Vonnegut’s Use of Experimental Language (2009) by Sarah Pynoo

I recently dug up one of the first papers I ever wrote in University, three years ago for a modern english class. It’s interesting to see how much my writing has grown since then - also interesting that I thought it was a good idea to contrast Vonnegut with Atwood and Colonel Kurtz. I remember starting this in a panic at one in the morning - in some respects nothing has changed. I thought I’d share an excerpt:

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut finds traditional chronological order insufficient for telling his story. He muses in the first chapter on what the climax of the story should be, and where the climax of the story should fall. He describes an outline he drew in crayon on a piece of wallpaper. On it, he represents each character with a drawn line, passing through the midsection of the story - the Dresden bombing, represented in orange cross-hatching (a vivid symbolic image reminiscent of the flames of the fires raging across the city) - and those who are still alive after the fact reappearing again on the other side. Rather than follow up on this concept, he immediately jumps to the retelling of an event after the war. If Slaughterhouse-Five were represented in a linear diagram like this early concept map of crayon Vonnegut drew, it would be shown as jagged, disconnected pieces of time, with orange cross-hatching permeating each fragment. Slaughterhouse-Five could be a piece of cloth, where the different narratives are interwoven with one central event - and like a piece of cloth, it would be impossible to separate that single thread without ruining the fabric. 

Click through to read the entire paper. 

In the novel Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut writes, “I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you can see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center”. This envelope pushing outlook isn’t just Finnerty’s approach to life, but Vonnegut’s to writing. Chronologically, beginning with his first novel Player Piano, each of Vonnegut’s works act as footsteps towards Vonnegut’s precipice - Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut unconventionally manipulates language through techniques such as non-linear narrative, juxtaposition of characters, and metafiction to tell his story.  

If Vonnegut had less of a personal connection to the events of Slaughterhouse-Five, it would be an incredibly different novel. As a batallion scout in the second World War, he was captured and imprisoned in Dresden. While imprisoned, he narrowly survived the firebombing. Along with his fellow POWs, Vonnegut was kept in a detention facility/slaughterhouse meat locker referred to as Slaughterhouse Five. The slaughterhouse served as a bunker, protecting the POWs and guards from the firestorm raging throughout the city. Vonnegut described being in the meat locker as the bombing took place as a “very safe shelter … with sounds like giant footsteps above”.

During the aftermath of the bombing, the POWs were sent into the city to aid in the cleanup. At first, they attempted to collect and bury the bodies. As this proved to be too difficult of a task, “a new technique was devised. Bodies … were cremated by soldiers with flamethrowers right where they were”. One of Vonnegut’s fellow prisoners, Gifford Doxsee, recalls that “virtually the entire center of Dresden was pulverized, with not a single building left intact over an area covering dozens of square miles”. The carnage of approximately 35,000 civilian victims and the destruction of such a beautiful, peaceful city had an enormous effect on Vonnegut.  He knew that he had to write about an event that had such impact on his life, but he found it difficult to tell such a formative and disturbing tale in a way that would properly convey the scope of the event. 

After the war, Vonnegut’s literary career reads as a cathartic chain of events leading up to Slaughterhouse-Five. Through Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat’s Cradle, and God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Vonnegut’s use of language and form grows more inventive as the autobiographical elements increase. 

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut finds traditional chronological order insufficient for telling his story. He muses in the first chapter on what the climax of the story should be, and where the climax of the story should fall. He describes an outline he drew in crayon on a piece of wallpaper. On it, he represents each character with a drawn line, passing through the midsection of the story - the Dresden bombing, represented in orange cross-hatching (a vivid symbolic image reminiscent of the flames of the fires raging across the city) - and those who are still alive after the fact reappearing again on the other side. Rather than follow up on this concept, he immediately jumps to the retelling of an event after the war. If Slaughterhouse-Five were represented in a linear diagram like this early concept map of crayon Vonnegut drew, it would be shown as jagged, disconnected pieces of time, with orange cross-hatching permeating each fragment. Slaughterhouse-Five could be a piece of cloth, where the different narratives are interwoven with one central event - and like a piece of cloth, it would be impossible to separate that single thread without ruining the fabric. 

 By injecting science fiction into the novel, Vonnegut is able to write about the events in a cyclical way in order to represent their synchronicity. On earth, unlike on Tralfamadore, time progresses in a linear fashion, proceeding in only one direction - forwards. By writing the events of Billy Pilgrim’s life in a circular, or cyclical, fashion, the reader is able to make connections between the events, although the didn’t occur chronologically. “Synchronicity”, a word introduced by Carl Jung, explains the idea of parallel incidences that appear to reveal an underlying pattern or meaning. Vonnegut structures the narrative in Slaughterhouse-Five in a way that shows how each event in the life of Billy Pilgrim, from his childhood to his death, was shaped by his time in Dresden.

Karen F. Stein, discussing Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin- another work of historical fiction that utilizes science fiction in a non-linear way to tell a story - aptly describes how tests can be layered with the allegorical image of “a Russian doll … a nested series of stories within stories; … one story hides another until it is opened to reveal another story surprisingly similar to it”. When Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck in time,” he finds himself jumping between the bizarreness of life in a Tralfamadorian zoo, the grotesqueness of wartime, and his life with his wife and children, which, in contrast with the first two, seems absurdly trite and ordinary. One of the most striking examples of this contrast happens when Billy first arrives in Dresden. He describes his march through the city in the following passage:

Billy did not meet many of the eyes that found him so entertaining. He was enchanted by the architecture of the city. Merry amoretti wove garlands above windows. Roguish fauns and naked nymphs peeked down at Billy from festooned cornices. Stone monkeys frisked among scrolls and seashells and bamboo. Billy, with his memories of the future, knew that the city would be smashed to smithereens and then burned - in about thirty more days. He knew, too, that most of the people watching him would soon be dead. So it goes. 

The description of the absurdity of the “festooned” architecture contrasted with the sombre image of the foreshadowing of the Dresden bombing is repeated only a few pages later, when Billy boards a plane that he knows will crash, with a barbershop quartet of optometrists. This comic image of a barbershop quartet is echoed later as tragedy, as Billy describes the guards’ reaction of shock and horror at the bombing’s aftermath to “a silent film of a barbershop quartet”. 

The tragicomic nature of the character of Billy Pilgrim is that, while the reader begins to grasp the synchronicity of the events taking place in Billy’s life, Billy remains unable to piece the events together to create any sort of meaning for himself. Martin Coleman said the following on Billy’s predicament:

Certainly he reflects on his experiences and tries to make sense of them. But his reflection is limited by his insensibility to temporal relations. He is ignorant of the meanings of his experience, that is, of how is experiences are related. Billy Pilgrim does his best to determine the meaning of his experiences, but his sense of coming unstuck in time and his postulation of time travel indicates an insensibility to experience… In the present he is frequently unable to respond intelligently to situations that overwhelm him; his undiscriminating response is to leave them all behind, he says, for another situation in a different time and place.

By framing the narrative with the premise of Vonnegut himself attempting to find a way to tell the story, the reader is able to notice a framework underlying the events, while Billy is unable to cope with the seemingly unrelated series of events from the different stages of his life that he finds himself travelling between. 

Like the trio of Tralfamadore, Billy’s home life, and Billy’s time in Dresden, Vonnegut uses triads of characters to compare their nature and their experiences with Billy’s. In Tralfamadore, Billy is contrasted with Montana Wildhack and the Tralfamadorians; at home, with his wife Valencia and his children; in his pre-war life with his mother and father; and with Roland Weary and Paul Lazzarro when he is captured after the Battle of the Bulge and brought to Dresden. In Tralfamadore, Montana exists as a means for Billy to convey and come to terms with his own thoughts on the bombing of Dresden, while the Tralfamadorians impart what they see as wisdom to Billy on the nature of free will. Post-war, Billy’s wife is pleasant and loving, his children troublesome (his son’s rebelliousness and his daughter’s later attempts to control him), and Billy finds himself unable to relate well to any of the members of his family. As a child, Billy’s mother attempts to nurture him, while Billy’s father passes on a life lesson - life is very literally “sink or swim”. Finally, Billy’s incongruous place in the war appears as a stark contrast to Weary’s heroic ambitions and Lazzarro’s confrontational nature. 

Perhaps the most interesting comparison between characters is between Kurt Vonnegut himself and Billy Pilgrim, as the novel is told by a “narrator-hero doubling [as in] ‘Heart of Darkness’ (Marlow-Kurtz)”. The term for this type of “narrator-hero doubling” is metafiction, “the growing class of novels which depart from realism and foreground the roles of the author in inventing the fiction and of the reader in receiving the fiction”. The roots of the word metafiction come from the linguist L. Hjelmslev’s term “metalanguage”. Waugh summarizes, “a language that functions as a signifier to another language, and this other language thus becomes its signified”. In layman’s terms, this means metafiction uses not only a fictional language, but also a literary discourse, or a more “real” narrative. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut uses the frame narrative of himself writing a book about Dresden to surround the fictional story of Billy and his travels between life on Earth and Tralfamadore. 

Although “[t]ypically metafictive texts are self-reflexive … raising questions about authorship and narration,” Vonnegut does his best to make the distinction between himself and Billy Pilgrim by including himself as a character in the novel. As Vonnegut appears infrequently in the novel, it is difficult for the reader to gain much understanding of his character, and whether or not Vonnegut the fictional differs from Vonnegut the author. 

However, it is easy to distinguish between fictional Vonnegut and Billy Pilgrim. “Vonnegut seems to be playing with the notion that human life is both determined and meaningless: events are fixed in advance, but there is no meaning or direction to the changes that take place over time”. Vonnegut and Pilgrim both perceive free will in entirely different ways.

Billy takes to the Tralfamadorian concept that free will is a ridiculous idea, accepting his powerlessness against all the different events in his life. The Tralfamadorians explain to Billy when he asks them how the universe ends: 

‘We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers. A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole universe disappears.’ So it goes.

‘If you know this,’ said Billy, ‘isn’t there some way you can prevent it? Can’t you keep the pilot from pressing the button?’

‘He has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.’

After an initial struggle with the concept, he has come to accept that time is a cycle where all moments are constantly happening or repeating, Billy finds it easy to believe that he has no capacity for affecting his future. Billy chooses not to act, even when aware of his impending death.

On the other had, Vonnegut whole-heartedly opposes the idea. Vonnegut’s friend, Harrison Starr, responds to his writing of an anti-war book by saying “You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books? I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’” Vonnegut ends the passage with the hopeless statement, “and even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.” Yet, even in the face of such pessimism, Vonnegut proceeds to not only write an ‘anti-war book’, but to tell his sons to “not under any circumstances … take any part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee [and] also tell them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that”. Vonnegut outright defends the concept of free-will, and his portrayal of Billy’s apathy as stemming from trauma and being that of a pathetic man suggests that he still has hope.

By framing the narrative with an introduction that explains why the novel is so “short and jumbled and jangled”, Vonnegut is able to ground the story in reality. Combined with the Tralfamadorian explanation of how their novels are read, this description introduces the reader to how Slaughterhouse-Five is meant to be understood. The Tralfamadorians explain to Billy how their books are like telegrams:

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 writes using well-constructed, concise sentences. Whether this stems from his background in journalism rather than literature, or is a conscious form he has adapted for his novels, the effect makes his tale seem familiar and to the point, leaving it for the audience to react by carrying in their emotions and conclusions about the proceedings that he has related. 

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is “unique in that [it] can be read two ways - as [an] autonomous text that in and of [itself] contain[s] meaning and as part of a larger whole”. In order to tell his personal story, Vonnegut uses innovative language constructs from metafiction and science fiction, to the juxtaposition of character and events in a non-linear fashion.