From Powerlessness to Power

As is discussed in Chapter One, the author in SF seems powerless as he lacks the traditional authorial power. However, in this chapter, through the examinations of Vonnegut's thematic concerns and writing strategies, I want to argue that the author actually embodies power in his apparent powerlessness. Among the various subjects presented in the novel, I will focus on three of Vonnegut's major concerns: destruction and irrationality of the Second World War, which culminates in the Dresden firebombing, incomprehensibility of death in life and how these two subjects can be represented in writing.

In this chapter, therefore, through the examination of Vonngut's thematic concerns and their relationships to the apparent loss of the authorial control identified in Chapter One, I want to argue that Vonnegut actually chooses to abandon the traditional authorial power in order to find an appropriate novelistic form for his subjects of the absurdities of war and death in life. Structurally, I divide my discussions into three main parts. To begin with, I will focus on Vonnegut's black humor presentation in the absurdities in Billy's life. Next, I will discuss the functions of the writer figure Kilgore Trout and the authorial intrusion in the novel, through which the author loses his god-like position and power in the act of fictional writing about the absurdities in life. In addition, I will examine Vonnegut's strategic arrangement of form which helps him undermine traditional fictional narratives, such as war movies, legends and fairytales, though the metafictional elements at the same time take away the author's power in constructing a coherent structure and chronological plot. Finally, I aim to discuss how the space travel motif of scientific narrative constructs the structure of SF and its relationship with the themes of war and death. Definitely, Vonnegut is not the only one to discuss the subjects of death and war in fiction; however, only through discarding the traditional authorial power can Vonnegut bring forth a powerful new perspective to the absurdity of history and prescribe ''corrective lenses" to the distorted views projected by the traditional way of story telling, while preventing these views from being absolute and final.

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A Bottle of Coke-Cola

Billy is a character who helps Vonnegut to present life as absurd. Unlike traditional realistic representation of a character, readers are never offered a logical cause and effect explanation of Billy's clownish and funny behaviors. For one thing, the name ''Billy Pilgrim" does not imply the character's spiritual journey in a traditional representative way, but is rather parodic. As Waugh suggests,

In addition, the author does not attempt to offer the inner world of Billy as authors of ''stream of consciousness" in modernist tradition might do to reveal all the elements in a character's mind as clues for the analysis of his personal problems. It is almost impossible to analyze Billy through the conversations in the novel since he seldom communicates with others. When he does speak up, he uses as few words as possible. What we are offered are only glimpses and fragments of his life presented not in chronological order but through his random travelling between the past and future. The characterization of Billy is rather a combination of incongruous signs and ridiculous moments than a realistic character with psychological depth and spiritual progress, which is, for me, the author's use of black humor strategies to comment on the absurdity of life. The author refuses to reveal more about Billy, just as he admits his inability to comprehend life.

Billy is ''a funny-looking child who became a funny-looking youth¡Xtall and weak, and shaped like a bottle of Coca-Cola" (23). When he serves in the army, he does not look like a soldier at all; instead, he looks like '' a filthy flamingo" (33). Ironically, he is presented as a typical American when a photographer who wants ''a picture of an actual capture" catches the scene of Billy and Roland Weary's bare feet to show ''how miserably equipped the American Army often was"(58). After Billy eyewitnesses the numerous deaths in the war and finally survives the Dresden holocaust, ''he burst into tears" (197) simply because he sees the horse being use as transportation. Ironically, Billy '' hadn't cried about anything else in the war" (197). Thus, the ridiculousness of Billy's inability to cry for anything but the horse is not just the problem of an individual's apathy; it reflects the lack of meaning of war itself.

In addition to Billy' s awkward physical appearance and ridiculous behavior reflecting the absurdity of the war he participates in, his other experiences in life are as terrifying and incomprehensible as his war experiences. As a child, Billy has the terrible experience of being put in the swimming pool by his father, which for him is like ''an execution," though his father only means to train him how to swim (44). When Billy's parents bring him all the way to the Grand Canyon by ''seven blowouts on the way," Billy has the feeling that '' he was going to fall in" and he is so scared that he wets his pants as his mother touches him (89). Ironically, the crucifix from Billy's mother does not bring any salvation to him, but the ''clinical fidelity" of the Christ's wounds have made Billy ''contemplated torture and hideous wounds at the beginning and the end of nearly every day of his childhood" (38).

Instead of being a pilgrim with a sense of meaning and mission, Billy drifts from one moment to another in his life, and stays passive to the events around him. Even as a successful middle-aged optometrist, Billy dozes off when he examines his patients for the prescription of corrective lenses. Though Billy has a family, it seems that no one really understands him. Not even Billy can control or understand himself: ''Every so often, for no apparent reason, Billy Pilgrim would find himself weeping. Nobody had ever caught Billy doing it. . . . It was an extremely quiet thing Billy did, and not very moist" (61). Billy is not only unenthusiastic about his job, but more tragically he is unenthusiastic about living. Vonnegut points out Billy's relationship with his mother, which is not based on love, but rather on hatred, when Billy's mother visits him in the hospital. ''She [Billy's mother] upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all" (102).

Here, Billy's life summarizes Vonnegut's view on human existence as absurd: life is without reason or logic, but full of the unpredictable and the grotesque. In this sense, Vonnegut gives up the power of a realist author to understand and present his characters, just as his characters are incapable of making sense of life. As the author/narrator points out: ''There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces" (140).

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:"

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:

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.

From the confessions of the author/narrator in Chapter One, I divide the difficulties and frustration in the composing of the war book into two interrelated categories: one is rooted in the nature of its subject matter, and the other results from the inappropriateness and inefficiency of traditional narrative forms. Schriber also has the same observation, ''The anti-war novel tradition's formal offering to the narrator and tradition's mold for the Dresden experience, is the source of the narrator's frustration . . . " (179).

First, I will discuss the author's frustration in composing the war book results from the nature of its subject. When the author/narrator tells his movie-maker friend about his plan to write a book on Dresden firebombing, which means to show the brutality and insanity of the war--an anti-war novel, he receives an unenthusiastic response: ''Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?" (3). Through this incident, the narrator actually learns that ''they [wars] were as easy to stop as glaciers" (3). This conversation points out one of the important characteristics of SF. The efforts spend on writing the book about the atrocity of the Dresden bombing for the prevention of war is as futile and repetitive as the song that goes:

The first mistake lies in the narrator's false belief that ''since the subject was so big" (2) he must create a fictional story with an ''irony so great"(5). As the narrator confesses,

Vonnegut also uses the funny behavior of Billy to ridicule the realistic representation. When Billy serves as an infantry scout in the army, his loss of one of his shoes makes him ''bob up-and-down, up-and-down "(33). This funny act of Billy parodies traditional story telling where there will always be climax and suspense, which is just as obsolete and ridiculous as one with a shoe missing in composing a book on the Dresden firebombing.

Also, there are two discussions of the novel in the experience of Billy's time traveling which might appear to be trivial but are actually important episodes for understanding Vonnegut's ideas of traditional fiction. When Billy Pilgrim is captured by the Trafamadorians, he asks for a novel to read. The only earthling book they have is Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susan, ''with all its ups and downs, up and downs" (88). The book is definitely not a masterpiece or a standard sample in English if one wants to recommend a book to the outer space creatures to demonstrate what are some of the best novels in the earthling world. Therefore, Vonnegut also comments on the masterpiece, The Brothers Karamozov, by Feodor Dostoevsky. Eliot Rosewater, a major fictional character in God Bless You Mr. Rosewater and a science fiction fan of Kilgore Trout, tells ''an interesting thing to Billy one time about a book that wasn't science fiction." He thinks ''everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers of Karamazov, but ''that wasn't enough any more . . . " (101). What is not enough here are the traditional forms. Through these two seemingly unrelated episodes, Vonnegut shows the inadequacy of the traditional fictional writing form.

A Found Object

The second mistake is to innocently regard the task of fictional writing as easy as ''to report" (2) realistically of what he has seen in the war. Personal experiences of the war do not guarantee the production of ''a masterpiece" of the witness account (2). When Vonnegut was asked in an interview if the writing of SF was on a purely realistic level, he replied:

Consequently, neither the author's personal memories nor the official history can help with the composing of the war book. The event itself is impossible to be represented simply through the recollection of the data or the writer's memories. Even though the firebombing can be represented, it would become a reproducing of cruelty and violence, which the narrator refuses to do. The narrator's mentioning of his experience as a police reporter (8) also suggests his realization of not writing a war book on the basis of realism, which would have to represent the horror of the massacre again. The story he covers is about a veteran who is squashed by elevator because his ''wedding ring was caught in all the ornaments" (9). The worst part comes when the narrator has to ''dictate over the telephone" and also call the elevator man's wife for her response. Then he finally transforms the accident into a report. Therefore, although SF centers on the controversial historical event of the Dresden firebombing in the Second World War, we do not find ''a single description of the bombing . . . among its fifty thousand words" (Klinkowitz, Slaughterhouse-Five 44).

The Three Musketeers

The episode of the encounter between the narrator and Mary, the wife of his war buddy O'Hare, shows that the traditional war novels or movies are usually inappropriate glorification of personal heroism and justification of brutal killings. The exposition of the writing process by the author is actually a renunciation of the traditional war production of John Wayne.

In addition to the ''movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men," Vonnegut also shows his critical attitude on the inappropriate association between war and glamour in his parody of ''The Three Musketeers" and the English soldiers. Though Roland Weary ''dilated upon the piety and heroism of the ''The Three Musketeers," he is actually an infantry scout who is filled with ''tragic wrath" (50) rather than courage. He likes to show people his collection of ''guns and swords and torture instruments and leg irons" (35). He shares his experiences with Billy Pilgrim on how to make a worst torture of people, and spends most of his time making imaginative enemies to keep himself alive. Roland Weary gives his version of the war story like this:

Moreover, Vonnegut points out his critical attitude toward the Englishmen's wrong conception of war. In contrast to Billy Pilgrim's ''filthy flamingo" look, the Englishmen have bellies like washboards and muscles like cannon balls. They give a lecture to the American war prisoners on the importance of personal hygiene, which they regard as a means to keep themselves going on living. The Englishmen have more food than they actually need while the Russian soldiers starve. '' They made war look stylish and reasonable and fun" (94). Here, clearly with the negative image of Roland Weary and the ridiculous and impossible stories of his personal heroism in ''The Three Musketeers," Vonnegut points out a common pattern between the modern and traditional projection of war: ''it was a crazy, sexy, murderous relationship" (35). Although the image of the movie stars and the English soldiers are glamorous and courageous, they are actually as sick and morbid as the character Roland Weary.

Besides the inappropriate glorification of war of Weary and the movie, the author/narrator finds that people inappropriately exaggerate and distort the violence and atrocity of war into heroism and romance: