Rabo in Dresden (13th of January 2016)

portrait of Rabo Karabekian in Dresden - watercolor

Vonnegut's most famous novel, "Slaughterhouse-Five" has been proclaimed quietistic by some critics. Those wisemen have found in Vonnegut's writing some sort of "understanding" for horrible slaughter of war and a sense of tragic hopelessness against the human evil which every so often gushes from this civilization of ours. Of course that something like that can be found in "Slaughterhouse-Five", but the reason for this is not some quietistic philosophy of Vonnegut but post-traumatic stress disorder which for 24 years prevented him to think anything consistent of Dresden bombing, let alone write something about it. The main protagonist of the novel, Billy Pilgrim, also suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, and such a state enables him to communicate with Tralfamadorians, inhabitants of planet Tralfamador which look like upright toilet plungers, with one green eye on a palm of small hand at the top of the plunger handle.

Tralfamadorians know that the evildoing in Dresden was in a way "necessary" because history for them does not exist as a dynamical activity. Since Tralfamadorians are four-dimensional beings, all history and all time is available to them and every "moment" can be visited by wish, after learning skills required to "travel through time" (more precisely, "to unstuck in time", as Vonnegut writes).

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

Carbonized Dresden is thus always there, nothing can be changed about it nor it could ever have been and by that, indeed, wise critics of Vonnegut are right - Tralfamadorians do sound like quietists created by the tortured minds of Billy Pilgrim and Kurt Vonnegut.

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.

Activism and persistence in attempts to change something are signs of a healthy spirit. But they are also signs of a spirit which didn't have the misfortune to see plenty of entirely absurd deaths and evildoings - that is why it is healthy, unlike Billy's:

Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present and the future.

Most common figure of speech in Tralfamador is

So it goes.

... and every time someone dies in the novel, and that happens often, Vonnegut also writes: "So it goes."

Thus began the first corpse mine in Dresden. There were hundreds of corpse mines operating by and by. They didn't smell bad at first, were wax museums. But then the bodies rotted and liquefied, and the stink was like roses and mustard gas. So it goes.

One should by no means get confused and think that "Slaughterhouse-Five" is some SF novel - that would be entirely wrong. "Slaughterhouse-Five" is a novel about how people, even two thousand years after Jesus Christ, did not become good, because it seems that there has been a mistake in the way New Testament was written so that the true message of Jesus, the one about love, did not successfully come through. It is a novel about evil we deposited in the amber of time, about Dresden which repeats all the time, massacred completely innocent people, children who kill, about pathetic human consciousness which cannot stay healthy and endure the evil it is emerged into and which it also creates.

Vonnegut of course knew that his fellow citizens will hate him for writing about all that, and especially about what happened in Dresden. And he is not the first one, no one likes to listen about "our guys" who did evil things. That is how it is in all wars, that is how it was in Vietnam war when Vonnegut published his novel in 1969, and that is how it was in the wars in ex-Yugoslavia. Still, if it wasn't for Vonnegut and the likes of him, war may (to the unknowing ones) look like a noble undertaking - our boys who defend good (children-crusaders - the subtitle of the novel is "The Children's Crusade") against them, who are embodiment of evil. That is why Vonnegut is by no means quietist and that's why his role is extremely important.

I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.

'But you're not going to write it that way, are you.' This wasn't a question. It was an accusation.

'I-I don't know,' I said.

'Well, I know,' she said. 'You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies...

"Slaughterhouse-Five" is at 29th place of the >> list of banned and challenged classics which was created by the American Library Association. The novel was banned, burned, censored, thrown out of libraries, syllabi and assigned reading lists with the explanation that it is "depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar and anti-Christian". I, of course, do not think so. I think that more closer to the truth is the categorization of Modern Library which puts "Slaughterhouse-Five" at number 18 of 100 best novels of XXth century written in English.

The painting above shows Rabo Karabekian, i.e. Billy Pilgrim just at the moment the Tralfamadorians unstuck him in time and picked him up on their spaceship. He asked them:

'Why me?'

' That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?'

'Yes.' Billy in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.

'Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.'

Find more posts about Vonnegut's books in >> the archive.

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Last updated on 13th of January 2016.