Kurt Vonnegut

Brokenhearted American Dreamer

Abstract

Sumner’s essay deals with Kurt Vonnegut’s most significant work of art, Slaughterhouse-Five. Long in gestation – says the author – the book oscillates between realism and science fiction, mordant humor and grief, relieved by moments of unexpected lyrical imagery to convey Vonnegut’s experience as a young soldier in the Second World War. Vonnegut struggled for a long time to develop a language that could do justice to his “war story,” and for years had no good answers for it. Cautiously, he moved toward the task, and it is possible to detect his first intuitions in his earlier works. Therefore, the author holds, Slaughterhouse-Five needs to be seen in a larger context, as an attempt to come to terms with the ravages of war. It is a commentary on Vietnam and at the same time a narration of the Dresden bombing as seen by someone who lived through it. But it is more universal than that. Like all of Vonnegut’s work, Slaughterhouse needs to be “unstuck in time” from a conception of it as an artifact from the 1960s. It is an expression of humanist values by a self-described “child of the Great Depression.” The author’s ambivalence is captured perfectly in the phrase from the novel for which he today remains most identified. “So it goes” conveys a deep sense of irony and resignation in the face of defeat, but also a will, nonetheless, to carry on.