Postmodern interpretation of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim and David Irving: Tralfamadorians in Training

Where Billy Pilgrim begins, Kurt Vonnegut ends and this is where David Irving intrudes for good measure. However this is what makes the post-modern interpretation of this book so interesting (at least to this author). Certainly, an all pervading odor of fatalism and cynicism colors the work and one can certainly not blame Vonnegut for this. A veteran of any war goes off to the conflict a boy and comes back an old man. All of the moments that they were in combat, captivity or any other aspect of their military service colors their perception of the world. In this postmodern classic, the difference between real and the non-real is not clear cut. Vonnegut keeps us guessing as to what is real in all dimensions, including time and space.

After all, how many of us would view the world differently from the subterranean vault of a meat locker like Slaughterhouse Five? In the very real world, human flesh is burning and the holocaust offered to the god of war eats at the conscience of the young soldier. After all, he asks himself a basic question of war, "why did I survive?" Many of his buddies died in the Battle of the Bulge. Many more of his fellow human beings were incinerated in the hellish kiln of Dresden. Even allowing for the nauseating nature of David Irving's revisionist views on the slaughter of six million Jews during World War 2, a very point is raised, that is what happened to the good Germans? Unfortunately, a lot of them were being slaughtered in fire bombings like Dresden and Hamburg. After all, if you slaughter the antichrist's enemies, what else can you say against the Whore of Babylon? Perhaps God is only one who can sort it out. After all, Vonnegut did not ask to go to Dresden to support Irving's work. The nexus is purely accidental.

While it is beyond the purview of this limited essay to analyze Allied bombing theory during World War 2 or afterward, it did have a huge impact upon Vonnegut. In a comment by Vonnegut himself from the 1976 edition of his book, states succinctly in a short space that what happened in his view was that "The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in (Bonin). "

or, as is a fitting epitaph for Vonnegut throughout Slaughterhouse Five is "so it goes." This phrase is spoken every time in the novel when there is a death fitting focus for the terminal irony of Dresden and Vonnegut's journey into postmodernism. His numbers are based upon David Irving's flawed work of holocaust denial hedge:

However, Oliver Kamm in the Times Online takes a more precise view:

But ultimately the simplicity is not deceptive. Vonnegut's philosophy and history are simplistic. Dresden was hellish -- but there were not 135,000 deaths. The true figure was probably no more than a fifth of that. Vonnegut's number came directly from the now discredited work of the Holocaust denier David Irving. (in Slaughterhouse-Five, Irving is cited by name, and a long passage, by a retired air marshal, from the foreword to Irving's book the Destruction of Dresden is reproduced.) to a POW digging up cadavers, accurate numbers will ever after seem pedantic. But the issue is important to historical truth and also to the ideas that Vonnegut dramatized (Kamm).

While the focus on Dresden is understandable due to Vonnegut's experiences there, cities like Hamburg (socialist leaning and anti-Nazi) where more were killed (some 50,000) were full of good Germans as well. Unfortunately, for the inhabitants, the bombing tactics of the Allies was due to the primitive of nature of bombing in World War 2. In addition, it was also due to the fact that the war was being waged against the German people who supported Hitler in his war. In addition, where is all of the browbeating due to the terror bombing the Nazis did during World War 2?

In the text by Peter Barry from his book Beginning Theory, how does all of this square with post-modernism? On page 91 of his book in Chapter 4, he notes six things that postmodern critics do. This author used them to see how Kurt Vonnegut is post-modernist.

Barry begins in number one by asking how authors discover postmodernist themes and attitudes. In the observation, postmodernists foreground fiction which might be said to exemplify the notion of the 'disappearance of the real' in which shifting postmodern identities are seen. For number three, there is use of parody, pastiche and allusion. For number four, there is foreground irony for number five narcissism. For number six, the distinction between the high and low cultures is challenged and highlighted in the texts in which they work as hybrid blends of the two.

In other words, Barry maintains that taking the action out of the "real world" and into an imaginary one that creates and facilitates the postmodern. This would explain the convergence in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five of so many seemingly contradictory elements, from the violence of war to sexual subjects such as porn starlet Montana Wildhack, the time and dimensional travel of the alien Tralfamadorians and the allusions to sex and violence that morph and converge together. The sexual release is necessarily the most basic rebellion against war just as the 1960s sexual rebellion of the hippies. Sex and violence both provide a similar release and climax, especially when combined together in this postmodern construction of the world (Barry 91).

Surreal is definitely the type of world that Billy Pilgrim finds him self in. The images of meat and flesh are central to this surreal world. Even as a reconstructed city, Vonnegut describes the 1967 city that he visited on a Guggenheim fellowship as "looking a lot like Dayton, Ohio…there must be tons of human bone meal in the ground (Vonnegut 1)." Vonnegut has a very negative view of the American experience. Even relations with his wife are in this category. When he gets drunk he describes his breathe "like mustard gas and roses (ibid 4)." Interestingly enough, the real Vonnegut seems to be more comfortable with Montana Wildhack, just as Billy Pilgrim is. Bad breathe is not tolerated with porn starlets.

Kurt Vonnegut a.k.a., Billy Pilgrim and then indirectly the alien Trafalmadorians. As well provide a real and unreal background in terms of the ultimate surreal background for Kurt Vonnegut and his characters. In the 1960's, these provided a great mix of the real and the unreal that resonated well amongst Americans. However, nothing seems to be happening during the America of today, given the phenomena of two concurrent ongoing wars that are being fought at the same time in Iraq and Afghanistan. The sexual imagery in Iraq and Afghanistan is much more suppressed and below the surface. Violence and sex together seem to be much more managed to promote violence rather than resist it.