The two books do, however, have this in common: they are both portraits of a world that has lost its mind, in which children are sent out to do men’s work and die.Īs a prisoner of war, age twenty-two, which is to say three years younger than I was when I read his story, Vonnegut was in the famously beautiful city of Dresden, locked up with other Americans in Schlachthof-Fünf, where pigs had been slaughtered before the war, and was therefore an accidental witness to one of the greatest slaughters of human beings in history, the firebombing of Dresden, in February of 1945, which flattened the whole city and killed almost everyone in it. His predominant tone of voice is melancholy, the tone of voice of a man who has been present for a great horror and lived to tell the tale. If Heller was Charlie Chaplin, then Vonnegut was Buster Keaton. It sees war as a tragedy so great that perhaps only the mask of comedy allows one to look it in the eye.
There is much comedy in it, as there was in everything Kurt Vonnegut wrote, but it does not see war as farcical. It sees war as insane and the desire to escape combat as the only sane position. “Catch-22” is crazy funny, slapstick funny. It hadn’t occurred to me until I read them that antiwar novels could be funny as well as serious. As a matter of fact, I read both “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Catch-22” in the same year, a decade later, and the two books together had a great effect on my young mind. I did not read “Catch-22” in 1961, because I was only fourteen years old. In those days, I was living in Britain, which did not send soldiers to fight in Indochina but whose government did support the American war effort, and so, when I was at university, and afterward, I, too, was involved with thinking about and protesting against that war. “Catch-22,” like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” was a novel about the Second World War that caught the imagination of readers who were thinking a lot about another war.
Kennedy began the escalation of the United States’ involvement in the conflict in Vietnam. Eight years earlier, in 1961, Joseph Heller had published “ Catch-22” and President John F. I mention Vietnam because, although “Slaughterhouse-Five” is a book about the Second World War, Vietnam is also a presence in its pages, and people’s feelings about Vietnam have a good deal to do with the novel’s huge success. Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” is humane enough to allow, at the end of the horror that is its subject, for the possibility of hope.
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