Introduction

Vonnegut closely examines the social problem of war in Slaughterhouse-Five and

Mother Night, attempting to understand the current state of human understanding regarding war, elucidate its faults, and provide reasonable ways to remediate them. But he is not overtly didactic; these novels have complex themes, and the answers Vonnegut seeks are not always clear, even to him. Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night aim predominantly to consider the problem of dealing with and narrating a traumatic past; the characters struggle with the knowledge of wartime events they have seen or participated in, attempting to find ways to describe, rationalize, or forget the troubling thoughts that plague them. The coping strategies each character chooses differ, but they work variously toward relieving mental anguish, providing explanations for seemingly random events, and figuring out the scope of moral responsibility and free will. Vonnegut’s intrigue stems from the reader’s ability to untangle the motivation of the characters, to understand their needs, their actions, and the consequences they face as a result of their narrative choices.

The main characters’ interaction with other characters causes a profound confusion. In both novels, Vonnegut includes several minor characters who, much like the main characters, wrestle with remembering and forgetting different pieces of the war. Each has his own reason for narrating his past, and each decides on a method that has benefits and faults. But all these characters practice selective narration, which helps them emphasize certain parts of their experience that they want to concentrate on and allows them to downplay other aspects they would like to ignore. The description of these various narrative methods provide Vonnegut’s readers with much needed perspective on the subject of memory; they show the wide range of options the main characters must contend with when deciding how to narrate their stories. In

1 addition, they give examples of the possible consequences selective narration leads to. Lastly, they lead us to consider the genesis of the more thoroughgoing avoidance strategies that the main characters develop in the course of both novels.

In Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night, Vonnegut writes extensively about the WWII experience from the perspective of two men who choose more radical schizophrenic strategies to deal with the past: Billy Pilgrim, an American soldier and prisoner of war during the Dresden massacre, and Howard Campbell, an American spy living as a Nazi in order to transmit coded messages to the Allies. These characters face personal dilemmas arising from the war. When they attempt to narrate their experiences, they develop conflicts about coherent factual narration.

In Mother Night, Campbell mentions his inability to speak anything but gibberish after a string of horrible experiences, saying, “it’s all I’ve seen, all I’ve been through…that makes it damn near impossible for me to say anything. I’ve lost the knack of making sense” (Vonnegut Night 124).

This statement clearly parallels the narrator’s apology to his editor in Slaughterhouse-Five, which describes why his book is so confusing: “it is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say” (Vonnegut Five 24). War’s uncontrollable mental effects plague Vonnegut’s characters constantly, even years after the fact. The characters’ need to recount and understand their situations, as well as to reconcile their past and present lives, cannot be satiated by mere selective narration. Their alternative schizophrenic strategies mirror those of Holocaust survivors who have also engaged in retrospective narration of the war.

Holocaust Testimonies, a book Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer wrote after listening to hundreds of testimonies given by survivors, provides insight into these characters’ difficulties in narration. Langer’s interviews with Holocaust survivors present harrowing images, and they help us to understand the way memory records such traumatic experiences. Additionally, they

2 show how different people cope with narrating difficult pasts, how memory assists or impedes this narration, and how Holocaust victims view their post-war lives in light of the tragedy they experienced. Let it be said that no scholarly source that I have come across ever suggested that readers should consider Kurt Vonnegut a Holocaust writer, and I do not mean to make that suggestion either. None of Vonnegut’s novels deals with the central theme of Holocaust writing, namely the histories of concentration-camp life as recounted by prisoners themselves, like those

Langer presents. However, Langer’s study explicitly describes the mental processes behind the type of trauma-induced schizophrenic narration that appears repeatedly in Vonnegut’s fictional historical narratives and is, therefore, a useful supplemental text.

Langer immediately becomes relevant to this study because his book begins by discussing the incoherent tendencies of Holocaust testimonies. He explains:

Written accounts of victim experience prod the imagination in ways that speech

cannot, striving for analogies to initiate the reader into the particularities of their

grim world. This literature faces a special challenge, since it must give most

readers access to a totally unfamiliar subject. (Langer 18-19)

The Holocaust victims’ experience is often completely foreign to those who wish to hear about it, and finding a way to clearly express such stories is trying. In Holocaust testimonies, the memories are so disturbing that just recounting them can trigger intense responses for the writer.

But he must ultimately describe the experience well enough to transfer these responses to the reader. Vonnegut’s characters clearly share this struggle to explain themselves, fighting against unsettling images that they have difficulty confronting, let alone describing. The problem primarily stems from memory’s constant resurgence and discontinuity; Langer states that

“memory cannot be silenced; it might as well be heard, in an attempt to understand why it must

3 express itself with such disjointed dismay” (50). Writing about the past seldom conforms to linear time. Rather, it is a montage of past and present images that refuses to fall into order.

Realistically, “instead of integrating past and present, memory here assaults and finally divides the self” (49), resulting in incongruous images and events that compose a muddled schizophrenic narrative.

While Langer’s work helps clarify the characters’ internal struggles, Hayden White’s theories of historical narration work toward explaining Vonnegut’s larger purpose in writing these novels. In “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” White discusses the way in which people present factual histories, skewing them in order to create an effect: “[the] value attached to narrativity in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary” (24). No history can truly be objectively factual. While Vonnegut’s novels are fictional, and as such are not properly “histories,” they examine WWII as a historical event.

Both Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night question the social forces behind the war as well as their implications, which are very much real and tangible. White explains, “interest in the social system…creates the possibility of conceiving the kinds of tensions, conflicts, struggles, and their various kinds of resolutions that we are accustomed to find in any representation of reality presenting itself to us as a history” (14). Vonnegut’s concentration on the way society perceives war leads him to his explanation of the characters’ resulting difficulties. Past narratives affect the characters and their subsequent modes of narration, and examination of this causal chain clearly connects to White’s claim about the selective narration of history.

Even more importantly, White opens his first chapter by saying, “to raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on

4 the nature of humanity itself” (1), which brings us to the larger moral point of Vonnegut’s writing. Vonnegut does not stop at simply showing us modes of remembering; he incites us to consider the effects historical narration has on humanity as a whole. War is a charged subject, and Vonnegut’s discussion of its consequences, of the tragedy it perpetuates, clearly leads us to think about its overarching moral implications. Even though White elsewhere describes adequate closure as an unattainable fantasy, he finds a way to make sense of people’s desire for neatly constructed endings to histories. He believes that the readers’ need for closure in historical narration “suggests that narrativity…is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality” (14). The larger conclusions that Vonnegut pushes us towards are based in morality. We must first think about the morality of war itself, but we must also consider the moral repercussions of certain reactions to war. These issues are of the utmost importance in reshaping our perceptions of our world.

Methods of Selective Narration

To understand the complex strategies the main characters eventually devise to describe their pasts, we must first concentrate on understanding the multitude of ways their peers choose to do the same. The different narrative techniques that the minor characters use provide a spectrum of possible ways to narrate the past and, specifically, the war. These characters aim to emphasize or downplay certain aspects of war, helping them to understand their experiences and remember them as they want to. Additionally, these various narratives do not exist in a vacuum; narrative naturally implies a readership, which is inevitably affected by what it reads. Some characters’ selectivity when discussing war acts as a catalyst for other characters’ subsequent selectivity. Thus, widely disseminated war narratives of all kinds promote other characters who

5 read them to put different spins on their war stories as well. Ultimately, analysis of these different techniques will show us the effects of selective narration.

Howard Campbell’s neighbors in New York, the Epsteins, are the first characters in

Mother Night who serve to contrast remembering against forgetting, allowing us to see the benefits and consequences of each. Abraham Epstein and his mother lived in Auschwitz for most of his childhood, and the two argue constantly over the benefit of remembering that period.

Abraham’s mother asks Campbell if he is any relation to the Nazi propagandist. Abraham gets angry, responding quickly by saying, “forget the war…forget Auschwitz…I never think about it”

(Vonnegut Night 31-32). His mother’s insistence upon remembering the war and the camp bother him; he wants to be an American doctor without thinking about his painful past. When

Campbell later comes to terms with and decides to confess his Nazi involvement, he approaches the Epsteins, and Abraham again denies any rumination over his childhood: “I never think about it. I’m a physician…go away. You’ve come to the wrong place” (257). His mother, however, says, “then let me remember. I can remember. Every minute I remember” (257). The great pain of remembering leads her to capture a war criminal, while Abraham, in his eagerness to forget, would have let Campbell go free. The indication here seems to be that remembering is preferable; it allows justice to be done. Perhaps Epstein’s mother focuses a bit too much on her past, but being too focused is still better than trying to be completely ignorant.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator’s early conversation with his war buddy Bernard

O’Hare and O’Hare’s wife, Mary, provides insight into the role other forms of narration play in remembering and forgetting traumatic events. The two men attempt to remember significant events for the narrator’s novel-in-progress about the Dresden firestorm, but, as the narrator explains, “we would chuckle or grin sometimes, as though war stories were coming back, but

6 neither one of us could remember anything good” (Vonnegut Five 17). Their attempt to remember “good” things distresses Mary, and she accuses the narrator of trying to write a glamorous war book, where “’war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them’”

(18). She fears the narrator will only include the “good” moments, narrating his and Bernard’s story as to avoid the harsh reality of the war experience. The narrator comes to a realization: “so then I understood. It was war that made her so angry…and she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies” (19). Whether or not the narrator initially intended to write a pro-war book, his encounter with Mary again underlines the importance of one’s choosing different strategies of remembering and forgetting the past. Films, books, journalism, and histories, which give the general populace its information about most important events, can be either dangerous or helpful tools, depending on how people employ them. As White reminds us, writers, reporters, and artists choose to emphasize some aspects of the subject that they wish to convey and ignore others. As a result, they seldom tell the full story. This selectivity may lead to pro-war propaganda, which Mary reviles and fears as a large proponent of future wars.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator quotes actual histories of WWII that illustrate the misguided stories of the war that they present. Their hawkish ideals ignore the moral consequences and hardships that accompany war. Statements throughout these excerpts describe the various and sometimes questionable ways of remembering that writers employ when talking about atrocities like Dresden. The narrator quotes an article about Dresden: “I deeply regret that

British and U.S. bombers killed 135,000 people in the attack on Dresden, but I remember who started the last war and I regret even more the loss of more than 5,000,000 Allied lives in the necessary effort to destroy Nazism” (Vonnegut Five 239). Articles of this nature, which cast blame on other countries while exonerating the author’s country and its motives, presumably

7 exist in all nations, and they perpetuate senseless wars by convincing each country of its moral supremacy. Another article appears directly afterward, providing a different perspective on the same event. This historian explains, “that the bombing of Dresden was a great tragedy none can deny. That is was really a military necessity few, after reading this book, will believe” (240).

But even with this seemingly regretful statement, he continues to say, “those who approved

[Dresden] were neither wicked nor cruel, though it may well be that they were too remote from the harsh realities of war to understand fully the appalling destructive power of air bombardment” (240). While the first historian represents Dresden as a military necessity, the second calls it a tragedy, but then presents the Allies’ ignorance as an excuse. The Mary

O’Hares of the world would see this justification as utterly absurd. To rationalize so many casualties simply in the name of ignorance means that future poor decisions may be excused as well, perpetuating a damaging cycle of worthless military action.

In addition to these articles that provide excuses and justification, the narrator describes

Billy Pilgrim’s being posed for pictures and propaganda films for the Nazis, who actually aim to misrepresent war. On Billy’s march after his capture, a German photographer wants a picture,

“so the guards staged one for him. They threw Billy into shrubbery…they menaced him with their machine pistols, as though they were capturing him then” (Vonnegut Five 74). Similarly,

“a motion-picture camera was set up at the border – to record the fabulous victory” (83).

Readers are meant to understand that most of what really happens during wars is cleaned up for presentation in articles like those written by military historians. Situations are also often completely staged in the case of photography and film. This creative presentation implies that war is less necessary and commendable than most people think; the reality is not deemed acceptable for public consumption because it does not conform to the glorious standards that

8 society has been conditioned to expect. Lies about war compose most general knowledge, but people’s blind acceptance allows such lies to go on without questions or repercussions most of the time. Put simply, in Slaughterhouse-Five, “the object of satiric attack turns out to be a complacent response to the horrors of the age…the real horror is that events such as Dresden continue to occur and no one seems appalled” (Merrill 149). The lack of social inquiry or outrage, or the commonness of social approbation in some cases, leads directly to the furthering of war.

Characters like Bertrand Rumfoord from Slaughterhouse-Five narrate so as to avidly support the glorification of war. While in the hospital, Billy listens as Rumfoord reads aloud pro-war articles about Hiroshima and Dresden. Rumfoord sympathizes with those who see

Dresden as a military necessity, and he loathes those who cover up such tragedy “’for fear that a lot of bleeding hearts…might not think it was such a wonderful thing to do’” (Vonnegut Five

245). He thinks that the weak deserve to die and want to get rid of such people in as quick and efficient a manner as possible. His belief that the ends justify the means leads him to narrate the war’s effects as necessary and positive, much like his contemporaries who write the hawkish articles he loves to read. He is the type of man involved in the glamorization of war that leads the Wearys and Derbys of the world to their demise. An Air Force veteran himself, he speaks not from a position of ignorance, but of experience, which has somehow still not made him favor pacifism. The skewed representations of war that he reads have little to do with his opinion; they simply convince him even more that he has the right idea, and this fact makes him a particularly dangerous type of person. He has seen firsthand the horrors of war and still continues to champion its effects.

9 Frank Wirtanen, Campbell’s recruiter in Mother Night, has a similar reading on war. In their first meeting, Wirtanen patiently explains his prediction that Campbell will choose to be a spy: “you’ll live your final answer…you’ll go ahead with it strictly on your own” (38).

Wirtanen’s calculating military personality homes in on Campbell’s literary talent and leads him to seek Campbell out specifically to serve the Army. He makes this decision in the name of military necessity because, like Rumfoord, his involvement in war has done nothing to convince him of its damaging nature. With his expert recruiting tactics, Wirtanen leaves Campbell with the blame for his enthusiastic response to the fact that “espionage relieved him of the necessity of operating with a conscience” (Leeds 84). Campbell calls Wirtanen “my Blue Fairy Godmother”

(40) for his occasional miraculous reappearances, during which he frees Campbell from various arrests and provides him with valuable information. But despite his continued ability to keep

Campbell free, Wirtanen only does so to serve a military purpose. Wirtanen reiterates

Rumfoord’s military detachment; he concerns himself only with people’s usefulness. Rumfoord would likely see Campbell’s espionage as a military necessity, much the way he sees Dresden, and he would not consider the war’s ruining Campbell’s life to be a tragedy. It is simply the sacrifice he must make to serve his country.

However, Slaughterhouse-Five also includes numerous characters who buy into incomplete representations of war to show the problems such misguided beliefs may cause.

Edgar Derby latches on to the portrayal of soldiers as heroic and glorious, narrating his experience with these characteristics in mind. Because of his age, Derby must pull strings to get into the army in the first place, and he does so primarily to find this supposedly omnipresent sense of heroism. He acts paternally in the novel, staying by his fellow soldiers’ sides during their most desperate moments. He volunteers to watch over Billy in the camp infirmary when he

10 cracks up during the camp production of Cinderella, holds Roland Weary’s head while he dies in a boxcar, and takes it upon himself to watch over everyone. In Derby’s speech after being elected leader of the prisoners’ group, the narrator says, “his primary responsibility now was to make damn well sure that everybody got home safely” (Vonnegut Five 187). Derby seems to thrive on being a leader, taking care of the younger men, and being viewed as a father figure, ostensibly because these characteristics prove him to be one of the true American heroes that many people who narrate about war glorify so openly. His men elect him as their leader, and he becomes even more convinced that he will achieve military honor.

Despite the narrator’s insistence that “poor old Edgar Derby” has good character, his misguided beliefs about heroism help to seal his fate. Although he teaches a college course called Contemporary Problems in Western Civilization, Derby ostensibly fails to recognize war as one of these problems. He maintains the belief that fighting will bring him glory, all the while ignoring the painful reality of what surrounds him. He imagines writing hopeful letters home,

“telling his wife that he was alive and well, that she shouldn’t worry, that the war was nearly over, that he would soon be home” (183). His imaginary letters do not mention that his regiment has insufficient equipment, that the camp food makes them violently ill, or that he holds soldiers’ heads up as they die. Rather, they serve as his mode of escape from an unpleasant situation.

Like the narrators of the heroic war stories he admires, he cleans up his war narrative in his head for future presentation to his wife, focusing on what are, in fact, the barest scraps of his experience in Germany. His tenacious pursuit of glory leads him to suffer mightily, but Derby experiences no glory before he dies; his entire quest is futile, and his letter-writing fantasies do not help him to escape his situation in the end. As one of the few survivors of the Dresden firebombing, he scours the ruins with Billy Pilgrim, and the police execute him for stealing a

11 teapot. Derby lives through war, despite unbelievable odds against him, only to die in the relatively calm aftermath. His devotion to representations of the hero has him pulling strings to get into the war, only to realize that he has been duped by creative lies and selective narration.

Unlike Derby, who focuses exclusively on what might be termed the more “positive” representations of war, Roland Weary concentrates instead on the opportunity to kill and destroy.

He thrives on tales of torture, tells Billy “about neat tortures he’d read about or seen in the movies or heard on the radio” (Vonnegut Five 46), and obsesses over his barbaric trench knife.

Weary chooses to ignore the unsavory effects the war has on him as well, instead fixating on killing, anger, and, in the interest of pretending he is popular for the first time in his life, friendship. In his hometown, Weary “had been unpopular because he was stupid and fat and mean, and smelled like bacon no matter how much he washed” (44). He sees the war as an opportunity to make lasting friends. Initially, this desire seems altogether reasonable, and readers may sympathize with Weary. However, we quickly learn that even his friendship fantasies revolve around “Weary and his antitank buddies [fighting] like hell until everybody was killed” (53). His imagination concentrates solely on destroying the enemy, while he ultimately fails to realize that he is in serious danger at the same time. Weary’s delusion, despite its alternate focus, closely parallels Derby’s. Both men enter the war with unrealistic expectations that are fueled by selective representations of war, and, as a result, both men completely disregard the possibility of their own deaths.

Weary also has a vivid imagination that allows him to create fantastic stories much like

Derby’s imaginary letters to his wife. However, Weary goes a step beyond Derby; instead of simply playing up the positive aspects of his experience, he fabricates them entirely. When

Weary narrates his story in his head, he is “able to pretend that he was safe at home, having

12 survived the war, and that he was telling his parents and sister a true war story” (53) about a group composed of him and two scouts who are his closest friends. In reality, they hate him because he tries too hard to be tough. He, like Derby, lives in futility, and he later dies of gangrenous wounds from his own unique torture: being forced to wear wooden clogs on a march. But nowhere does he understand that his fantasies, which make him ignorant of the actual situation around him, do nothing to help him. Even while dying, he holds firmly to his obsessions with friendship and with death. In his final days, “Weary, in his nearly continuous delirium, told again and again of the Three Musketeers” (101), showing his complete devotion to the fictional war story he dreams of living and someday telling to his family. Similarly, he maintains his violent mindset on his deathbed, contracting other people to get revenge for his death. As a final demonstration of his violence, he “wanted to be avenged, so he said again and again the name of the person who had killed him…’Billy Pilgrim’” (101). His fantasies stay with him until the very end, illustrating the tenacity with which people hold to misguided representations of war.

In both Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night, characters also use reading and writing not as a justification for their involvement in the war, but to completely avoid war and give meaning to life outside of it. Eliot Rosewater, a former infantry captain in Slaughterhouse-Five, also tries to rationalize and forget; he is not angry or glory-hungry – just “alarmed by the outside world” (Vonnegut Five 126) when he returns from service. Rosewater meets Billy Pilgrim when both voluntarily commit themselves to a mental hospital after the war. He introduces Billy to the world of science fiction, saying, “everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers

Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoevsky. ‘But that isn’t enough any more’” (129). Rosewater believes that only science fiction can offer new insights into human nature, and he and Billy use

13 it “to re-invent themselves and their universe” (128). Billy voraciously reads Rosewater’s store of Kilgore Trout novels, anxious to find help for his problems with life after war. Schatt explains, “Trout’s stories…function as bittersweet lies that reveal truths” (90). One particular novel tells the story of an assassin robot that people refuse to accept because of his halitosis.

When he cures his breath and goes back to killing, people gladly welcome him to the human race; their shallowness and lack of concern for one another leads them to value hygiene over benevolence. In Rosewater’s view, only through such a far-fetched example can people realize the ease with which they accept cruelty. Rosewater and Billy “both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in the war” (128), but reading Trout provides them both a temporary escape and an explanation for the inscrutable aspects of human nature they encounter in the war.

In Mother Night, writing and art also help Howard Campbell reshape his world. He works as a playwright before being recruited as a spy in WWII, and his plays, as he claims,

“were medieval romances, about as political as chocolate éclairs” (Vonnegut Night 33). The plays are sentimental fairytales, and they contain no reference to the war, despite the fact that he writes them in Germany at the beginning of WWII. He prides himself on avoiding war as a topic and plans to write his next play about “how a pair of lovers in a world gone mad could survive by being loyal only to a nation composed of themselves” (34). Campbell’s idealistic writing reflects the world he wishes he lived in, rather than what really exists around him. He wants to believe that “the structure of art implies a structure of the world; and where a story follows a logical or causal development, it expresses a correspondingly coherent world – looked over by

God, say, or ruled by fate” (Giannone 43); his attempt to mix life and art seems designed to give order to an otherwise complicated situation. Unfortunately, this view could never be

14 successfully put into practice, and “Campbell’s personal history should have taught him that there are forms and that a work has a form, but the form does not exist except as an ideal or textbook exercise” (43). His childlike faith in the power of art represents just one of many sadly unwise ways to cope with a painful and confusing set of circumstances. In the end, it does him much more harm than good.

Development of Schizophrenia

Both Billy Pilgrim and Howard Campbell take ideas from their reading and writing, respectively, and use these ideas to practice schizophrenia. Billy becomes schizophrenic in time, escaping to a science-fiction-like world. He can avoid the unpleasant times in his life by simply time-traveling to another place. His knowledge of science fiction helps him to accept the new race and its ideals because Billy considers them more informed than human beings. Campbell, on the other hand, uses writing to become schizophrenic in identity. His playwriting knowledge allows him to act like a Nazi while supposedly retaining his pre-war morals in another separate persona. Giannone explains, “war…demands a decisive moral response. Campbell hedges”

(39). He instead chooses to use his “brilliant interpretation of a Nazi, inside and out” (Vonnegut

Night 39) as an opportunity to perform an amazing feat of acting. Additionally, Campbell uses his writing skill to do his job as a spy. “By mutilating language, Campbell subvert[s] his talent into an instrument of evil” (Giannone 41), climbing the Nazi ranks with his exquisite linguistic abilities. Billy and Campbell turn simple language-based escape strategies into life-altering schizophrenic episodes. These different modes of schizophrenia constitute the predominant ways in which Vonnegut’s main characters try to remember and reconcile their pasts.

Thus, as victims of war’s traumatic influence, both Pilgrim and Campbell deal with their lives by becoming schizophrenic. Their experiences are too painful for them to narrate them

15 away like the lesser characters; simply ignoring reality will not abolish such intense memories.

The past has a way of intruding on the present, and this influence would deeply affect these characters if they did nothing to combat it. They must go a step beyond and create multiple personas to deal with their lives. Acceptance of multiple selves helps the characters to go on living, and Vonnegut presents schizophrenia “as the predominant operational activity enabling all the characters to live in harmony with their many selves” (Leeds 82). Critic Jerome

Klinkowitz concurs, saying, “the traditional desire to maintain the integrity of self in the face of a too chaotic world has always been schizophrenia of a sort” (86). Vonnegut critic Stanley Schatt describes the way we should begin to understand schizophrenia by saying, “in order to discover what is real, it is necessary to reconcile a number of different views of reality even though some of these may be contradictory” (50). Reconciliation does not indicate complete integration of these various views, but rather suggests coming to understand the reasons and motivations behind the multiplicity of selves that the characters develop.

Langer asserts, “odd as it may sound, we need to search for the inner principles of incoherence that make these testimonies accessible” (16-17), and, to do so, we must understand the fragmented self that traumatic experience creates. When his group of Holocaust survivors tell about their past, they obviously do so while living in the present, which is, conceivably, a very different time and place, so “witnesses struggle with the impossible task of making their recollections…coalesce with the rest of their lives” (Langer 3). The disparity between their past and present selves refuses to be corrected, and “straining against what we might call disruptive memory is an effort to reconstruct a semblance of continuity in a life that began as, and now resumes what we would consider, a normal existence” (2). Indeed, in Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy

Pilgrim jumps back and forth in time between his childhood, his war experience, and his post-

16 war life as an optometrist in a small city, finding it impossible to make them relate harmoniously.

Howard Campbell has a similar problem in Mother Night, drawing experiences from his relatively calm pre-war life as a playwright, his tumultuous Nazi existence, and his post-war period of hiding in New York City. The war intrudes upon a life that, without such intrusion, would probably have been fairly uneventful and mundane, but now the men must reconcile the brief period of disturbance with the rest of their seemingly normal lives. This fact aligns them well with other victims who wrestle with the same problem on a daily basis, even years after their experience ends.

Thus, schizophrenia gives Billy Pilgrim the power to rationalize away the aspects of life he wants to ignore – particularly the war. Since Billy has no preconceived ideas about war, he employs a more thoroughgoing strategy to avoid almost everything about his experience. When the real world gets too painful, he escapes to a different place for solace. Billy slips in and out of time to visit the Tralfamadorians, a race of aliens who give him the ideas he needs to rationalize what is happening to him. They explain to him a new and different notion of time, in which he can visit any moment he wants to whenever he wants to. This theory is free of cause and effect and of free will, so a variety of distinctly human dilemmas are easily reconciled. Death does not pose a problem, because people are alive in plenty of other, happier moments, accessible through schizophrenia whenever someone wants to look at them. Similarly, all moments are pre- structured so that there is no responsibility on anyone’s part for what happens, no guilt, and no consequences for any action. In reference to the Tralfamadorian ideals, critic Tony Tanner asks,

“can one afford to ignore the ugly moments in life by concentrating on the happy ones? On the other hand, can one afford not to?” (129). Tanner’s question lays out Billy’s dilemma in simple terms: are there moral repercussions to ignoring the bad times, or is this ignorance merely a

17 necessity that lies outside moral constraints? Billy sees no dilemma, and he firmly believes that ignorance is necessary and helpful.

Like Billy Pilgrim, Campbell also turns to schizophrenia as an escape from the difficult questions in his life. He tells us, “I’ve always been able to live with what I did…through that simple and widespread boon to mankind – schizophrenia” (Vonnegut Night 179). After being recruited as a spy, Campbell explains, “I began to strut like Hitler’s right-hand man, and nobody saw the honest me I hid so deep inside” (39). He rationalizes his actions by appealing to what he sees as his true self, a man who, at first, claims, “I’m not a soldier, not a political man…if war comes, I won’t do anything to help it along” (38). Technically, this statement is not a lie;

Campbell truly believes at the time that his spying will not help the war, but rather help end it.

Thus, to justify the evil acts he must perform in order to supposedly promote good, he creates a kind of mantra for himself: “a very good me, the real me, a me made in heaven, is hidden deep inside” (xiii). These ideas allow him to ignore the obviously evil deeds he does during the war.

Campbell says he cannot see the Nazis as anything other than human, and he knows that he

“worked too hard…for their trust and applause. Too hard. Amen. Too hard” (36-37). He fully realizes that his propaganda went far beyond what it needed to in order to get the spying done right. He also claims to know that the Germans whose orders he carries out are “ignorant and insane” (69), but explains, “God help me, I carried out their instructions anyway” (69). His separation of selves makes this duality possible.

Since Campbell is a writer and playwright, he should be an experienced liar, and this talent helps his career as an American spy during WWII. The novel’s fictitious editor explains,

“lies told for the sake of artistic effect…can be, in a higher sense, the most beguiling forms of truth” (Vonnegut Night x), and one key concept of the book becomes clear: Campbell is a spy

18 who does his job too well. He continually claims that he is not a Nazi war criminal, but rather that his true self hides deep inside him. He simply uses schizophrenia as a tool to help him forget his more obvious Nazi self. Relying on his art as a playwright, “Campbell seeks escape by creating his own world – one in which he can watch his actions as a Nazi with detachment and even smug amusement, secure in the knowledge that he is only acting” (Schatt 47).

Campbell goes to great lengths to justify forgetting the horrible things he does as a Nazi, but the fervor with which he climbs the Nazi ranks calls into question whether he is truly the good person he claims to be at heart, or if he has actually become the ardent Nazi he thinks he is merely pretending to be. “Campbell lives in a pluralistic universe in which it is impossible to determine just what is real” (Schatt 49), but his memoir gives us some insight into his schizophrenic theories and their effects on the events of his life.

Early in the novel, the interaction between Campbell and his Israeli prison guards lays out the fractured self his schizophrenia creates (Schatt 45). Arpad Kovacs is a Hungarian Jew who made false papers and joined the S.S. in order to save his own life during the Nazis’

Hungarian occupation. As a fellow spy, Kovacs cheers Campbell, condemning “people who did nothing to save their own lives or anybody else’s life when the Nazis took over” (Vonnegut

Night 11). When Kovacs reads one of Campbell’s broadcasts, he has an alarming reaction: disappointment. Kovacs explains, “’I was such a pure and terrifying Aryan that they even put me in a special detachment’” (13). He explains that his job was to discover who was leaking vital information to the Jews, and “he looked bitter and affronted, remembering it, even though he had been that leak” (13). Arpad clearly suffers a wide separation of his multiple selves

(Schatt 45); he exists simultaneously as a Jewish agent against the war and a Nazi agent promoting genocide, yet each of his selves may regard the other as a completely different person.

19 Andor Gutman, however, illustrates the part of Campbell that painfully remembers his actions and suffers from a guilty conscience (Schatt 45). In Auschwitz, Gutman volunteered to be a

Sonderkommando, a special detail assigned to escort prisoners to the gas chambers, remove the corpses, and be exterminated. While he claims no knowledge as to why he would volunteer for death, the Sonderkommando represented the quickest form of suicide available but required conspiring in the deaths of other campmates. Gutman says, “’volunteering for the

Sonderkommando – it was a very shameful thing to do’” (9). Campbell, who truly participated in shameful behavior, uses his schizophrenia to escape guilt. He cannot yet understand

Gutman’s impulse toward it, but their interaction foreshadows the realization he will have later in the text.

By completely detaching his “true self” from his Nazi persona, Campbell can convince himself that he is really doing a good deed by transmitting coded messages to the Americans during his radio broadcasts. He explains, “the code was a matter of mannerisms, pauses, emphases, coughs, seeming stumbles in certain key sentences” (Vonnegut Night 29), but the broadcasts containing this code actually disseminate Nazi propaganda around the world. This fact does not seem to bother him at all. Campbell never meets the people who give him his instructions, nor does he know what information passes through him, but he says, “from the simplicity of most of my instructions, I gather that I was usually giving yes or no answers to questions that had been put to the spy apparatus” (29). With no knowledge of his messages’ content, he blindly follows orders without knowing if he is helping or not. In reference to his broadcasts, Campbell flatly explains, “that was the extent of my usefulness to the Allied cause”

(30). He does not editorialize, but merely looks at his involvement as no more than an event.

Schatt claims, “Campbell can comment about his ludicrous poisonous broadcasts with the same

20 detachment that the Tralfamadorian robots exhibit in Slaughterhouse-Five” (55). His separation of selves effectively prevents any kind of reflection on what he has done.

Billy, however, narrates his past from the Tralfamadorian perspective, using separation of place rather than separation of self to understand his world. The narrator describes these alien theories by providing copies of Billy’s post-war letters to the editor of his local newspaper.

Billy’s second letter explains:

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies

he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly

for people to cry at his funeral…Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead,

I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is

“so it goes.” (Vonnegut Five 33-34)

The Tralfamadorian reaction to death allows a quick and casual response to subsequent tragedies.

A simple “so it goes” (30-31) follows each short description of the deaths that Billy experiences in the war. There are, however, many instances of inanimate objects dying, and each receives the same comment. Dead champagne refuses to fizz (93), bubbles try to escape from a glass of

“dead” water (129), and Billy attends a talk on whether or not the novel has died (263).

Tralfamadorian theory lends the same amount of compassion to human and inanimate death.

Tralfamadorians see soap made of Jews and gypsies (122) just the same as they see cart wheels greased with animal fat (200). This concept obviously constitutes a profoundly compassionless way to respond to a loss of human life. Vonnegut has his narrator speak in ways that utterly lack compassion, showing the supreme detachment that the Tralfamadorians uphold.

Besides the ability to time-travel, an important part of Tralfamadorian theory is their fatalistic worldview, which Billy chooses to believe as well. Upon his capture, Billy

21 immediately wants to know how to stop war and live at peace, but his alien captors regard this question as silly. The aliens say, “all time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations” (Vonnegut Five 109). In other words, all time is predetermined and does not fit into some kind of master plan. Most importantly, they claim, “only on Earth is there any talk of free will” (109). This fact enables Billy to ignore the need for understanding that humans naturally seek. He blindly accepts the Tralfamadorians’ determinism, which allows him to further rationalize his unpleasant experiences. He understands war as simply part of the preordained fabric of the universe and sees it as unavoidable. Tanner explains the deterministic appeal when he says, “fantasies of complete determinism, of being held helplessly in the amber of some eternally unexplained plot, justify complete passivity and a supine acceptance of the futility of all action” (130). Tralfamadorian theory allows Billy the luxury of operating without worrying about compassion or morality, so he lives as a kind of machine, impervious to outside influences. The narrator explains, “Billy was not moved to protest the bombing of North

Vietnam, did not shudder about the hideous things he himself had seen bombing do” (Vonnegut

Five 76). His adherence to Tralfamadorian theory causes all his human instinct to be outraged at callousness and depravity to be lost; there is nothing he can do to change things. To live like a

Tralfamadorian, Billy must deny his compassionate instincts and his belief in free will.

Campbell importantly parallels Billy Pilgrim in his lack of compassion, which, unlike

Billy, he freely admits as his own creation. He contrasts himself with Adolf Eichmann, who he believes cannot tell the difference between right and wrong, by saying, “I always know when I tell a lie, am capable of imagining the cruel consequences of anybody’s believing my lies, know cruelty is wrong” (Vonnegut Night 166). This statement proves that he is fully aware of what he does in the war, but he can go on doing it nonetheless. He regards everything he says in his radio

22 broadcasts as lies, and he apparently knows what harm these lies can do, but he does not experience regret about them. Campbell wishes “to be the sort of person of whom it could truly be said, ‘forgive him – he knows not what he does’” (166), but he realizes, “this cannot be said of me now” (166). To so knowingly promote cruelty seems a profoundly compassionless act, and Campbell knows that it is. He says at one point, “it might make me seem more human…if I were to declare that I itched and blinked and nearly swooned with a feeling of unreality. Sorry.

Not so” (213). His schizophrenia, much like Billy’s, allows him to live in any isolated moment, seeing it as real and normal despite its obvious contradiction to the moment that came before.

He confesses to a “ghastly lack” (213) in himself when it comes to reacting in the typical compassionate fashion to certain catastrophic events, and, ironically, “Campbell’s unending facility to gratify the extremes of human nature aligns him with the philosophy of Adolf

Eichmann” (Leeds 88) in the end.

Campbell explains the modifications he makes to himself that drastically reduce his natural emotional responses. When the police arrest him and his gang of American supporters, he freezes in place. Struggling to find a reason for his inability to move on, Campbell runs down a list of things he has ingrained in himself over the years:

It was not guilt that froze me. I had taught myself never to feel guilt. It was not a

ghastly sense of loss that froze me. I had taught myself to covet nothing…It was

not the thought that I was so unloved that froze me. I had taught myself to do

without love. It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had

taught myself never to expect anything from him. (Vonnegut Night 231-232)

Campbell’s supposed ability to live without feelings of guilt, loss, love, and religion speaks volumes about his self-modification. These beliefs are clearly necessary to promote his

23 schizophrenia; if he allowed himself to experience the full range of human emotion, he would be unable to live the dual life of Nazi and caring American. Thus, schizophrenia again proves to promote a completely compassionless way of living. However, it continues to be wonderfully effective in helping Campbell to rationalize his past and escape blame for what he does for the

Nazi cause.

Campbell’s feelings about his schizophrenic lifestyle culminate in a description of the totalitarian mind. He describes it as “a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random…with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell” (Vonnegut Night 223-224). The Nazis choose to take certain truths, here represented as teeth on a gear, and obliterate them, leaving other truths unharmed. Campbell sees the unbelievable danger in selectively destroying important pieces of information, and he explains that such a thought system causes seemingly unreal events like the alternation “over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz [between] great music and calls for corpse-carriers” (225). Campbell claims, “never have I willingly destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine” (225), but this claim does not go so far as to say that his thought machine is undamaged. He admits, “there are teeth missing, God knows – some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history” (225). Presumably, the schizophrenic mind must function in this way, with certain pieces of information missing. Otherwise, a complete separation of selves would be impossible.

Campbell, however, distinguishes himself from other Nazis by discussing willing versus unwilling destruction of thoughts. He seeks to save his reputation by telling us that the destruction of his thought process is not his fault, but that, “shaped by the eternal dynamic tensions of human existence, ‘the clutchless shifts of history’ become the structured moments of

24 his personal existence” (Leeds 89). Campbell tries to blame the world, and “his theme is that we all suffer some form of schizophrenia…due to the swirl of historic/genetic forces and that we are doomed to perpetuate such cycles” (Leeds 90). Campbell’s rationale could easily extend to Billy

Pilgrim as well; history’s forces could be blamed for pushing Billy to accept the Tralfamadorian worldview as his own. But the fact remains that both men choose to live as schizophrenics, regardless of their reasoning for this choice. No one forces Campbell to become a spy, and, similarly, no one convinces Billy to believe Tralfamadorian theory. The horrors of war are such as to make these options attractive to both characters, but they make their own choices with reference to coping strategies. Neither character necessarily willingly destroys gears on his thought machine, but the destruction naturally follows from his decisions.

Implications of Schizophrenia

Vonnegut carefully displays the consequences of the decision to be schizophrenic, showing us the problems it creates for the characters. Bystanders subject both men to being misunderstood, because “an obvious dilemma arises when the spectators of our lives disagree with our own perceptions about the motives and actions that define us” (Leeds 81). Leeds goes on to explain this new tension: “one’s place and function within a given moment of existence is simultaneously defined by outsiders considering the facades we present and by ourselves contemplating the various mitigating factors that prompt our actions” (81). The victim, now finally able to deal with himself, must inevitably confront his peers’ confusion regarding his multiple selves. External perceptions and other events directly lead to a failure of the schizophrenic mindset.

In Mother Night, Campbell’s schizophrenia gets out of hand as he tries too hard to be a

Nazi, separating his selves too widely to reconcile them with each other. He describes various

25 tasks he performs at the behest of his Nazi superiors, such as agreeing to write a play for

Goebbels about the Germans’ crushing of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Campbell claims never to have written the play, but admits, “I probably would have written it if there had been enough time, if my superiors had put enough pressure on me” (Vonnegut Night 19). But he also addresses many tasks he does carry out. He draws a caricature of a Jew to be used in target practice for the Hitler youth, and explains, “this target represents an excess of zeal, since I was not working as a graphic artist for the Nazis…I drew the monster in order to establish myself even more solidly as a Nazi” (154). He also invents the Free America Corps; he “suggested its creating, designed its uniforms and insignia, [and] wrote its creed” (94), hoping to mobilize

American POWs to fight for the Nazis. By admitting his interest in completing these side projects, Campbell proves that he has more desire to impress the Nazis than is reasonable for a spy. The coded information he passes along travels only through his radio show; the extra writing and drawing he does for the Nazis serves no purpose other than to push him upward in their hierarchy. Campbell’s desire to be respected among the Nazis has no impact on his efficacy, because he could do his job for the Americans just as well while remaining a peon in the order. His zeal represents his first step toward becoming what he pretends to be.

Despite these unwarranted extra contributions to the Nazis, Campbell tries to maintain his innocence in the face of statements that clearly contradict his beliefs about himself. Werner

Noth, Campbell’s father-in-law, has only one conversation with him in the novel, but Noth makes a point that acts as the first blow to Campbell’s rationalizations. Noth prepares to leave his home in Germany to escape the Allied invasion, but when Campbell comes to say goodbye,

Noth says, “until almost this very moment nothing would have delighted me more than to prove that you were a spy, to see you shot” (Vonnegut Night 99). As a Nazi himself, Noth mistrusts

26 the overzealous Nazism of an American whose country is on the other side of the war. But he has a change of heart; he explains that Campbell could admit to being a spy, and he would let him go back to being an American without question. This reaction initially seems confusing, but

Noth explains his motivation:

You could never have served the enemy as well as you served us…I realized that

almost all the ideas that I hold now, that make me unashamed of anything I may

have felt or done as a Nazi, came not from Hitler, not from Goebbels, not from

Himmler – but from you. (99)

Noth’s powerful statement proves that Campbell’s propaganda effects more powerful feelings in true Nazis than even the work of the most elite Nazi commanders. To place him above Hitler as a catalyst of Nazi pride and rhetoric shows the true extent to which Campbell helped the Nazi cause.

Campbell has little reaction to Noth’s statement, but he begins to realize his far-reaching effects when he returns to the United States after the war. Lionel J.D. Jones, an American hired as a German propaganda agent, publishes a pamphlet called The White Christian Minuteman in the U.S. during the war. Campbell explains, “it is quite possible…that much of his more scurrilous material was written by me” (Vonnegut Night 67). Through Jones, Campbell’s propaganda reaches many Americans sympathetic with the Nazis during the war, which means his influence does much more than simply help the Germans. He unwittingly provides overwhelming support to racist initiatives in the United States, especially considering that the

Americans do not know he is a spy, and, “though he savors his own niceties of wit, such subtleties go over the heads of the countless Jonses…of the world” (Giannone 48). Like Jones, other Americans interested in racial purification look up to Campbell as well. Father Patrick

27 Keeley, a priest for a Nazi-organized gun club, reads a particularly scathing prayer at one of its meetings. Campbell admits, “Keeley’s famous prayer…was a paraphrase of a satiric poem I had composed” (Vonnegut Night 74). Similarly, August Krapptauer, leader of the Klan-like

German-American Bund, makes speeches to his followers regularly. Campbell explains,

“Krapptauer’s claims about the Pope and the mortgage on the Vatican were my inventions, too”

(74). Jones, Keeley, and Krapptauer do their racist work in Atlanta, Detroit, and New Jersey, respectively. Thus, Campbell’s work drums up a web of supporters all over the country. Noth’s claim that Campbell serves the Nazis better than he serves the Americans begins to look entirely plausible.

Wirtanen’s opinions also cause Campbell to have painful realizations about the way the world perceives him and its disparity with the way he perceives himself. Campbell dwells on the fact that his parents died without knowing that he was an American agent, saying that his Nazi persona was not his true self. Wirtanen disagrees, saying, “certainly you were [a Nazi]…how else could a responsible historian classify you” (Vonnegut Night 188) and insisting that the world knows Campbell for what he really is. To prove his point, he asks Campbell what he would have done if the Nazis had won, and Campbell has no choice but to admit, “there is every chance…that I would have become a sort of Nazi Edgar Guest, writing a daily column of optimistic doggerel for daily papers around the world” (189). Wirtanen breaks through

Campbell’s protective schizophrenia bluntly, making clear that Campbell is completely guilty of being a Nazi, whether or not he does so for the sake of the American cause. He also tells

Campbell that he broadcast the news of his wife’s death in code to the Americans before he even knew she was dead. Campbell explains, “it represented, I suppose a wider separation of my several selves than even I can bear to think about” (184) and says, “this news…somehow upset

28 me more than anything in the whole adventure (184). Finally his realizations hit him hard. The combination of these various outsider perceptions proves finally that the true self Campbell claims to know no longer exists in anyone’s eyes but his own.

Despite Campbell’s insistence upon his good nature, he can no longer deny his wrongdoing, and he chooses to surrender to the Israeli government. He surrenders to Abraham

Epstein, the Auschwitzer, and he describes his feelings when the police knock on the door to collect him: “the instant they did that, I felt enormously relieved. I felt happy” (Vonnegut Night

259). Finally he succumbs to feeling a need for punishment; his schizophrenia lifts long enough for him to admit to his crimes. But while awaiting trial, Wirtanen comes to his rescue, writing a letter that exonerates him. The letter forces the Israelis to free Campbell, and he says, “so I am about to be a free man again, to wander where I please. I find the prospect nauseating” (267).

He knows he can never reclaim the life he had before the war. Being free means nothing to him anymore, because, as he explains, “what had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity. Now even that had flickered out” (232). Klinkowitz explains, “because men have abandoned all else and have selfishly fled to their selves as the romantic center of the universe, when the self collapses, everything, quite literally, is lost” (88). So Campbell decides

“tonight is the night I will hang Howard W. Campbell, Jr., for crimes against himself” (Vonnegut

Night 268) because “it is becoming increasingly more difficult for him to rationalize the actions of that part of himself that is dark and evil” (Schatt 46-47). He becomes unable to sustain his schizophrenic lifestyle, deciding instead to end his life.

In light of his suicide, we should consider the implications of his schizophrenia. “Mother

Night lays bare for us the mechanism of the self-deceiving mind as it desperately tries to keep up with the uncontrollable distresses of life” (Giannone 51), and the irresistible conclusion is that

29 choosing to be schizophrenic is Campbell’s downfall. His initial agreement to be a spy seems reasonable, but the way he chooses to play it out clearly reveals a poor knowledge of the consequences. Campbell’s zealous overacting and egotistical pursuit of the role of the perfect

Nazi starts a downward spiral that he is powerless to counteract at the end of his life. He finds, in the end, that “he cannot enter the meaning of his life by extracting form from form, taking off mask after mask” (Giannone 50), and this inability leaves him with few choices. Learning that

“the self is not inviolate…[and] there is no place to hide” (Klinkowitz 88) causes him to regard suicide as his only option. The problem remains unresolved, and “Campbell is doomed emotionally to relive his crime without ever coming to a releasing understanding” (Giannone

50), so the novel ends on an incredibly dark note. Howard Campbell lies to himself for the greater part of his life, rationalizing and escaping unsuccessfully the resounding moral lesson that should come from his decision. As Giannone explains, “the pain caused by remorse is awful, but worse pain comes from the recognition that there is no resolution” (51), and Campbell clearly experiences this problem. He holds tenaciously to acting as an excuse for war crimes, a strategy that does not help him, but rather leaves him hanging himself.

Billy Pilgrim experiences similar problems with his schizophrenia, and we see that he is also unable to maintain it continuously. Billy lives out his life preaching the Tralfamadorian gospel to anyone who will listen, so he has no overarching realization like Campbell. However, there is still an indication that he cannot wholly indoctrinate himself into their way of life. Just after the war, he suffers “a mild nervous collapse” (Vonnegut Five 30) while in optometry school, and throughout the novel he manages to cry often, in private, over things that he cannot quite understand. Billy visits his doctor to “relieve a complaint that [he] had: every so often, for no apparent reason, Billy Pilgrim would find himself weeping” (78). Billy even cries for the

30 mutilated feet of the horse that carried him around Dresden after the firestorm, because “the

Americans had treated their form of transportation as though it were no more sensitive than a six- cylinder Chevrolet” (251). He nearly passes out when he sees a barbershop quartet perform, because their contorted singing faces remind him of the expressions of the dying civilians in

Dresden. These reactions prove that he has not completely suppressed his compassion; it comes back to break his protective schizophrenic barrier.

Schatt explains Billy’s various reactions, saying, “Billy Pilgrim accepts [the

Tralfamadorian] view intellectually but not emotionally…[he] cannot endure the sight of human suffering even though the Tralfamadorians tell him there is nothing he can do about it” (86).

These small instances of emotion show that Billy is not, in fact, as dead to human compassion as he may seem. The narrator explains, “[Billy] had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was” (Vonnegut Five 221). The secret is that the pull of compassion is strong enough to resist the unnatural beliefs of Tralfamadore to a small degree. According to Schatt,

“Billy is crying in despair for the plight of mankind even though his intellect refuses to recognize this fact” (87). Billy is still a person, not an alien, no matter how hard he tries to avoid it. His schizophrenia simply breaks down when he is confronted by images of intense suffering.

Another problem for Billy is that his technique is still unavailable to his peers. The majority of the human race, unlike Billy, does not experience time as non-linear. Merrill explains, “it is one thing to say that human problems are insoluble if one has visited

Tralfamadore. It is quite another to support this view from a strictly Earthling perspective”

(Vonnegut Five 149). In other words, to the general population the Tralfamadorian notions might seem intriguing or even tempting, but people cannot act upon such ideals while still living

31 in linear time and espousing a characteristically human theory of compassion. The

Tralfamadorians describe their interpretation of the human condition as follows:

This poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could

never take off. There was only one eyehole through which he could look, and

welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe…he was also strapped to a steel

lattice which was bolted to a flatcar on rails, and there was no way he could touch

the pipe. All [he] could see was the little dot at the end of the pipe…whatever

poor [Earthling] saw through the pipe, he had no choice but to say to himself,

‘that’s life.’ (147)

While a human being could grasp the idea of living in isolated moments, he would be unable to actually do so without having some special schizophrenic ability like Billy or, at the very least, being content to leave behind human compassion. As Schatt observes, “the Tralfamadorians enjoy the good moments and ignore the bad moments, but this solution is unsatisfactory to

Vonnegut who believes that death is far too important to ignore” (95). Most other people would hopefully share Vonnegut’s unease with suppressing compassion, leaving them unable to be truly Tralfamadorian.

The narrator of Slaughterhouse-Five also attempts to live the Tralfamadorian life, and in his narration we can see more problems that arise. In his early encounter with Mary O’Hare, he solemnly promises that he will not romanticize the war in his book, telling her, “I give you my word of honor: there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne” (Vonnegut Five 19). In fact, he does something quite different; instead of demonizing or glorifying war, he takes on the

Tralfamadorian viewpoint, seemingly to promote resigned acceptance. Strictly speaking, we get all our information through the narrator, so he is really the main supporter of the Tralfamadorian

32 theories, the one who wants to tell us what he has learned. He is the one who says “so it goes” in response to all the deaths, both catastrophic and insignificant, in the book. He is the one who shares Billy’s knowledge with us, who thinks Billy’s story and ideas are worth recounting. But he introduces most of the Tralfamadorian ideals with “Billy Pilgrim says” (110), making clear that the information is not his; it is Billy’s. His constant reminders that he is merely reporting ideas show that he may not be at as much ease with them as he tries to be.

The narrator, like Billy, does a rather flawed job of being Tralfamadorian; he allows his compassion to get the better of him at certain times. He explains the instructions he gives to his sons in the beginning of he novel: “I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres…I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that” (Vonnegut Five 24). He obviously still believes that free will is possible and that his sons may exercise their freedom of choice about participating in war. Besides condemning those who help to take lives, he also dwells on descriptions of people who believe passionately in saving lives. When he talks about Mary O’Hare, he says she is a nurse and comments that a nurse is “a lovely thing for a woman to be” (15). There is something profoundly compassionate about nurses and the way they care for and nurture the sick, even the most hopeless cases. To spotlight this idea’s importance, when Billy is in the hospital, the narrator returns to it.

Rumfoord tries to prove that Billy should be left to die, as he is, in his incoherent state, of no service to anyone anymore. But the narrator points out, “the staff, of course, was devoted to the idea that weak people should be helped as much as possible, that nobody should die” (247). The

Tralfamadorians, on the other hand, would likely not care either way. They would write off

33 Billy’s death as another predetermined event to be accepted and subsequently ignored for its unpleasantness. The narrator cannot quite commit himself to this idea.

In addition to his admiration for nurses and doctors, the narrator also admits to loving

Lot’s wife for turning back to look at Sodom and Gomorrah, because it is such a human instinct to be unable to walk away from disasters. God warned her not to turn back, but even His command was unable to override her instinct to sympathize and care about those who were being incinerated. For her transgression, she was turned into a pillar of salt. The narrator admits that he, too, in the course of writing the novel, has been turned into a pillar of salt. He looks back at

Dresden because, despite his pledged allegiance to the Tralfamadorians, he still retains the human need to look back and to understand; it seems that “he cannot reject the burden of being human” (Merrill and Scholl 147). He still feels deeply the effects that witnessing tragedy has had on him, and he “looks back at a holocaust with feelings of human compassion and love”

(Schatt 84). But after admitting this need, he tries to slip back into the Tralfamadorian mindset and says, “people aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore”

(Vonnegut Five 28). For the Tralfamadorians, there is no looking back, no understanding, no grief; there is only emotionless acceptance followed by avoidance of the images. The narrator obviously falls far short of avoiding any of his tragic thoughts. He may say “so it goes,” but to be truly successful as a Tralfamadorian he would have to ignore death completely, which he clearly finds impossible, because “the book is obsessed with death…is packed with corpses”

(Tanner 126). He frets over every miniscule death in the novel, attempting to accept each one, but revealing his ultimate inability to do so.

The narrator serves the important function of causing us to question the benefits of schizophrenia; both his failure and his descriptions of Billy’s make us see the error of

34 Tralfamadorian ways. He spends much of the early part of the book struggling to find a way to talk about Dresden, but if he were perfectly Tralfamadorian, as he seemingly tries to be, he would see no point in writing about it. His internalization of the alien statement “ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones” (150) would not lead to 275 pages of attempting to come to terms with a catastrophic experience, dwelling on the same few instances of death, and repetitively describing agonizing scenes. Despite the narrator’s almost childlike devotion to

Billy’s teaching, the story he tells eventually exposes Billy and himself as frauds.

The schizophrenic characters’ natural inclination is to avoid rationalizing these contradictory parts of their selves, and, as Langer explains, “still haunted by the untransfigured actuality of what they recall, they cast about, usually in vain, for some form of escape from

[memory’s] web” (48). But, because “memory prevents the imagination from finding refuge from such assaults” (13), victims eventually must confront their past, whether they want to or not. One testimony from a concentration camp survivor describes this tension very clearly:

“I recognized that in order to become part of society I had a choice to make:

either to stay a survivor or a prisoner and be in prison for the rest of my life, or try

to preserve my sanity by putting this away in my mind and integrating myself into

society as if nothing had ever happened. And obviously I chose the latter.” Yet,

he admits, his wife tells him that for the first ten years of their life together, he

woke up every night screaming. (Langer 142)

While he makes a conscious decision to ignore the past, his subconscious will not allow him to do so. The inevitable failure of escape leaves the victim with only one choice: he must live as a fragmented person, with differing personalities in the present and the past. However, even this strategy cannot stay viable in the face of an intensely traumatic past. When listening to victim

35 accounts, Langer comments, “a dual sense of the self emerges, with what we would have considered a solid layer of resistance, reinforced by time, turning out to be only a thin and vulnerable veneer” (141). The past repeatedly finds a way to push through the protective schizophrenic mind of the victim. Each of the main characters clearly exhibits this tendency, with his schizophrenia failing him in the end.

Vonnegut’s Larger Moral Purpose

Many critics contend that Vonnegut’s novels constitute black humor, but close examination of the text reveals this to be untrue. Harris explains, “Vonnegut’s rejection of the idea of human progress reflects the dim view he takes of the human character. This disparaging view of man, along with his belief in a purposeless universe…overshadows any protest found in his novels” (134). He believes the darkness present in the novels “indicates Vonnegut’s growing resignation to the futility of caring as a viable response in an absurd world” (139). At first reading, Billy Pilgrim’s passivity and Howard Campbell’s frenzied self-justification seem to promote the quietistic worldview that critics accuse Vonnegut of embodying, but that theory leaves us wondering what purpose the novels could possibly serve. In a particularly elegant defense of Vonnegut’s purpose, Merrill and Scholl point out that “it is safe to assume that novels of social protest are not written by cynics or nihilists. Surely protest implies the belief that man’s faults are remediable” (143). While Pilgrim and Campbell remain unhappy and the novels contain little in the way of reconciliation, their purpose remains intact. We are not to necessarily idolize or demonize either character, but rather we should take their experience and put it into context, learning what we can from their mistakes. This conclusion seems elementary, but the striking complexity of the novels’ problems makes Vonnegut’s task of moral education extraordinarily difficult.

36 Proof that Vonnegut disapproves of quietists even appears in his text. In an early conversation from Slaughterhouse-Five, movie producer Harrison Starr asks the narrator, “why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead” (4), implying that an anti-war novel is not worth the time it takes to write. The narrator explains, “what he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers…and even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death” (4). He acknowledges the difficulty in getting society to change its mind, but he writes the book anyway. Vonnegut echoes this determination; in writing these books, he may be fighting a losing battle against many years of misleading narrative forces, but he will fight anyway. He intends to give us the necessary tools to understand his moral vision.

Hayden White tells us “that every historical narrative has as its latent or manifest purpose the desire to moralize the events of which it treats” (14). The narrative of war Vonnegut presents to us has, at its core, the desire to assess all the implications and consequences of WWII and the different narratives that arise from it. Minor characters introduce narrative techniques and purposes, and their tactics eventually lead us to consider the more radical schizophrenic lifestyles that people employ when simple selective narration no longer helps rationalize traumatic events.

The main characters’ narration allows us to examine the complex moral lessons derived from their horrible wartime experiences. As White suggests, “the demand for closure in the historical story is a demand…for moral meaning, a demand that sequences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral drama” (21). Parts of a “moral drama” need not always be positive; we can learn just as much from moral failures. The main characters’ failures, therefore, act not as condemnations of human nature, but as reminders that we each control certain elements of our existence and may change our personal course if we wish to.

37 Langer concurs, stating that “memory searches for a moral vision, a principle supporting the idea of the individual as responsible agent for his actions” (186). Realization of flawed action

“is nonetheless a form of self-justification, a painful validation of necessary if not always admirable conduct” (Langer 122). Pilgrim and Campbell are not necessarily horrible human beings; they just happen to react poorly to their situations, but their reactions are not inconceivable to the audience. This is not to say that all schizophrenics are able to look back on their actions and feel a sense of moral justification. On the contrary, their stories often prove to be “stained by the disapproval of the witness’s own present moral sensibility, as well as by some of the incidents it relates” (Langer 122). Vonnegut allows for this type of retrospective analysis.

Pilgrim’s narrator and Campbell assess their individual moralities, while the reader looks on and makes his own judgments based on what he reads. While concrete conclusions are relatively difficult to come to, there are definite moral implications to each man’s conduct, which we as readers may pick out as we move through the text.

Langer goes on to explain that “one effect of common memory, with its talk of normalcy amid chaos, is to mediate atrocity, to reassure us that in spite of the ordeal some human bonds were inviolable” (9); even in the most dire circumstances, there is room to learn and grow as human beings. While, admittedly, “the promise of survival does not bear with it a guarantee of renewal” (Langer 195), thinking about the circumstances and the characters’ responses to them allows us to draw larger conclusions about morality and our own choices. Readers may well identify with the main characters’ actions. Schizophrenic escape and justification have real- world applications; the life-shattering involvement Pilgrim and Campbell have in WWII is not necessary to promote such reactions. By making us consider the possible courses of action in

38 such unusual circumstances and forcing us to apply them to our own lives, Vonnegut causes us to explore more deeply our personal understanding of moral responsibility.

The overall message in these novels is one of hope, of belief that people can learn from others’ poor moral decisions and actions. It seems that “human need requires a future where love and hope reign as motives for human conduct and aspiration in spite of the scope of the disaster” (Langer 128). Obviously this journey toward hope proves trying; Langer explains,

“history inflicts wounds on individual moral identity that are untraceable to personal choice or qualitative frameworks – though the scars they leave are real enough, reminding us that theoretical hopes for an integral life must face…[a] constant challenge to that unity” (201).

Vonnegut acknowledges that disruptive events seldom result in complete understanding, but he maintains the belief that even partial comprehension of the past will result in a marked improvement of the future. People have the power to avoid war and senseless death, and writing critically about such events allows for close examination that might otherwise be avoided. In people’s eagerness to move past damaging events like WWII, they often miss identifying important moral conclusions, and Vonnegut finds this ignorance unacceptable. “Certainly the historical record as passed down to succeeding generations explains the ‘when’ and ‘what’ of specific moments in time, but it will never be able to explain the ‘why’” (Leeds 92), but without this “why,” certain events remain morally unsubstantiated. Questioning this lack of purpose gives humans the ability to work against such senseless actions in the future, a purpose towards which Vonnegut’s novels clearly aspire.

Vonnegut’s novels thus closely examine the implications of different memory theories and display the inevitable consequences of wartime experience. His social protest in

Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night, written years after WWII, draws public attention to

39 issues that might be considered outmoded, but, realistically, the concepts he discusses still have relevance decades after the fact. Klinkowitz succinctly summarizes the novels’ resounding usefulness by saying, “Vonnegut, in short, demands independent investigation. One finds at the end of Vonnegut novels a ‘fine madness’ indeed, but a madness a the same time more clinical and more cosmic than…nearly anywhere else” (83). Our investigation of all his themes will lead to more complete rumination over important social issues, an activity necessary to reform our world and ourselves. If Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night do nothing else for the reader, they should invoke the spirit of questioning reality, drawing thoughtful conclusions, and changing various aspects of existence as necessary. No narrative could aim toward a more noble purpose.

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