It seems like every book we've read so far this semester has ultimately left me with a picture of history as a fate-driven and largely unchangeable cycle. Yet, as bleak as that perception may sound, not every book we've read has itself struck me as pessimistic.
Ragtime definitely left me with a predominantly hopeless lease on life. As I believe I touched on in a previous blog entry (although I may just be imagining that), I saw Ragtime as depicting everything a person does or tries to do as ultimately futile in the grand scheme of things, since history will just continue to take its cyclical course regardless. I felt as though every seemingly monumental plot point in the novel ended up being ultimately meaningless and, thus, was left wondering what the point of anything really was anyway.
Mumbo Jumbo, on the other hand, gave off a very different message about history, in my opinion. Granted, like Ragtime, the novel certainly suggested that everything was merely part of a cycle—Jes Grew was destined to die out because it is in its nature to rise and fall and rise and fall over and over again. However, the last few scenes of the novel saved this message from coming off as bleak to me. PaPa LaBas seemed so content with the cyclical nature of history that I too adopted an optimistic viewpoint. After all, Jes Grew didn't really fail just because it died out; rather, its ability to die out and come back again was one of its strongest and most important qualities.
With Slaughterhouse-Five, however, I'm less sure what I consider the overall message. At first, I found it at least somewhat hopeful because, even though the novel came to the eventual conclusion that wars are essentially inevitable and that we really don't have any free will to stop bad things from happening, the Tralfamadorians were clearly not at all fazed by this. By looking only at the good moments, they controlled what they perceived of the world, despite the fact that they couldn't control the world itself.
However, I'm not sure this Tralfamadorian mindset can be my overall takeaway from the novel because, while it is a beautiful way to look at life, it goes against everything I've ever been taught about dealing with conflicts and injustice. If the whole point of the novel is that Vonnegut's looking back on Dresden because he needs to for his own good, as well as for the good of those who know very little about the bombing, then it seems unlikely that he would want his readers to adopt a mindset in which they simply do not look back on painful memories, but rather pretend that they do not even exist.
I guess it would be easy to argue, then, that Vonnegut finds the Tralfamadorian view a little bit silly, which would be supported by the fact that they are aliens after all. However, just as I don't think he wants us to take their ideas at face value, I don't think he wants us to simply write them off either. Their complacent attitudes may seem somewhat crazy in that they're so much more accepting of imperfections and numb to emotions than we're used to, but at the same time we know in the back of our minds that there's quite a lot of truth to their ideology.
Thus, the outlook on life that I take away from Slaughterhouse-Five is not quite the optimistic one of a Tralfamadorian nor the pessimistic one of a soldier scarred by war. By superimposing history and science fiction, Vonnegut offers his readers a picture of how cruel and unforgiving the world can be, but also gives them an understanding of how, no matter what, life goes on. Somehow we must learn for ourselves how to unify those two ideas.
For me, part of the surprising optimism or general paradoxical good feeling that comes from Vonnegut's novel--despite its bleak view of free will and human nature--has to do with the little moments where the people caught up in these immense forces behave decently and compassionately to one another: Billy giving the "lollipop" to Derby; the blind inkeeper saying "Good night, Americans"; Billy breaking down crying at the sight of the suffering horse. These may not be enough to turn the tide of history--the "glacier" is coming no matter what--but in the context of so much gross inhumanity, there's something so compellingly human about such moments. Billy's "faith in a meek and loving Jesus" may be denounced as "putrid" among his fellow soldiers, but the idea that such "meek love" can be sustaining and redeeming in the midst of war is one the novel takes seriously, I think. (Even Vonnegut's portrait of Weary--a hard-to-like character in so many ways--seems ultimately compassionate, like he's just a big, abused kid who's way out of his depths . . .)
ReplyDeleteFor all his "hardness" and apparent cynicism, there's a real softness at the core of Vonnegut's work, which is what so many of his readers love about him.