Introduction
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut portrays hardship and life grievances faced by people after the bombing of Dresden and their psychological and emotional states. The Tralfamadorian episodes provide the reader with relief from the war scenes much as they do for the protagonist Billy Pilgrim himself. While humorous, the science fiction subplot is shorn of the painful elements so often present in the short stories. Billy’s life under the Tralfamadorians’ geodesic dome, safe from the acidic atmosphere outside and with every need provided for, is pure wish fulfillment. Vonnegut uses humor and the theme of schizophrenia to portray the theme of war and hardship face by people after the war.
Main body
The Tralfamadorian subplot includes a vision of the end of the world and the perpetuation of war, but these seem distant threats compared with the miseries of battlefield. Its humor the watching Tralfamadorians and their wishes to see the humans mate, the night cover, Billy’s startled awakenings from time-traveling seems mellow and reassuring in its contrast to the war scenes (Berryman 95). Vonnegut depicts that the Tralfamadorian philosophy of coping with life by thinking only of the good times seems less cynical than healing in this context (Hume 221). The incorporation of the science fiction subplot in such a way that it could all be read as Billy’s imagining underscores the sense that the human mind can only tolerate so much pain. Thus, science fiction fulfills a similar role within Billy’s personal drama that it often does in Vonnegut’s fiction. The effect of their presence enables Vonnegut to explore the inherent inadequacies of both deploying or resisting traditional narrative strategies. Vonnegut sets out to justify his own artistry against the ramblings of a Reverend Jones or even Kilgore Trout (Hume 221).
Slaughterhouse-Five follows the German-American Billy Pilgrim along his time-looped existence as an American scout captured during the Battle of the Bulge, imprisoned in an ancient cultural capital of his ancestor and shuttled underground by his Teutonic guardians while the forces of his American homeland incinerate the descendants of their common past (including Billy’s sixteen-year-old cousin Werner Gluck) (Hume 221). Billy’s existence is a metaphor for the schism of his many parts. In Slaughterhouse-Five, the trapped German inside the American foot soldier Billy Pilgrim is in some ways a straight translation of Vonnegut’s dilemma as he experienced it. Vonnegut depicts his self as the American-German Howard W. Campbell, Jr., in keeping with the convoluted thinking of the schizophrenic. Not only is Campbell incapable of distinguishing his core self in the face of his many parts, schizophrenia is presented as the predominant operational activity enabling all the characters to live in harmony with their many selves (Berryman 95). The introduction of each succeeding character reveals his or her dual identity not simply because it is written in the past tense, but because Campbell employs the same unity of vision across time afforded the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five. Schizophrenia is quite obviously the focus, but it is only by traveling along Vonnegut’s gauntlet that Campbell appreciates his moments variously and simultaneously as “beautiful and surprising and deep” as a Tralfamadorian novel (McGinnis 56).
Emotional and sociological disorder, schizophrenia, enables the Campbells to function for each other necessitated the denial of language as a communication tool. For Helga, detaching herself from the public persona is no more difficult than assuming another role. Howard’s indifference about these things is softened yet anxiously anticipated by the prospect of crossing over from author to actor (Berryman 95). Though Wirtanen expects Campbell to become a spy because of his naive vision of the world, Howard sees the opportunity to let out the actor within the dramatist: “The best reason was that I was a ham. As a spy of the sort he described, I would have an opportunity for some pretty grand acting. I would fool everyone with my brilliant interpretation of a Nazi, inside and out” (Vonnegut 136). As Wirtanen later points out, “Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible” (Vonnegut, 140). The second reason Campbell is capable of detaching himself from his public persona as a Nazi propagandist is that Wirtanen’s offer had already killed off any presentable identity to which Howard may have clung.
You’ll be volunteering right at the start of a war to be a dead man. Even if you live through the war without being caught, you’ll find your reputation gone and probably very little to live for. (Vonnegut 41).
Espionage relieved him of the necessity of operating with a conscience. When Helga disappears in the Crimea while entertaining the troops, Howard’s detachment becomes total, “I became what I am today and will always be, a stateless person” (Vonnegut 44). Campbell’s espionage destroyed language as the medium of his art, thus removing his core (Meyer 95). Beyond his art lay the death of his personal commune and confidence with his wife. Senseless and detached from associating his wavering stance in the swirl of forces that dictated his activities, Campbell asserts that Mrs. Epstein “understood my illness immediately, that it was my world rather than myself that was diseased” (Vonnegut 185). As his best friend and Nazi/Israeli double agent, Heinz Schildknecht told Howard that during the war, “All people are insane…. They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons” (Vonnegut 90-91). To accept Campbell’s diagnosis as he projects it through Mrs. Epstein is to accept the supposition that his egotistical desire to “ham it up” as a Nazi is a sane response to cure the ills of a mad world. Howard had never been interested in the supposed ills of the world, devoting himself instead to caricaturing romance through the uncomplicated clashing of stereotyped extremes of good and evil (McGinnis 56). Spying was his chance to keep Helga, become a great actor in a grand morality play of apocalyptic proportions, and at all times remain a contributor to the dynamic tensions that authored his role. Accepting his role meant destroying his identity as artist. Howard’s narrative attempt to project in Mrs. Epstein a shared recognition of the world’s maladies is another manifestation of his schizophrenia (Berryman 95).
Conclusion
In sum, Slaughterhouse-Five portrays that a common person is influenced by emotional stress and hardship caused by war. Schizophrenia is the only possible way to escape emotional sufferings and reality. The author guards against a mindless adherence and against insanity, schizophrenia, and moral incertitude, without succumbing to those threats in the process of revealing them. Though Campbell’s confession illustrates schizophrenia in varying degrees and forms and considers a number of possible reasons for its prevalence, his theme is that we all suffer some form of schizophrenia due to the swirl of historic forces and that we are doomed to perpetuate such cycles.
Works Cited
Berryman, Ch. After the Fall: Kurt Vonnegut. Journal article by Charles; Critique, 26 (1985), 95.
Hume, H. Vonnegut’s Melancholy. Philological Quarterly, 77 (1998), 221.
Meyer, W. E. K. Kurt Vonnegut: the Man with Nothing to Say. Critique, 29 (1988), 95.
Vonnegut, K. Slaughterhouse-Five. Dell, 1991.
McGinnis, W. D. The Arbitrary Cycle of Slaughterhouse-Five: a Relation of Form to Theme. 17 (1975), 55-70.