As we touched on in class, throughout Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five the lack of explicitly explained emotions allows for the reader to experience their own emotions during the course of the novel. I found this book to be incredibly touching. I suppose that I tend to be easily moved by novels, but this one was powerful in a different way that I attribute to the moments that Vonnegut chooses to include in telling Billy Pilgrim's stories.
Vonnegut's portrayal of World War II and the outlook on human nature tended to leave me with a bleak feeling about the terrors of this world. So it was the moments of pure and simple humanity in Slaughterhouse-Five that illicited the strongest emotional reactions in me. Hopefully this example is not getting old, but the scene in the prenatal malt syrup factory where Billy sneaks Derby a spoonful of syrup "and then Derby burst into tears" is quite powerful (205).
Another similarly emotional moment is when Billy and a few other Americans are in the back of a horse drawn wagon and are going to look through Dresden's remains to see if anything is there worth salvaging. Billy lies in the back of the wagon asleep in the sun, enjoying what he might have chosen to be "his happiest moment" (249). A short time later, a couple of German doctors notice the poor condition of the horses pulling the wagon and scold Billy for their treatment. "When Billy saw the condition of his means of transportation, he burst into tears. He hadn't cried about anything else in the war." Because there are very few moments in the novel where a character cries, the moments when there are tears shed have a much stronger impact on the reader. In both of these cases, it is as if the men are unable to fully process or let themselves be vulnerable to their own emotional reactions to the horrors of the war that they have witnessed. So, their layers of masked and hidden feelings only show through when a small act of humanity occurs.
As I mentioned (too) quickly near the end of class the other day, I find the scene at the end of chapter 8, where the blind inkeeper and his wife take in the ragtag band of American refugees and shelter them in their stable, to be a similarly moving and even transcendent scene. In a novel that takes such a generally bleak view of how human beings treat one another, this is such a simple act of compassion and basic humanity under the worst of circumstances. Nationalism would have the inkeeper and his wife ("Nazis," remember) excoriate the Americans, the perpetrators of this terrible assault. By the rules of war, they "deserve" worse treatment. The line "Good night, Americans," is so simple and kind--the acknowledgment that they are ALL suffering--it shines as one of the brightest moments in a bleak landscape.
ReplyDelete