Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born in
Indianapolis in 1922, a descendant of prominent
German-American families. His father was an architect and his mother
was a noted beauty. Both spoke German fluently but declined to teach Kurt
the language in light of widespread anti-German sentiment following
World War I. Family money helped send Vonnegut’s two siblings to
private schools. The Great Depression hit hard in the 1930s,
though, and the family placed Kurt in public school while it moved
to more modest accommodations. While in high school, Vonnegut edited
the school’s daily newspaper. He attended college at Cornell for
a little over two years, with instructions from his father and brother
to study chemistry, a subject at which he did not excel. He also
wrote for the Cornell Daily Sun. In 1943 he
enlisted in the U.S. Army. In 1944 his
mother committed suicide, and Vonnegut was taken prisoner following
the Battle of the Bulge, in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium.
After the war, Vonnegut married and entered a master’s
degree program in anthropology at the University of Chicago. He
also worked as a reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. His
master’s thesis, titled Fluctuations Between Good and Evil
in Simple Tales, was rejected. He departed for Schenectady,
New York, to take a job in public relations at a General Electric
research laboratory.
Vonnegut left GE in 1951 to
devote himself full-time to writing. During the 1950s,
Vonnegut published short stories in national magazines. Player
Piano, his first novel, appeared in 1952. Sirens
of Titan was published in 1959,
followed by Mother Night (1962), Cat’s
Cradle (1963), God Bless
You, Mr. Rose-water (1965), and
his most highly praised work, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).
Vonnegut wrote prolifically until his death in 2007.
Slaughterhouse-Five treats one of the
most horrific massacres in European history—the World War II firebombing
of Dresden, a city in eastern Germany, on February 13, 1945—with
mock-serious humor and clear antiwar sentiment. More than 130,000 civilians died
in Dresden, roughly the same number of deaths that resulted from
the Allied bombing raids on Tokyo and from the atomic bomb dropped
on Hiroshima, both of which also occurred in 1945. Inhabitants
of Dresden were incinerated or suffocated in a matter of hours as
a firestorm sucked up and consumed available oxygen. The scene on
the ground was one of unimaginable destruction.
The novel is based on Kurt Vonnegut’s own experience in
World War II. In the novel, a prisoner of war witnesses and survives
the Allied forces’ firebombing of Dresden. Vonnegut, like his pro-tagonist
Billy Pilgrim, emerged from a meat locker beneath a slaughter-house
into the moonscape of burned-out Dresden. His surviving captors
put him to work finding, burying, and burning bodies. His task continued
until the Russians came and the war ended. Vonnegut survived by
chance, confined as a prisoner of war (POW) in
a well-insulated meat locker, and so missed the cataclysmic moment
of attack, emerging the day after into the charred ruins of a once-beautiful
cityscape. Vonnegut has said that he always intended to write about
the experience but found himself incapable of doing so for more
than twenty years. Although he attempted to describe in simple terms
what happened and to create a linear narrative, this strategy never
worked for him. Billy Pilgrim’s unhinged time—shifting, a mechanism
for dealing with the unfathomable aggression and mass destruction
he witnesses, is Vonnegut’s solution to the problem of telling an
untellable tale.
Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five as
a response to war. “It is so short and jumbled and jangled,” he
explains in Chapter 1, “because there is
nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” The jumbled structure
of the novel and the long delay between its conception and completion
serve as testaments to a very personal struggle with heart-wrenching
material. But the timing of the novel’s publication also deserves
notice: in 1969, the United States was in the
midst of the dismal Vietnam War. Vonnegut was an outspoken pacifist
and critic of the conflict. Slaughterhouse-Five revolves around
the willful incineration of 100,000 civilians,
in a city of extremely dubious military significance, during an
arguably just war. Appearing when it did, then, Slaughterhouse-Five made
a forceful statement about the campaign in Vietnam, a war in which incendiary
technology was once more being employed against nonmilitary targets
in the name of a dubious cause.
