In a passage detailing his undergraduate anthropological studies after World War II, Kurt Vonnegut wrote:
"Another thing they taught me was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, 'You know — you never wrote a story with a villain in it."
I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war."
I must admit that this has been one of the central themes of my own higher education at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. And there are moments when I desperately desire that this notion be true. Certainly survivors and victims, even perpetrators and bystanders, all are — at some point on each of their lives' trajectories — scot-free of blame. Every one of them has been innocent of being ridiculous, bad, or disgusting. How could I even begin to believe such a thing?
Let me explain. This is a sentiment only encouraged by how I interpret Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five. His protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, while in the evening years of his life, becomes unstuck in time. He swings from one moment of his existence to another, years and decades into the past or future. He could flash backwards to his childhood — staring at the painful-looking crucifixion on the wall above his bed. Or he could land unexpectedly in the time beyond death — where there is nothing but purple haze and a low humming sound. Or he could be catapulted into the basement of the slaughterhouse in which he was held prisoner beneath Dresden, Germany during the very end days of the War — and above which fall thousands upon thousands of bombs, leveling the beautiful city to ashes and shards. Or he could skip back to his abduction by the Tralfamadorians, an infinitely superior alien race of tiny green beings shaped like plumber's friends, who have much to teach Billy about time. Such wonderful things they instruct him to share with the rest of the human race. Vonnegut wrote that these Tralfamadorians are able to see in four dimensions, an extra over that of our measly three. This is how, Vonnegut explained, they view time:
"All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all these 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."
So this is how I imagine that Vonnegut sincerely attempted to view the world's inhabitants. All those survivors and victims, even perpetrators and bystanders, were once and, perhaps, still are innocent beings. Every one of these individuals — little babies before the sins and errors they will surely commit and have committed against them. There is a passage in the novel in which Billy Pilgrim has a transcendent vision; it’s of the world’s history in reverse, like a film projector running backwards — of those horrible deeds done by so many to so many undone, of bombs that had been dropped returning upwards to the bomber planes they came from, and those planes returning to their hangers, and of the mechanisms and chemistry of those bombs being dismantled, and everything returned to factories and labs, and then to their natural forms. It’s a wonderful thing to imagine.
“And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed…Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.”
Not that I believe in Adam and Eve as told by the Bible’s book of Genesis. But look at how I capitalize certain words despite my disbelief! It is strange how there are particular things that we cannot unlearn no matter how much we wish we could. They hold onto us, and we discover that we cannot lessen our own grip on them — though we thought we had done so long before.
Each of us is a product of many different systems working on and against many others. It’s all about context — the biology and genealogy, the familial and community influences, the point of history in question, the economic and political structures at play, the quality of life on Earth, etc... We are constantly in flux — being worked on by and trying to balance ourselves against the world’s innumerable forces.
I’m sure there's faulty logic in here somewhere. I certainly can’t claim to know what Vonnegut believed. But I personally hold that once a piece of art/literature is released into the world, the artist/author no long has any jurisdiction to direct the audiences’ impressions of that work. Thus, the readers of Vonnegut’s masterpieces may interpret them however they would like. It is my intent to do so thoughtfully, especially since I am on a quest to dissect why certain books speak to me so much. And Slaughterhouse-Five is one of those novels that simply will not stop speaking to me — no matter how many times I pick it up to flip through, and ultimately, reread in its entirety again and again.
So, some may ask, where is the villain? And if there exist no true villains, what becomes of personal responsibility — of holding individuals accountable for their heinous acts against others? Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is notably lacking in individual villains. Sure, there are plenty of people behaving poorly, but whose fault is all of the nonsense and horror? Who does Vonnegut blame for the leveling of Dresden by Allied bombs in the last days of what is commonly considered to be the absolute worst series of events in the history of the world?
Why do such cruel and abhorrent things occur so often?
Why do terrible things happen to anyone at all?
“‘That is a very Earthling thing to ask, Mr. Pilgrim.’” A Tralfamadorian tells Billy when he is first abducted. “‘Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?…Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.’”
I can’t say that I agree that there is no why, as Vonnegut spoke through his little green characters. And perhaps he did not believe it completely either. Because it seems that he kept asking this question in nearly every book he penned after Slaughterhouse-Five, until his death in April of 2007. There exists no definitive answer, but my curiosity continues, waxing and waning in intensity. Just as his certainly did. We are caught like insects in the three dimensions we are able to sense; we do not share the fictional Tralfamadorians’ capacity to gaze upon that fourth dimension — that view of time as much more flexible than we can ever begin to comprehend.
Thus, it appears to be the nature of our existence to keep asking these unanswerable questions. And I promise I will keep asking. So it goes.
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