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Title: Notes Towards An Analysis of Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut Jr

Author: Roger Day

Date: Summer, 2005

Slaughterhouse 5 is written in a simple, paratactic style. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines parataxis as 'the placing of clauses or phrases one after another, without the use of connecting words the relation (of coordination) between them' (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary,1993, p2098). For example:

ALL THIS HAPPENED, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed the names (Vonnegut, 2000, p1).

With this style, prose becomes a dry 'laundry-list' which tends towards verse and a democratic hierarchy of statements, a flat hierarchy that does not seek to explain (see Lanman, 2003, p29-33). Parataxis is so pronounced in Slaughter House 5 that we are forced to ask: what purpose does it serve? At it's heart, Slaughterhouse 5 is a book about war, which attempts to be against war. One of Kurt Vonnegut's strategies is to make war as un-exciting, dreary and wretched as possible:

The coat Billy Pilgrim got had been crumpled and frozen in such a way , and was so small, that it appeared to be not a coat but a large black, three-cornered hat. There were gummy stains on it, too, like crankcase drainings or old strawberry jam. There seemed to be a dead, furry animal frozen to it. The animal was in fact the coats collar.

Billy glanced dully at the coats of his neighbours. Their coats had all brass buttons or tinsel or piping or numbers or stripes or eagles or moons or stars dangling from them. They were soldiers' coats. Billy was the only one who had a coat from a dead civilian. So it goes.

And Billy and the rest were encouraged to shuffle around their dinky train and into the prison camp. There wasn't anything warm or lively to attract them -- merely long, low, narrow sheds by the thousands, with no lights inside.

Somewhere a dog barked. With the help of fear and echoes and winter silences, that dog had a voice like a big bronze dog.

Billy and the rest were wooed through gate after gate, and Billy saw his first Russian. The man was all alone in the night -- a ragbag with a round, flat face that glowed like a radium dial.

Billy passed within a yard of him. There was barbed wire between them. The Russian did not wave or speak, but he looked directly into Billy's soul with sweet hopefulness, as though Billy might have good news for him -- news he might be too stupid to understand, but good news all the same (Vonnegut, 2000, p59).

The humour of the situation is drained by the flat way in which Billy Pilgrim is described, and we are transported to the fatalism that he endures. Even the distance between his clothes and those of his fellow soldiers is just that: a distance with no humour. When the P.O.W.s enter the prison for the first time one might expect some tension, some excitement but the flat style dampens the atmosphere. Vonnegut does not attempt to explain the stories actions, for example, there is no explanation as to why the Russian is there by the gate or why he is all alone. War, in Vonnegut's hands is not hell, rather a more banal affair, with it's cast on a fatalistic trajectory. On the other hand parataxis, in Kurt Vonnegut's hands, has its limits. Kurt Vonnegut has made a fundamental judgement against war, yet parataxis is a flat hierarchy of statements so Kurt Vonnegut to resort to 'tell' rather than just 'show': by the end of the second paragraph, Billy's character still retains some pathos hence sympathy so in an attempt to emphasise the mundane, quotidian nature of Billy Pilgrim's predicament, Kurt Vonnegut adds the paratactic phrase 'And so it goes' to end of the paragraph to reinforce the seems of inevitability and dreariness.

A paratactic style is shared across a range of American tough-guy fiction of authors living in and around the historical moment of both world wars who took the paratactic style and made it reflect the realities of life as they saw it. Take, for example, this paragraph from Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye:

I opened it and found a plastic bottle with red capsules in it. Seconal, 1½ grains. Prescription by Dr. Loring. That nice Dr. Loring. Mrs. Roger Wade's prescription (Raymond Chandler, 1971, p161).

Or Dashiel Hammett's The Maltese Falcon:

The boy turned and faced Spade. His face was a ghastly white blank. He kept his hands in his overcoat pockets. He looked at Spade's chest and did not say anything (Dashiel Hammett, 1975, p111).

Or the grand-daddy of the tough-guy school, Ernest Hemingway, in A Farewell To Arms with his 'famous tight-lipped syntactic reserve' (Lanman 2003):

We were quiet awhile and did not talk. Catherine was sitting on the bed and I was looking at her but we did not touch each other. We were apart as when some one comes into a room and people are self-conscious. She put out her hand and took mine. (Hemingway, 2004, p 125)

All these authors served with measures of distinction in bloody campaigns, and all had jobs outside of writing. Hemingway served in the ambulance corps rather than fighting. Chandler came from a business background. Hamnett served in the Pinkerton Agency. Vonnegut worked at various jobs, including that of crime reporter, a frequent stereotypical occupation in film noir or pulp fiction; after the war, and before he wrote Slaughter House 5, he taught creative writing, his key difference with these authors. However 'tight-lipped syntactic reserve' whilst it may reflect the brutalities of action can become the measure of how a man - and in the period Vonnegut was writing, they were all men - should act under duress and this is reflected in a lot of successful film adaptations of tough-guy books. Vonnegut states boldly that there would not 'be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne' (Vonnegut, 2000, p11) in his book. However, Billy Pilgrim may not act with the false heroism of, for example, his companion Weary, who thinks of himself and the scouts as part of the 'Three Musketeers' (Vonnegut, 2000, p35) but Billy Pilgrim does survive, he takes his punishment with stoicism. He does not desert nor does he commit treason. The mapping of parataxis and action is quite uncanny however Kurt Vonnegut is writing against action - action is the glamorisation of war - and his sentences lapse into repetition when he tries to write action into inaction:

Kurt Vonnegut emphasises the poetic tendency of the paratactic style by organising each chapter into groups of paragraphs separated by a double space, each section starting with a out-dented paragraph:

And so on to infinity. ...

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.

And, even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death

When I was somewhat younger, working on my famous Dresden book, I asked an old war buddy named Bernard V. O'Hare if I could come to see him (Kurt Vonnegut, 2000, p2)

Each group of paragraphs forms an intact unit of narration. Kurt Vonnegut starts each unit with a declarative statement and ends with a declarative statement like so:

The only light outside came from a single bulb which hung from a pole -- high and far away. ... So it goes (Kurt Vonnegut, 2000, p58).

The trip to Dresden was a lark. ... The only other city I'd ever seen was Indianapolis, Indiana (Kurt Vonnegut, 2000, p107).

Typically, the unit does not break the action but continues it from another angle:

... and Billy didn't really like life at all.

Billy heard Eliot Rosewater come in and lie down (Vonnegut, 2000, p74).

Kurt Vonnegut seems to comment obliquely on this style when he writes in the voice of the Tralfamadorians:

'There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you're right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message - describing a situation , a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvellous moments seen all at one time.' (Vonnegut, 2000, p 64).

Both literary and filmic narratives equal time spent, so that the leap from scene to scene Slaughterhouse 5 becomes an extended series of filmic cuts, where

A camera cut changes the perspective from which a scene is portrayed. It's as if the viewer suddenly and instantly moved to a different place, and could see the scene from another angle. Often this is done without missing any action (a seamless cut) (Wikipedia, 2005).

Slaughterhouse-5 is a collection of fragments which forces the reader to do several things: view Billy Pilgrim's character as a whole, as built up through a collage; view time as seen by the Tralfamadorians, time as a tangible; view the novel as a single piece rather than a linear series of scenes.

Kurt Vonnegut uses two devices to hold the fragments together, or continuity if you will: repetition and first person narrative, or a running style.

With repetition, he repeats phrases across the different scenes, often far apart in the book. For example, "mustard gas and roses" crops up here:

Billy answered. There was a drunk at the other end. Billy could almost smell his breath - mustard gas and roses (Vonnegut, 2000, p53).

and here:

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses (Vonnegut, 2000, p3).

and here:

And I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know that I like him, and he lets me know he likes me. He doesn't mind the smell of mustard gas and roses (Vonnegut, 2000, p5).

The book, "The Red Badge of Courage", appears on p71 in one scene and re-appears on p76 in another scene, both scenes describing Billy Pilgrim's visit to the hospital in the camp where he is attended by Edgar Derby, who is reading said book (Vonnegut, 2000). The phrase "radium dials" appears on p59, twice on p65 (Vonnegut, 2000).

In literary terms, collections of fragments are usually termed a collage. A collage is a 'an abstract form of art in which photographs, pieces of paper, string, match-sticks etc are placed in juxtaposition to each other and glued to a surface' (OED, 1993, p438). Moreover, it is a 'jumbled collection of impressions, events, styles etc' (passim). This certainly ties in with Vonnegut's description of his own style: 'It is so short and jumbled and and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre' (Vonnegut, 2000, p14). Yet, as we have seen, Vonnegut employs various cinematic techniques. At one level, a montage is a 'cinematic collage' (Wikipedia, 2005) at another, Sergei Eisenstein looked at at in a wider context:

[Eisenstein] regarded montage as a dialectical means of creating notions. By contrasting unrelated shots he tried to provoke associations in the viewer, which were induced by shocks. In effect the film was aimed at transcending the level of mere presentation of realities and at explaining the conflict character of reality and the reasons underlying this conflict. This form of editing is known as intellectual montage (Wikipedia, 2005).

It is clear that Kurt Vonnegut is aiming for this kind of explanation.

In Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut uses the cinema to inform his paratactic style. As Billy waits to be kidnapped for the first time, he watches a war-movie. It's a generic raid by American bombers on France, but he runs through the action in reverse (Vonnegut, 2000, p53), a scene that would not have been possible without cinema. Kurt Vonnegut maintains a directorial presence throughout the novel, at times inserting himself, Hitchcock-like, into the action: 'That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book (Vonnegut, 2000, p91).' However, Vonnegut, as we have seen, turns his fiction against the glamour of the cinema, to be as un-filmic as possible, to have no part for a Frank Sinatra or a John Wayne (Vonnegut, 2000, p11). To be a film, there has to be a sense of the long-shot and the close-up, the epic and the personal. One thinks of the first time we see the Ringo Kid in 'Stagecoach' (John Ford, 1939), a long shot of a cowboy on the open-range, then a close-up of his face. Kurt Vonnegut removes any traces of a long shot from his writing in Slaughterhouse 5. He also removes the traditional climax: in the first chapter he says that he has a epic climax with the killing of Edgar Derby for a crime he did not commit amongst the ruins of Dresden, which is a crime someone did commit, where 'the irony is so great' (Vonnegut, 2000, p4). In spite of trailing Edgar Derby's death several times throughout the book, his death is given a small paragraph towards the end of the book (Vonnegut, 2000, p157).

Parataxis seen on a wider focus leads to a running style, a narrative that shows no sign of organisation other than following the author as they think, moment to moment (see Lanman, 2003, p49). It is the second device that the author uses to hold Slaughterhouse 5 'together'. In Slaughterhouse 5, the author narrates the story to you the reader in the first person most obviously in chapters 1 and 10 and carries on through the other chapters. Chapters 2 and 6 are introduced by 'Listen:' (Vonnegut, 2000, p17 and p99). Chapter 5 begins with 'Billy Pilgrim says' (Vonnegut, 2000, p63). Chapter 9 begins with 'Here is how Billy Pilgrim lost his wife, Valencia' (Vonnegut, 2000, p133). For eight chapters, the author relates to you the reader the story of Billy Pilgrim. The whole book is written in the narrative time-space of the author, in the present tense. In some respects, this mimics the voice-over from many a film-noir.

Sometimes, Kurt Vonnegut inserts himself, Hitchcock-like into the story-line. He does this five times with a direct 'I': at the surrender (ibid, p156); in the boxcar with Billy Pilgrim on the way to the prison camp (ibid, p108); when, with the rest of US P.O.W.s, he is 'excreting his brains' into the latrine after their badly timed too-hearty meal (ibid, p91); when Kurt Vonnegut is witness to Wild Bob's death (p49). He also intervenes indirectly. For example, 'mustard and roses' appears here:

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses (Vonnegut, 2000, p3).

then re-appears here:

Billy answered. There was a drunk at the other end. Billy could almost smell his breath - mustard gas and roses (Vonnegut, 2000, p53).

The author also does more than this. The 'I' of the author is represented at one remove by Billy Pilgrim, also by Kilgore Trout but he is also. It is as if Kurt Vonnegut is playing a game of hide and seek with the reader. On the one hand he denies Billy Pilgrim the fullness of being human, on the other, he decorates Billy Pilgrim with the some of the trappings of his own life. Both Billy Pilgrim and Kurt Vonnegut have Luftwaffe swords: 'Billy had a sabre, too. It was a Luftwaffe ceremonial sabre (Vonnegut, 2000, p 142).'; 'I had a ceremonial Luftwaffe sabre, still do (Vonnegut, 2000, p 5)'. This sense of remove is reinforced by the death of the two scouts after ditching Weary and Pilgrim (ibid, p39) when we know that Kurt Vonnegut was a scout in the Second World War (ibid, p3). This membrane of remove, of authorial control, is pierced sometimes by the insertion of the authorial I. It is this play with the biographical elements of Slaughterhouse 5 which both denies the biography, but, at the same time, Kurt Vonnegut seeks to use his authority of the eyewitness report, to try and make Slaughterhouse 5 more than just a work of fiction. It is the attempted intersection of the author with the (then) leading edge of history, that gives this book it's lasting resonance.

The scenes fall roughly into three categories: the war, Billy Pilgrim's family and Tralfamadore. For convenience, I will call them 'threads'. Transition between one thread and another is handled by what can be described as a 'jump-cut', where 'a jump cut is a cut in film editing that breaks continuity in time' (Wikipedia, 2005). For example in a transition phase between the science fiction and the :

Moments after that, the saucer entered a time warp, and Billy was flung back into his childhood. He was twelve years old, quaking as he stood with his mom and father on Bright Angel Point at the rim of the Grand Canyon (Vonnegut, 2000, p64).

From Chapter 7, after the description of the crash (ibid, p114), time-travel is complemented by more conventional flashbacks and memories, for example Billy remembers the night of the raid (ibid, p129) rather than time-travelling to it.

In spite of Kurt Vonnegut following this hyper-realised running-style, with Billy Pilgrim bouncing erratically amongst scenes of his own life, each thread follows an arc. The family thread starts with a discussion of Billy Pilgrim's time problems plus his birth in Ilium, New York (Vonnegut, 2000, p 17) and ends with the destruction of his family when he broadcasts his 'truths' about the Tralfamadorians (Vonnegut, 2000, p144-151). The war thread starts with Billy Pilgrim going to war (Vonnegut, 2000, p22) and ends with his escape from the prison (Vonnegut, 2000, p157). The science-fiction thread begins with his abduction (Vonnegut, 2000, p54) and seems to reach some sort of equilibrium with Montana Wildhack in their prison on Tralfamadore (Vonnegut, 2000, p151).

Each thread also occupies it's own set of issues: the bestiality of the military in the war thread, the major philosophical issues in the science-fiction thread and Billy Pilgrim's disintegration in the family thread. The Dresden and Tralfamadore threads subvert and mimic the ideas and attitudes in the family thread which charts the disintegration of Billy Pilgrim's life as a suburban family man and his rise as a religious leader expounding the ideas of the Tralfamadorians.

The American soldiers in Slaughterhouse 5 are stripped of the qualities normally associated with the military: discipline, honour, pride, competence. The only two competent soldiers, the infantry scouts, are killed early on (Vonnegut, 2000, p39). He progressively worsens Billy Pilgrim's appearance from the moment he steps onto the battlefield, from a pair of shoes that make him appear to dance (Vonnegut, 2000, p24) to wearing a pair of silver shoes, a blue toga and hands in a muff (Vonnegut, 2000, p99-111). Weary is a tyro anti-tank gunner whose gun gets blown up because of his incompetence (Vonnegut, 2000, p25). Ultimately, he takes away their humanity, for example when the German prison camp guards meet the American P.O.W.s for the first time:

They [the German guards] had never dealt with Americans before, but they surely knew this general sort of freight. They knew that it was a essentially a liquid which could be induced to flow slowly toward cooing and light (Vonnegut, 2000, p58).

However the Americans soldiers are not portrayed as cowardly or traitorous. The one American who is a traitor is Howard W. Campbell, on leave from 'Mother Night'. He is a traitor in the Lord Haw Haw mould, having sided with the enemy before the war, and at the time of the war, a German playwright-poet with a dead German wife. In Chapter 8, he comes to Slaughterhouse 5 to recruit men for 'The American Free Corps', a would-be unit of American deserters (ibid, p118). He has no takers. Indeed, Edgar Derby when faced by Howard W Campbell provides a dramatic rebuttal of the latter's advances (ibid, p119).

Kurt Vonnegut focuses on the worst aspects of humanity in these situations, and the American's situation, a long forced march to a prison camp by an under-equipped, almost defeated army, must count as dire. The American soldiers are portrayed as vicious, nasty, weak, petty, delusional, clown-like, inefficient, vindictive. Weary is a would-be torturer and imaginary member of the Three Musketeers along with the two scouts (Vonnegut, 2000, pp17-37), who, for the most part, is either trying to kill Billy Pilgrim for an imagined wrong (Vonnegut, 2000, pp36-37) or trying to get others to kill him (Vonnegut, 2000, p57). Lazzaro, a fellow prisoner on the train to Dresden, promises to have Billy Pilgrim killed after the war for letting Weary die (Vonnegut, 2000, p101). 'Poor' , patriotic, Edgar Derby who is executed, so we are told many times, for stealing a teapot. The vainglorious 'Wild' Bob Cody dieing of pneumonia, wanting to have his troops call him 'Wild Bob' and meet them in reunions after the war in Cody, Wyoming, thinking his destroyed battalion had won a great victory (Vonnegut, 2000, p48-49). By the time we get to Robert Pilgrim in his neat, heroic Ranger's uniform (ibid p138) , and the political aspects of the Dresden raid (ibid, pp135-143), we are primed to be sceptical of anything military.

The American soldiers biggest humiliation is after being fed a too-rich welcome meal by the English: they have diarrhoea in the prison-camp's perfunctory latrines (Vonnegut, 2000, p91). It is after this episode that the English, disgusted by the American's behaviour, separate themselves into another hut (Vonnegut, 2000, p100).

The English, playing against type for an American audience, seem to act as a comic counterpoint to the Americans. They introduce the Americans to the camp with a rendition of 'Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here' from the Pirates of Penzance (Vonnegut, 2000, p67). They are athletic, well-groomed, and cheerful in the centre of a lot of starving Russians. The irony is that this is due to a clerical error which sees the English receive 'five hundred parcels every month instead of fifty' (Vonnegut, 2000, p68). Mostly, though, they act as a model for the Germans of what their enemies should look like: 'They [the English prisoners] made the war look stylish and reasonable, and fun' (Vonnegut, 2000, p68).

The Germans mock the American soldiers and Billy Pilgrim in particular. The American conscripts, in their bedraggled, exhausted state, are photographed for propaganda purposes (ibid, p42). Billy Pilgrim is looked on in an exasperated manner (ibid, p110). Billy Pilgrim with his clownish garb, reduces war to the level of clowns. The prouder, the fiercer, the enemy, the better you feel about the war, the worthier you look when you defeat him or her. Which is why the Germans like the healthy Englishman (ibid, p68). Billy Pilgrim undermines this attitude.

The overall picture of the Germans that emerges from Slaughterhouse 5 is a sympathetic one. They are, after all, the victims in the massacre of Dresden. There is more to it than this, though. For example, amongst the ramshackle group - it is near the end of the war and Germany is running out of troops - that captures Billy Pilgrim, is a boy 'as beautiful as eve' (ibid, p39). We meet Werner Gluck, a Dresden boy taking Billy Pilgrim to Dresden (ibid, p114). Kurt Vonnegut makes him a distant cousin of Billy Pilgrim, which is strange as Billy Pilgrim is the author's alter ego and the latter's family family is of German descent. On the other hand, he knows about the Jewish Holocaust and soap bars from a Chicago professor (ibid, p7) which is echoed later on when the British are handing out bars of soap and candles (ibid, p69). Still the subsequent 'so it goes' (passim) seems a little inadequate at this stage.

The raid on Dresden forms the dark heart of this book, Kurt Vonnegut and Billy Pilgrim. It is an attack on a city of refugees by one of the 'thousand-bomber raids' so popular with the RAF's Bomber Command in those days. Kurt Vonnegut calls the raid a 'massacre' (ibid, p14, p73) and he spends the first chapter describing his attempts to come to grips with the raid and it's consequences for him and America.

Billy Pilgrim's stay in Slaughterhouse 5 is the vortex around which the rest of the book swirls. The effect of the description is dramatic as there is a large delay from the first chapter, where Kurt Vonnegut describes his efforts to write about the massacre, to it's eventual description on page 129 (Vonnegut, 2000). In keeping with the paratactic style, the description of the raid is flat, workaday:

He was down in the meat-locker on the night that Dresden was destroyed. There were sounds like giant footsteps above. Those of sticks of high-explosive bombs. The giants walked and walked. The meat locker was a very safe shelter (ibid, p129).

The raid is there and gone in a single scene. It's consequences, both fictional and real, last a lot longer.

At the heart of Slaughterhouse is a war-crime, a 'massacre'. It is different, say, from the fire-bombing of Hamburg. Prior to the raid, people think that Dresden will never be bombed, it's an 'open city', 'undefended, and contains no war industries or troop concentrations of any importance (ibid, pp106-107)'. Apart from the nightly black-out, against bombers which never came (ibid, p114), it was almost a city in peacetime, complete with it's peacetime architecture. Given that we were the 'good guys' in the Second World War, it is unsurprising, then, that the Allies wish to keep the raid secret (ibid, p8). The USAF even go as far as omitting the raid from their official history (ibid, p139).

Postwar, the secrecy was untenable, and the American people had to be told. Rumfoord, the military historian sharing Billy Pilgrim's hospital after his plane crash, has to write a 'one volume history of the United States Army Air Corps in World War 2' (ibid, p134) so it is his job to fill in the gaps. However, admitting that it was policy to bomb civilian populations was becoming unacceptable, as this had become a war-crime, making even the staff officers who ordered such actions liable. Certainly this was the view of the judge overseeing the My Lai trials:

If the staff knew the aerial bombardment was to specifically target civilians as part of a terror campaign to break the civilian populace's morale , superior orders should not be an available defense (Combined Arms Center Military Review, 2001).

One of 'Bomber' Harris's stated aims was to break the civilian populace's morale (find reference) and his defense was 'I was just obeying orders'. Fortunately for him, the current Geneva conventions could not be applied retrospectively. However, the secretive machinations of the US government and the restraint of the British in according Bomber Command decorations and the subsequent controversy surrounding 'Bomber' Harris's campaign, only point to a cover-up. Elsewhere, we see a long skein of apologia woven from the disputed events of the Second World War, Dresden, Nagasaki and Horishima. The apologia has two forms: war is war or it was a terrible mistake. For the former, Kurt Vonnegut quotes Harry S Truman on the nuclear bomb (ibid 135), and an introduction by an American General to a David Irving book, The Destruction of Dresden (ibid 136). For the latter, another quote from the same book (ibid, p137).

The reasons for the cover-up and evasions are clear: in the general discourse about the Second World war, "we", the Allies, are the good guys. If we are seen to have done wrong, committed a crime, then that lessens the wrongs of the defeated, and introduces relativity into the discourse. The fact that Vonnegut subtitles Slaughterhouse 5 "The Childrens Crusade" only underlines the moral dubiousness of the Allies in the Second World War. However, and this is probably one of the reasons why Slaughterhouse 5 is a failure, this particular cat has not yet been let out of the bag. An official apology from the British or US Government has yet to be issued, even up to the Queens recent visit to Dresden (Washington Times). This is one of the reasons why Slaughterhouse 5 is still an active force, borne along on the edges of this continuing discourse, particularly when it postulates that the Allies are guilty as charged.

If one accepts that this is indeed a massacre or war crime, then the Germans become victims. It is certainly true of Slaughterhouse that the Germans are seen in a sympathetic light, with the Holocaust given less weight, less coverage than the role for Germans as prison-warders and meat for the grinder of the Allied Airforces. Kurt Vonnegut's family are of German descent, and the Billy Pilgrim figure is given a German relation. Kurt Vonnegut does not really touch the victim/oppressor conflict.

But what, then, of the anti-war aspect? Slaughterhouse 5 has two traitors: Slovik (ibid, p32) and the hideous Howard W Campbell figure (ibid, p118). To take the stance of being against war, one must at some stage refuse to go to war. This, ultimately, is treason. Kurt Vonnegut seems to pull back from this position, he cannot make his characters commit treason, even for the greater good. Indeed, he puts a patriotic speech into the mouth of Edgar Derby to refute Campbell's recruitment drive (ibid, p119). Also, the only two competent soldiers are the infantry scouts, one of whom must map onto Kurt Vonneguts military record. In any event, Kurt Vonnegut seems to have lost his politics:

We were United World Federalists back then. I don't know what we are now. Telephoners, I guess. We telephone a lot -- or I do, anyway, late at night (Vonnegut, 2000, p8).

The subtitle A Childrens Crusade is also telling. The Childrens Crusade was a pointless 'invasion' by children from Europe of the Middle East in the Middle Ages. If one takes this from an American perspective, it seems that Kurt Vonnegut is condemning the US presence in the Second World War. He comes across as an American Isolationist. On the other hand, riding the consumer boom of the fifties/early sixties, it probably seemed as if hope for a radical future for his generation was dead, particularly with the ongoing conflicts in South East Asia. In the hospital, as his soldier son goes to speak to Billy Pilgrim, Billy 'closed his eyes again' (ibid, p138).

Billy Pilgrim's post-war life is lived in a time of riches for the US. It is the start of the long post-war boom and he has a wealthy optometric practice by dint of marriage and the General Forge and Foundry company who require their employees to wear glasses (ibid, pp17-18). He is a solid professional man with a wife, 2 children and a member of the Lions club (ibid, p43). His mother boasts about him to Rosewater (ibid, p73) and he gives a 'star sapphire cocktail ring' to his wife (ibid p124). In this he somewhat like Kurt Vonnegut and Bernard V O'Hare who, like a lot of Americans who had fought in the war, 'had never expected to make money after the war' (ibid p3) ; there the similarity ends. Even as he is 'coming up in the world', his self-destruction begins.

Bibliography

Hemingway, Ernest. (2004). A Farewell To Arms. England , Random House.

Lanham, Richard A. (2003). Analyzing Prose 2nd Ed. New York: Continuum.

Vonnegut, K. (2000). Slaughterhouse 5. England: Vantage.