be regarded as a projection of the author's fatalistic view. Instead,
structurally, its abrupt interruption of the narrative coherence shows
the similarity of all the occurrences of death and disaster in life. Thematically,
it corresponds to the attitude of ''black humor" instead of ''facile fatalism"
in the face of absurdity and unpredictability. Many critics identify Vonnegut's
writing style as ''black humor," which Vonnegut himself explains in this
way:
This [black humor] is middle European humor, a response to hopeless
situations. It's what a man says faced with a perfectly hopeless situation
and he still manages to say something funny. Freud gives example: A man
being led out to be hanged at dawn says, ¡¥Well, the day is certainly
starting well.' It's generally called Jewish humor in this country. Actually
it's humor from the peasants revolt. . . . It's small people being pushed
this way and that way, enormous armies and plagues and so forth, and still
hanging on in the face of hopelessness. Jewish jokes are middle European
jokes. And the black humorists are gallows humorists, as the try to be
funny in the face of situations which they see as just horrible. (qtd.
in Allen,
Conversation 56)
Vonnegut's apparent inability to draw meanings out of human deaths, therefore,
is actually an expression of a black-humorist view of life, which is to
retain a sense of humor in face of horror. Also, his lack of in-depth characterization
of Billy Pilgrim shows that Vonnegut sees Billy as one of ''the small people
being pushed this way and that way." People cannot always find explanations
or solutions to all the problems and disasters in life; instead, they can
only choose how to face them.
There is often confusion between Vonnegut's view with that of the character,
Billy Pilgrim, or the Tralfamadorian view. When Billy is first kidnapped
to the outer space, he asks a very ''earthling" question on why they choose
him. ''There is no why" answers the green creatures, because the moment
is simply like ''bugs trapped in the amber . . ." (76-77). When Billy asks
Tralfamadorians ''how can a planet live at peace," he gets a response from
those creatures as if he has asked the most stupid question they have ever
heard. Since for those creatures, ''the moment is structured that way"
and the whole universe will eventually be destroyed in an experiment with
new fuels (117). Actually, Vonnegut distinguishes the nihilistic and determinist
views of the Tralfamadorians from that of the author by the act of narrative
intrusion, which exposes the fictionality of the world of the green creatures,
and thus presents the world as only an alternative, not as a final or representation.
Therefore, the narrative intrusion becomes a powerful strategy as it prevents
Vonnegut from being a nihilist or determinist.
Still, the narrator in the opening and closing chapters faces a dilemma:
''There is nothing intelligent to say about the massacre," (19) because
the incident of Dresden firebombing is a grotesque, unexpected and incomprehensible
human experience. But Vonnegut as a writer has to look back. As Robert
Scholes in his essay ''Comedy of Extremity" points out, ''black humor"
is a way to ''both acknowledging its absurdity and showing how that very
absurdity can be encompassed by the human desire for form" (Fabulation
148). Also, James Lundquist shares the same points of view in his essay,
''Slaughterhouse-Five." He thinks that the author's task in writing a war
novel about an historical event is to ''bridge the increasing gap between
the horrors of life in the twentieth century and our imaginative ability
to comprehend their full actuality" (69). Consequently, how to find the
exact form to convey the incomprehensible historical incident becomes the
main task of the author in the constructing of the war novel.
Kilgore
Trout v.s. the Author
Since Vonnegut presents his view of life as absurd, the author has to
abandon the god-like power over the text and admit human limitation in
comprehending life's absurdity. As the novel is concerned with the act
of fictional writing, how Vonnegut presents the limits and the incapabilities
of the author in the face of absurdity and death becomes one of the focuses
in the examination of the authorial power. In the next part that follows,
I will discuss Kilgore Trout as the writer figure who serves as a reflection
on the author image. In SF, Trout's belittled image as an unprofessional
writer echoes the author/narrator's confession of his inability and failure
in composing the book. Taking the superior and all-knowing position of
a god would be inappropriate in dealing with subjects of death and disasters
because human power is limited and even futile in such case. However, the
help of Kilgore Trout's science fiction offers Billy a positive example
of the value of the struggling to compose a novel on the Dresden firestorm.
The act of writing is necessary in helping Billy and Eliot Rosewater to
''re-invent themselves and their universe," because ''[t]hey had both found
life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war " (101).
As Giannone points out, ''Survival is what Slaughterhouse-Five is
all about, and so to take up the question of the novel's survival links
form to action: the problem of living through the fire-bombing of Dresden
is rivaled by the problem of writing about it¡K" (Slaughterhouse
83).
Also, through the creation of Kilgore Trout and his novel ''Gospel from
Outer Space," Vonnegut uses the voice of the ridiculous and unsuccessful
writer character to make an ironical statement that ''slipshod storytelling
in the New Testament" makes Christians ''[find] it so easy to be cruel"
(108). Kilgore Trout, though belittled and trivialized, serves as the spokesperson
of Vonnegut to point out the flaw of the stories and revises the stories
by turning Jesus into a nobody, but still, when he dies ''the heavens opened
up" not because Jesus is ''the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe"
(109). At the same time, the creation of Kilgore Trout projects a negative
image on writers, a device that actually helps Vonnegut to speak the unspeakable.
Therefore, both Billy Pilgrim and Kilgore Trout are characters that empower
the author through the apparent powerlessness.
In addition to Kilgore Trout as a reflection of the author image, the
author surrogate who appears in the first and the final chapters of the
book and in the form of authorial intrusion, is also crucial in Vonnegut's
authorial power through denying. I would like to examine the necessity
of the exposition of the writing process and the author's confession of
his frustration in the composing of the book. Namely, how the narrator
realizes the importance to face the absurdity of life and the commonness
of death in the act of creating a war novel. Finally, I want to argue that
the exposure of the writing process actually shows the narrator's struggle
to fight against traditional fictional narrative in order to bring forth
the right form. The part that follows will be the second section of this
chapter. |
