Like everyone else ever, I had never heard of Kurt Vonnegut until college. I took a contemporary American literature course my freshman year and a student chose to write on the book for his term paper. He linked the Tralfamadorians to Italians, arguing that the circus/zoo exhibit that the Tralfamadorians place Billy Pilgrim in is analogous to Vonnegut's captivity in Dresden. Since Italians were part of the Axis powers, the Tralfamadorians read as hostile. Pilgrim's detention is not purely for the sake of providing an interesting exhibit, it is a way to demonstrate the Tralfamadorians' superiority over an alien species--and thus it resonates with Mussolini's and Hitler's ethno-nationalistic argument for a manifesto of race and master race, respectively.
Not knowing Vonnegut until college isn't all that surprising. Kurt Vonnegut's bare faced, nationalism-free discussion of historical events is at odds with the ideological function of grade school education. (One reason why I'm hesitant to get behind a push for a universally free K-16 in the US--sure, we'd get free education, but you'd have college math professors teaching common core and history profs presenting heartfelt thanksgiving stories of Native Americans and pilgrims sharing bowls of popcorn after a turkey dinner.)
Vonnegut presented the facts as they were, often brutal and ugly. Vonnegut fought in Germany during World War II. He was taken prisoner, and he lived through the firebombing of Dresden.
Dresden was a cultural center, home to artists. It was also home to factories that supported the war effort, but the city wasn't a military target, per se. Bombing Dresden was part of the strategy of total war that the Axis and Allied powers both employed during the war. The United States Air Force and the British Royal Air Force razed much of Dresden, killing 25,000, of whom most all were civilians.
I live in a small town in Kentucky with an air raid siren. Every day at high noon, the siren sounds once. Why? To make sure the thing works. Now, yes, the siren can be used for all kinds of warning purposes: tornadoes ranking as the main reason to have an ear-piercing siren ready to crank up in central Kentucky. But, sirens were introduced during the cold war as a way to protect Americans from bombing. Though the United States hadn't been bombed, the anxiety occurred as a result of the United States' own practice of bombing. The US bombed Germany, Japan, and had continual strategic initiatives drawn up concerning how to go about bombing Russia.
Fortunately, we never bombed Russia. Enough of the queries into strategic initiatives returned the near certainty of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), so the US stockpiled and waited. Still we wait.
As a college student, I thought Kurt Vonnegut's books were fun, silly sometimes. They were and are, but I didn't fully understand what it meant that his playfulness was a cover for his lifelong depression and a way to reconcile human evil and provide relief from the absurdity of existence. Yes, I understood those things--at least enough to write them out in an essay if demanded, but it's one thing to know something and another to let the weight of an idea rest on you, mantle-like, for a couple of decades.
Now, I feel that the title of the book is instructive. The word slaughterhouse conveys quite a lot. The whole world is a slaughterhouse. And it doesn't matter what allegiance you have--like the American soldiers captive in Dresden--the bombs are loaded and ready to drop. You can laugh about it. Laughing helps. But it doesn't make the world any less of a slaughterhouse. So it goes.
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