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Vonnegut's Dresden Story: The Cathartic Struggle Mary Janet Bailey Edwards A dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of Middle Tennessee State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Arts August 1997 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 9804695 Copyright 1998 by Edwards, Mary Janet Bailey All rights reserved. UMI Microform 9804695 Copyright 1997, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Vonnegut's Dresden Story: The Cathartic Struggle APPROVED: Graduate Committee: Major Prg^essor S Reader Dean of the Graduate^Sihool I Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Abstract Vonnegut's Dresden Story: The Cathartic Struggle This dissertation will reflect an analysis of a close reading of Kurt Vonnegut's first six novels: Player Piano (1952), The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961), Cat's Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1964), and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) as a means of tracing specific and repeated themes, images, sounds, smells, patterns, colors, and events that relate to Vonnegut's experience as an American POW during World War II in Dresden, Germany, vonnegut returned from war, planning to write a novel about what he had seen; it took him twenty- three years of struggle as a writer to accomplish the task. Chapter one will establish the historical background of what happened in Dresden during Vonnegut's imprisonment. This is necessary, so that the Dresden images, when they appear in a novel, will be recognizable. Chapters two through seven will then trace these Dresden "markers" as they filter through Vonnegut's writing. This dissertation will show that the specific writing techniques, themes, and characterizations needed for Vonne- to voice his Dresden message were being honed in these first books, and that when they came to full bloom in 1969 with the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, they resulted in a cathartic experience for Vonnegut, who felt a sense of accomplishment and release when he was finally able deliver his Dresden message. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Table of Contents Chapter I Vonnegut's Dresden Experience: The Historical Background....................... 1 Chapter II The Beginning: Guilt and Discontent in Player Piano .......... 21 Chapter III The Sirens of Titan: The Call to Humanity............................42 Chapter IV Mother Night and Vonnegut's German Identity . 64 Chapter V Cat's Cradle: The Missing Explanation......................... 89 Chapter VI Rosewater's Anguish ............................ 120 Chapter VII Slaughterhouse-Five: A Struggle with the Message...................140 Works Cited ......................................... 176 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I 1 Chapter l Vonnegut's Dresden Experience: The Historical Background Dresden, Germany died in the last days of World War II. The Allied Air Forces of America and England destroyed this beautiful German treasure city in a top secret operation named Thunderclap during a two day co-ordinated bombing raid which occurred on the evening of the 13 th and continued into the daylight hours of the 14th of February 1945. Shortly after this late war atrocity, the discovery of the German Death Camps captured the world's attention, followed by the dramatic events of Hitler's suicide. On May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered to the Allies,* and three months later the Atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, quickly bringing World War II to an end. Soon, the Iron Curtain dropped, marking the beginning of the Cold War and locking Dresden into the East German sector. As a result, the Dresden nightmare was hidden from and largely ignored by most of the world. America and England spoke little of it, the Communist world propagandized it, and the post-World War II population, in general, forgot about it. An American POW, Private Kurt Vonnegut, was there. He survived the firestorm and as a POW was used to carry corpses to the mass graves. He then spent the next twenty-three years trying to write about the Dresden nightmare, but he did not succeed until the 1969 publication of Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut brushes away the effect of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. j 2 being a POW, saying that his newspaper training caused him to handle the Dresden experience in a unique way. "Before I was a soldier I was a journalist, and that's what I was in Dresden--a voyeur of strangers' miseries. I was outside" (Fates 30) . Outside the experience or not, most vonnegut critics agree that the Dresden influence is important. Kathryn Hume notes that "Fire permeates Vonnegut's picture of the cosmos, but Dresden fire, not ethereal" ("Heraclitean" 224). David Goldsmith surmises that "rarely has a single incident so dominated the work of a writer. The guilt Vonnegut feels about Dresden stuck to him like a Lord Jim complex" (ix). Jess Ritter feels that because of the Dresden experience, "Vonnegut's battered heroes either refuse to contribute to human suffering or mitigate it" (37). Barbara Tepa Lupack states that "the bombardment touched Vonnegut's soul and burned itself indelibly into his memory, eventually finding its way into most of his major fiction" (101). Jerome Klinkowitz agrees, insisting that: the matter of Dresden furnished the world picture for Player Piano, the psychological barrier for The Sirens of Titan, the backdrop for Mother Night, the informing principle for Cat's Cradle, the climax for God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and finally the essence for Slaughterhouse-Five. ("Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." 16) A deeper, historical look into the actual events of Dresden not only supports this critical consensus, it reveals that although Vonnegut could not write his Dresden story for Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I 3 those twenty-three years, specific and repeated details of his Dresden experience were actually being encoded into each of the novels leading up to the 1969 publication of Slaughterhouse-Five. Understanding what really happened in Dresden Germany in February 1945 might be a significant key to uncovering Kurt Vonnegut's encoding. Dresden is an old city, dating back to the 13th century. Because of its architecture, stretching on both banks of the Elbe, the richness of its art treasures, and its great cultural atmosphere, it has often been labeled the "German Florence" (Rick Atkinson 18). In addition to its great cultural treasures, Alexander McKee notes that Dresden was a center for refugees, prisoners of war, and hospitals. The Red Cross operated actively in Dresden,- everyone viewed it as a safe city (78) . Kurt Vonnegut also considered the city an insignificant military target, expressing the general attitude of everyone concerning Dresden: The Germans purposely kept the city free of major war industries and arsenals and troop concentrations so that it might be a safe haven for the wounded and refugees. There were no air-raid shelters to speak of and few anti-aircraft guns. It was a famous world art treasure, like Paris or Vienna or Prague, and about as sinister as a wedding cake. (Fates 100) Yet, the Allies did more than bomb Dresden,- they used a new technique discovered during the process of the bombing campaign over Germany that used incendiaries to create a Reproduced with