Vol 4 Issue 4 1981 Leon F. Seltzer - Dresden and Vonnegut's Creative Testament of Guilt

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Dresden and Vonnegut’sCreative Testament of Guilt

Leon F. Seltzer

Of all the cultural issues in Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction, the one probably

least examined by commentators is also the one most frequently cited:

namely, the outrageous Allied firebombing of Dresden. This infuriatingly

gratuitous air raid of a militarily irrelevant city at the conclusion of World

War I1 may be viewed as one of the greatest debacles in European history. In

it British-American air forces laid waste an esteemed Baroque cultural

center, recognized as “The Florence of the Elbe,” a nd destroyed the lives of

at leas t 135,000 people-almost twice as many as the atomic bombing of

Hiroshima. Vonnegut, a first-hand witness of this massive moral atrocity,

was a t the time a n American prisoner of war safely interned three stories

below ground in a meat locker. Given such a vantage point, he wasprivileged to survive the holocaust physically unscathed. But whether he

was so privileged psychical ly is altogether another question.

In his Playboy interview (1973), Vonnegut contends that the

significance of Dresden in his life has been “considerably exaggerated” an d

suggests th at any survival guilt he might have sustained was practically

precluded by his many months of intense hunger in prison camp. To use his

own phrase: “I’d paid my dues.”’ Yet th is rationalization fails to explain the

obsession with Dresden manifest in almost all his novels. And Vonnegut

has himself fatally undercut this stance elsewhere (in an interview with

John Casey and Joe David Bellamy) by acknowledging that when he

returned to the States in 1945, he “started writing about [Dresden], an d

wrote about it, and wrote about i t and WROTE ABOUT IT”-adding that

Slaughterhouse-Five (the first of his novels to confront the firebombing

directly) “is a process of twenty years of living with Dresden and the

aftermath.”2 Such a n admission finds repeated support among the large

array of Vonnegut critics who have emerged in recent years; and their

unanimity in reading the author’s work is, in this respect at least , truly

striking. To present just a sampling: to Jerome Klinkowitz, “Vonnegut,

obviously haunted by this abrupt and violent initiation into contemporaryreality, attempted throughout his career as a novelist to arrest this

experience artistically;”3 to David H. Goldsmith, “rarely has a single

incident so dominated the work of a writer. The guilt Vonnegut felt about

Dresden stuck to him like a Lord Jim c~mplex;”~o Peter J . Reed,

Vonnegut’s “horrifying and puzzling experience of being under the raid on

Dresden seems to haunt him;”s to Alfred Kazin, “Kurt Vonnegut’s books are

haunted by. Dresden;”‘j to Stanley Schatt, “this holocaust colored

Vonnegut’s entire ~ a r e e r ; ” ~nd to Joe David Bellamy-who, admittedly,

55



56 Journal of American Culture

does seem a little carried away-nearly every write-up of the author (and by

now they number in the hundreds) has been concerned with “how the

magnitude of the event devastated hi s psyche and nearly struck him dumb,and how he h as spent the last twentyfive years of his life struggling to come

to terms with this single overwhelming event.”x

All of these observations were made after the author’s apparent

“exorcism” of Dresden in Slaughterhouse-Five, one of his most successful,

and unorthodox, fictional undertakings. Judging from the reduced quality

of that work’s fictive successors-the less-than-inspired Breakfast of

Champions and the artistically abortive Slapstick-Vonnegut’s “trial”atDresden may well have been at the creative core of his fictional

achievements? If Slaughterhouse-Five did in fact enable the author to

purge himself of accumulated guilt such as to make further sublimation ofhis wartime ordeal unnecessary, the strangely enervative aspect of

Vonnegut’s last two novels becomes understandable enough. Still, that

Vonnegut’s conscience should for so long have been plagued by a n act of

military barbarism beyond his responsibility and control hardly seems

rational; and it may be useful to offer some speculation as to the origins of a

guilt much too facilely identified by commentators with the author’s

fortuitous presence in Dresden during its nightmarish fire-storm.

As a German-American with relatives and friends of his parents living

in Germany during the war, Vonnegut’s very personal moral dilemma

precipitated by America’s entrance into the war should be easy to

appreciate. Writing with pride in the Prologue to Slapstick about his

German ancestry, Vonnegut nostalgically remarks that “the delight the

family took in itself was permanently crippled by the sudden American

hatred for all th ings German which unsheathed itself when this country

entered the First World War, five years before I was born.”’” Although anti-

German sentiment at the time of the Second World War was not asvenemous as in the First, it was undeniably present. And it prompted the

author to attempt a resolution of his pained ambivalence toward the

outbreak of war through some rather untimely declarations of pacifism.These declarations were made in the spring of 1941 when Vonnegut was

studying biochemistry at Cornell and contributinga column to The Cornell

Daily Sun. Following the ideological footsteps of his parents (who were atonce American patriots and pacifists), he wrote anti-war pieces that

embarrassed the rest of the newspaper staff. At one point, a n Editor’s Note

appended to his column emphasized th a t the views expressed by the author

did not necessarily reflect those of the paper.“

If Vonnegut felt vaguely guilty about his German background and his

unpopular stance toward America’s intervention in the war, his later

enlistment and service in the infantry hardly served once and for all to

dispel his moraluneasiness. For while he became convinced that Hitler andNazism were evil and had to be stopped, the universal capacity for evil sodevastatingly brought home to him by the Allies’ ruthless demolishment ofDresden left him as uncomfortably pacifistic as he had been prior to the

war. Given a moral susceptibility only heightened by his German

extraction, it was impossible for Vonnegut to survey the dismal ruins of a



Crea t ive Tes tament of Guilt 57

bombed-out city without somehow feeling involved and responsible.

Certainly the evidence of his disaster-filled novels would seem to point

forcibly to his lasting sense of guilt over being privileged to survive amassacre contrived and executed by the same side tha t saved him. Such

survival guilt could only be compounded by a dim realization th at as part-

German himself, and therefore a n inevitable object of wartime prejudice,

the Allied bombs were somehow meant to include him in their target.

Eminently capable of identifying both with aggressor an d victim,

Vonnegut’s literal role as spectator could hardly protect his psyche from

such wholesale human slaughter.

In any case cataclysms and catastrophes occur so commonly in the

nine novels Vonnegut has written to date as to offer convincing creativetestimony for Freud’s theory on the repetition compulsion. For doubtless the

ever-continuing effort to achieve belated control over a traumatic event

through the constant retelling of it (one manifestation of this malady) ishighly descriptive of the author’s patterned sublimations. And that

Vonnegut’s Dresden experience was genuinely traumatic is indicated by his

frank confession at the autobiographical outset of Slaughterhouse-Five

that-specifically-he could recall almost nothing about this crucial timein

his life.12

From the very start of his career as novelist, Vonnegut h as dealt with

ultimately pointless violence and upheaval. In the anti-utopian PlayerPiano (1952), the climax revolves around a social revolution designed to

ovcrturn a thoroughly mechanized society, which is inherently

dehumanizing. The revolution fails utterly, and in fact ha s been doomed

from the beginning. The Sirens o Titan (1959) features a militarily absurd

Martian invasion that culminates in the Earthling massacre of nearly

200,000 Martians-who are actually transplanted Earthlings expressly

intended to become the martyred victims of such merciless butchery th at

the Earthlings will finally learn their desperately needed lesson in

humanity. The structurally intricateMother Night (1961)is preoccupied notonly with the morally indiscriminatebrutality of World War I1 but with the

pervasive presence of the Nazi mentality generally. I n he end,it invites the

reader to confront some extremely unsettling questions about universal evil

and guilt. Whereas the confessional Mother Night ends in personal suicide,

the cataclysmic Cut’s Cradle (1963) ends in nothing less than total gloom

with the freezing of the earth by the man-made horror, ice-nine-which

leaves the blighted San Lorenzan landscape as barren and moon-like asVonnegut pictures the burnt-out landscape of Dresden after the fire-storm

in Slaughterhouse-Five.And the careless annihilation of the planet by ice-

nine is made just as much the moral responsibility of short-sighted humansas the pointless destruction of Dresden by fire, its complementary opposite.

While, strictly speaking, the only thing destroyed in God Bless You Mr.Rosewater (1965) is the Rosewater family fortune, the turning point of the

novel comes when its hero, the eccentric Eliot Rosewater, hallucinates that

Indianapolis (Vonnegut’s own birthplace) is being consumed by a f i r e

storm. His disturbed vision of devastation occurs just prior to the author’s

informing the reader that one of the books Rosewater owns is The Bombing



58 J o u r n a l of American Culture

o Germany by Hans Rumpf. Vonnegut then proceeds to quote from this

book its most mesmerizing section on the firebombing of Dresden.

Slaughterhouse-Fiue 1969), in many ways the natural successor to GodBless You Mi. Rosewater has the Dresden disaster as its thematic axis-

and no matter how often the psychically fleeing Billy Pilgrim manages to

escape its haunting remembrance through time travel, it constantly

threatens to impinge on his defensively split consciousness. In this novel

Vonnegut even has the extraterrestrial an d all-knowing Tralfamadorians

reveal to Billy the final accidental explosion of the universe, which might be

understood as a n attempt of the author to view the human significance of

Dresden from a much more cosmic-and thereby liberating-viewpoint.

But in Breakfasto Champions 1973) we are shown tha t the endeavor to

alleviate moral consciousness through adopting new perspectives only

invites a new sort of destructiveness. For in this novel the wealthy

automobile dealer Dwayne Hoover is prompted by reading a science-fiction

book by Kilgore Trout to believe that he alone in the world has free will, an d

that eveybody else-including God-is a n object of total determinism. The

result of th is “liberating” belief demonizes him into an agent of wanton

destruction, and before his frenzied display of omnipotent power is put in

check he has sent eleven innocent people to the hospital. Even if humans are

robots, Vonnegut seems to say, adapting one’s life to fi t such a belief can

only rob one of whatever kindness, generosity, and sanity he maynonetheless be capable of. The imaginatively tired Slapstick 1976) is

unfortunately glib in its explanation of catastrophe-but tha t here once

again disaster lies at the gnawed heart ofthe novel is beyond dispute. When

Dr. Wilbur Daffodil Swain opens his narrative, we learn th at t he entire

Western World has been demolished by Martian flu germs an d the Green

Death-the latter affliction a consequence of the inhalation or ingestion of

Chinese microorganisms. This curious eschatological picture whimsical as

it may be, is not really very far removed from Vonnegut’s dark vision of

Dresden, historically at least the prime cause of his enduring pessimistic

outlook.

Of all Vonnegut’s novels quite possibly the one most agitated is not

Slaughterhouse-Five but Mother Night. In a n interview with Robert

Scholes in 1966 (which occurred while the author was working on the later

novel), he responded to the remark that Mother Night seemed “a little

darker [and] less comic” th an his other four novels by confessing about the

book: “It’s more personally disturbing to me. I t had meanings for me. Oh,

because of the war and because of my German background, and that sort of

thing.”’3Perhaps what is most disturbing to Vonnegut, however, is best

suggested by a comment made by Scholes elsewhere. In a n essay onVonnegut’s college writing written several years after the interview,

Scholes astutely observed that the author “is himself. ..the lovely false

prophet Bokonon, the foolish philanthropist Rosewater, and above all the

kindly, untrustworthy, honest, quadruple turncoat Howard Campbell of

Mother Night.”14

Since Howard W. Campbell Jr. , a double agent in WorldWa r I1 who has

broadcast Nazi propaganda filled with coded American messages,

ultimatelv helped the Germans more than his compatriots through the



Creative Testament o Guilt 9

enthusiasm and zeal with which he acted out-or “realized”-his Nazi role,

Scholes’ assertion might at first seem a bit far-fetched. But significant

relationships between Campbell and his creator abound, and they aregenerally easy to locate. Probably the most obvious connection is simply

that Campbell’s name, like Vonnegut’s, ends in “Jr.” Moreover, although

we do not learn of it specifically until his reappearance in Slaughterhouse-Five Campbell has survived the frightful Dresden air attack by taking

refuge in the same slaughterhouse that sheltered not only Billy Pilgrim but

Kurt Vonnegut himself. Such a “coincidence” is similar to the peculiar

situation of Campbell’s having a mother so morbidly disturbed that before

her son was ten she felt compelled to provide him with a grim demonstrationof how the t w o of them would look as corpses. Her mentally troubled

preoccupation with death seems a dramatic heightening of Vonnegut’sperception of his own lugubrious mother-whose temporary insanity he

mentions both in Breakfast of Champions and in the Prologue toSlapstick-and whose “legacy of suicide” he laments in the former novel.

While Campbell’s mother does not actually commit suicide, Campbell

himself does (as do Resi Noth and the immigrant Lazlo Szombathy); and

Vonnegut’s obsession with self-destruction n almost all his fiction suggests

that at various points in his career he considered it a viable alternative to

continuing bouts of frustration and despair. In The Eden Express (1975)by

the author’s son, Mark Vonnegut (who himself became temporarilyschizophrenic), we get this telling disclosure: “From as early as I was old

enough to worry about such things I had worried about [my father’s] either

drinking himself to death or blowing his brains out. He had hinted at it

fairly broadly from time to time. Sometimes I thought the only thingholding him back was fear of how it would affect me. ‘Sons of suicides findlife lacking...’- Rosewater.”l5,l In his Playboy interview, Vonnegut claims

that Breakfast o f Champions contains an implicit promise that he will notcommit suicide, adding: “...I’m beyond that now. Which is something for

me. I used to think of it as a perfectly reasonable way to avoid delivering a

lecture, to avoid a deadline, to not pay a bill, to not go to a cocktail party.”17All this is certainly not to suggest that Vonnegut is the “death-

worshipper” that Campbell portrays himself a s becoming after the war,17but to indicate that the protagonist of Mother Nigh t exemplifies many of the

author’s deepest anxieties about himself and his relationship to life.

Satirical “half-portraits” of Vonnegut are not limited in the novel to

Campbell either. There are other doubles as well. To give but one example,

the painter George Kraft (in reality a Russian spy named Colonel Iona

Potapov) resembles the author in such things as his drinking problems, his

serious commitment to art, and the amusing circumstance that Vonneguthas him claim to be from his own hometown, Indianapolis. In fact, the

seemingly endless shifting of identities in the novel lends credence to the

view that the author sees everybody as lacking in fundamental integrity

and consequently capable of anything: the morally pointless murder ofinnocent others (astook place on both sides during World Wa r 11)as well asthe almost equally pointless murder of self (the desperate attempt toobliterate personal identity altogether). Also, the fascinating situation thatthe novel includes, in addition to Campbell and Kraft, a character called




“Heinz” strongly hints at the author’s using popular brand names-ofcorporations famous for the variety of their manufacture-to intimate the

multiplicity of the modem, irrational self: defined much more from withoutaccording to the exigencies of time and place) than from within. That this

rootless and therefore unstable identity is finally a tool of evil is bestsuggested by Heinz himself who, incidentally, is Campbell’s “doublespartner” in ping-pong during the war), in his shamefully telling Campbell:“All people are insane. They will do anything at any time, and God helpanybody who looks for reasons.”

Given such chaotic unreason, the whole concept of patriotism, ofnationalistic chauvinism, becomes absurdly arbitrary. And this anti-patriotic stance is in fact expounded both by Campbell within the fictional

context and by Vonnegut in his 1966 Introduction. Campbell drollyillustrates the essential blindness of patriotism to Kraft by drawing on hiswindowpanes a swastika, a hammer and sickle, and the starsand stripes-an d then cheering lustily for each symbol as he impersonates in turn theNazi, Communist and American. Elsewhere in the novel Campbell offers toMajor Frank Wirtanen the American who has recruited him as a nundercover spy) th is bitterly cynical reply to the question of what he wouldhave done if Germany had won the war: “There is every chance ha t Iwould have become a sor t of Nazi Edgar Guest, writing a daily column of

optimistic doggerel for daily papers around the world. And, as senility setin I might even come to believe what my couplets said: that everythingwas probably all for the best.” Compare this paradoxically whimsical yetsardonic declaration to Vonnegut’s singularly self-disparaging peculationin the novel’s belated Introduction: “If I’d been born in Germany, I supposeI would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and Poles around,leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my secretlyvirtuous insides ashas Campbell while, presumably, only “playing” therole of Nazi]. So it goes.”

Such a soured view of patriotism helps to explain the disillusioned

pacifism of both Vonnegut and his fictive persona. Another explanationhas to do with Vonnegut’s making his protagonist or really protagonist-antagonist) a writer, a man whose temperament and talent naturallycombine to make him apolitical. As Campbell, the prosperous Germanplaywright, confides to Wirtanen before he isfinally prevailed upon to servehis home country, he is neither a soldier nor a political man but a n artist,concluding: “If war comes, I won’t do anything to help it along. If warcomes, it’ll find me still working at my peaceful trade.” Vonnegut, too,endeavored to avoid the war and (as has already been mentioned) even

wrote editorials against his country’s entering it. But finally he felt obligedto abandon his pacifism and enlist-and for reasons similar to Campbell’s.Wirtanen argues cogently t hat the romantic sense of moral missionrevealed in Campbell’s plays will eventually force his compliance; and theGerman-American Vonnegut finally enrolled in military service for reasonscorrespondingly moral-and escapist. What at last distinguishes Campbellfrom his creator is the self-styled Nazi’s total lack of any ultimate ethicalcommitment t hat transcends his “assumed” role. Campbell himself admitsth at the Drimars reason he accepted the role of Nazi broadcaster was tha t he



Crea t ive Tes tament o Guilt 61

was such a “ham” and that this outlandish role would give him “an

opportunity for some pretty grand acting.” His adolescently self-indulgent

artistic posture here is hopelessly at odds with any responsible moral one;and his extravagantly successful, because aesthetic and morally

unscrupulous, posturing as a Nazi is what ultimately leads to his heavy

burden of guilt following the war (his feeble, strangely perfunctory,

protestations to the contrary).

No evidence exists that Vonnegut betrayed his own moral principles in

the war, but that-given enough provocation-he might have, seems to be

at the root of his choosing in so many ways to “share)’Campbell’s guilt. In

addition, the Editor’s Note to Campbell’s confessions reveals Vonnegut’s

nagging awareness that, as a writer himself, he may deservedly be

perceived as a confidence man, a beguiler and trickster by profession.

Consider, for instance, this comment: “To say th at [Campbell] was a writer

is to say th at the demands of art alone were enough to make him lie, an d to

lie without seeing any harm in it.”Vonnegut’s own fictions-or “lies”-all

seem carefully devised to achieve a moral purpose; but the author’s

discomfort in telling untruths generally is suggested by his quite literal

intrusion as a “character” in Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of

Champions.In the latter novel, the author even takes pains to tell the reader

over and over again (and in the body of the novel) that his characters are all

make-believe, subject totally to his own creative whim. Vonnegut’sconfession of complete responsibility for his characters roughly parallels

his implied acceptance of responsibility for the Allied firebombing of

Dresden, even though he had no advance information and took no part in

th is moral horror. Such acceptance is suggested in part by the fact that after

the war he was for a time a volunteer fireman in Alplaus, New York.

Knowing this about the author naturally invites the hypothesis that

Eliot Rosewater-the altruistic hero of God Bless You Mr. Rosewater who

is a volunteer fireman as well as a most unconventional philanthropist-

also warrants appreciation as a n imaginative double for the author. And

Rosewater’s seeming obsession with largely unearned feelings of guilt

further links him to his creator. There is no question that the apparent

sources of Rosewater’s guilt are innocent enough. To begin with, when he

was nineteen he took his mother sailing and accidentally killed her when he

shifted the boat a nd the boom knocked her overboard, never to rise again.

Later, as an infantryman in World War I1(again like Vonnegut himself), he

accidentally killed three unarmed firemen, mistaking them in the smoke for

German soldiers. Such guilt-inducing incidents can only aggravate his

long-lasting sense of shame for accidentally inherit ing immense wealth

and a privileged position i n life generally. Rosewater’s pained awarenessthat he has betrayed the values and ideals of his family-and especially

those of his conservative father, Senator LesterAmes Rosewater-can only

magnify his already considerable feelings of guilt, shame and remorse. And

here again, Rosewater’s vague distress over his implicit denial of all that his

father stands for (a repudiation similar to tha t of Paul Proteus in Player

Piano who comes to renounce the very society his father had helped

construct) ha s autobiographical relevance. For Vonnegut’s specialization

inbiochemistrywhile atCome11w slargelyat the prodding of his architect




father, who took a firm stand on the foolishness a nd impracticality of hisson’s majoring in the Arts. Vonnegut eventually rebelled against his

father’s wishes, but a lingering filial guilt for doing so is only to beanticipated.18The author’s recognition of a person’s almost inevitable accumulation

of guilt is suggested in God Bless You Mr. Rosewater by the words of oneLeonard Leech, a Cornell Law Professor whose deplorably unscrupulousadvice the ruthless Norman Mushari takes so seriously to heart. Leechwhose name reduces him to comic-book allegory) tells his opportunistic

student how to capitalize not only on the well-nigh universal “inferioritycomplex” but also on “the shapeless feelings of guilt ...most people [have].”Such a view of the human propensity toward guilt finds support in

Rosewater’s irrational reaction to the Dresden firestorm, in which he hadno personal involvement whatever. For we are told: “He had a book hiddenin his office, and it was a mystery even to Eliot as o why he should hide it,why he should feel guilty every time he got it out, why he should be afraid ofbeing caught reading it.... It was called The Bombing o Germany.’’

Vonnegut’s likely feelings of guilt for being “privileged” to escapeunincinerated the monstrous conflagration of Dresden-even though hewas himself part German-seems literally about as irrational as

Rosewater’s guilt for this and other accidents that ultimately define his

whole response to life. For, as the onetime incredibly wealthy MalachiConstant is led to state in The Sirens o Titan “I was a victim of a series ofaccidents, as are we all.”

One other victim in Vonnegut’s fiction that surely deserves mention isBilly Pilgrim. And here, too, we have a character whose obscure guiltfeelings seem unrelated to the violation of any moral code but involvedinstead with experiences in the Second World War . It is significant that inSlaughterhouse-Five the author chooses to place Rosewater and Billy inadjoining beds in a mental ward of a veterans’ hospital. According toVonnegut, both men are seeking to “reinvent themselves’’-and in both

cases this is necessary partly because of what the two men have gonethrough in the war. The unconscious guilt that appears to afflict Billy seemsin many ways connected to-or compounded by-his having witnessed thehorror of Dresden. Many years after the war his roommate at anotherhospital complains tha t “all he does in his sleep is quit and surrender andapologize and ask to be left alone.” Such a description is faintly reminiscentof one used to characterize the much more culpable Howard Campbellasheawaits trial in a n Israeli prison. Bernard Mengel, one of Campbell’s guards,tells the ex-Nazi propagandist t hat he “sleep[s] very noisily ...tossing and

talking all night,” signifying to Mengel “a bad conscience about what hedid in the war.”Given the uneasy conscience of Vonnegut’s three main “Dresden-

related” characters, it is no surprise that the author’s fiction shouldrepeatedly be concerned with methods of escaping this burdensome guilt.Perhaps the most obvious-or at least the most dramatic-method is

through suicide, and a death wish can easily be inferred in each of thesethree principals. Campbell worships death and perceives himself as deadyears before he actually resolves to hang himself. Rosewater’s attempts at



Crea t ive Testament o Guilt 6

suicide during the institutionalization tha t follows is final breakdown

(which ishighlighted by his hallucination of Indianapolis being devastated

by a firestorm) are explicitly mentioned at the end of the novel, but al lthrough the narrative the author’s references to Rosewater’s alcoholism

intimate a longing for self-obliteration. Billy pilgrim’s extraordinary

passivity seems so devoid of determination and will tha t, even though he

makes no attempts at his life, it seems clear that his traumatic experiences

in the war have shocked him into something fa r more inert than alive.

But-needless to say-suicide isnot really a n escape froma chronically

afflicted conscience so much as a final capitulation to it. And so while

Vonnegut betrays a fascination with suicide in virtually all his novels, he

explores other tactics for dealing with unremitting guilt feelings. One tactic

is to subdue the irrational voice of conscience through self-inflicted

suffering, to “buy it o f f ’ as it were. Concentrating once again on the

heroes-or anti-heroes-of Mother Night God Bless You Mr. Rosewaterand Slaughterhouse-Five we can detect a variety of behavior

psychoanalytically understandable as “moral masochism.” Howard

Campbell informs us tha t afterreturning o the States after the war, he lived

reclusively for fifteen years in “a depressing attic apartment [in

Manhattan] with rats squeaking an d scrabbling in the walls”-a self-

designed “purgatory,” as he himself admits. His finely calculated self-

punishment is further revealed in his telling the reader tha t by the time ofthe war ended h e had inherited from his parents a legacy worth forty-eight

thousand dollars.

By 1960 this inheritance is worth almost two hundred thousand. But

Campbell, punning grimly, apprises the reader: “Say what you like about

me. I have never touched my principal.” Living likea pauper on war surplus

goods when he actually has enough funds to live a life of comparative

indulgence, he turns his whole life into a prolonged penance. His behavior

even suggests unconscious self-crucifixion when he speaks about his

building a chess set from a Korean war surplus wood-carving set: Icarved for twelve hours st raight, sank sharp tools into [my] palm a dozen

times, and still would not stop. I was an elated, gory mess when I was

finished.”Another dingy attic dweller is, of course, the millionaire Eliot

Rosewater, whose almost ludicrously squalid surroundings patently reveal

the urgency of his need to renounce al l the privileges that accompany his

inherited sta tion in life. And his self-sacrificing practice of philanthropy

an d “uncritical love’’ in the (metaphorically at least) burnt-out township of

Rosewater is so overextended as o imply a desperate reaction-fomation tothe repulsively pathetic victims of “progressive” American automation he

gives up everything to help. For the inhabi tan ts of this small Indiana town

are contemptible-ugly, stupid, weak, insensitive, degenerate-and there isample evidence that Eliot (who holds a doctorate in international law) isnever quite able to suppress a deep, underlying disdain for them. We are

told, for instance, that during a phone conversation with his estranged wife,

Sylvia, he “revealed hat he had no illusions about the peopleto whom he

was devoting his life.’’Andatthe endof thenovel, whenhis ather describes



6 Journa l of American Cultu re

to him in the hospital the intense feelings these people still harbor for him,

we learn that “Eliot felt his soul cringe.”

Billy Pilgrim’s masochism can in no way rival the grandeur ofRosewater’s passionately self-inflicted post-war altruism, but it isnonetheless visible. When fellow infantryman Roland Weary takes out his

wrath on the absent-minded Billy for being left behind, Billy makes not the

slightest effort to defend himself. He is “socked,” “knocked,” kicked and

“rolled” by Weary but remains totally impassive-“making convulsive

sounds that were a lot like laughter.” His unconscious desire for

punishment is futher intimated by his mentally unbalanced proposal of

marriage. As Vonnegut confides: “Billy didn’t want to marry ugly

Valencia. She was one of the symptoms of his disease.” It seems justifiable

to interpret this disease as unduly magnified guilt and the symptom as self-immolating masochism.

In the end, however, the “cure” of masochism is hardly less self-

destructive to Vonnegut’s tormented characters than suicide, so that the

author is prompted to examine as a solution for senselessly nagging guilt

not merely the assault upon self but the assault upon one’s most personal

reality. In a word, with schizophrenia. This schizophrenia isnot reduceable

to any clinically analyzable psychosis: generally it has a high degree of

human credibility, but occasionally it seems conceived by the author as

much in philosophical, or spiritual, terms as psychological ones. Basically

Vonnegut seems to recognize two types of schizophrenia, although thesetypes contain definite parallels and overlaps, and are linked by repression.

The first is predominantly intellectual and relates to the human tendency

toward even the most flagrant rationalizations to justify behavior at war

with one’s self-image or conscious belief system. The second, which is far

closer to a textbook description of the disease, deals with the flight of

personal consciousness from a reality too painful or gruesome to bear. Such

flight can manifest itself either by a retreat into fantasy or by a total

suspension of the offending consciousness. Examples of these two varieties

of schizophrenia in Vonnegut’s fiction are fairly widespread, so that it willbe advisable to confine their illustration largely to the protagonists already

discussed. The important thing to keep in mind is th at all instances of

schizophrenic behavior in Vonnegut are last-ditch contrivances to preserve

the self, perceived by the individual as mortally threatened, whether from

without or within. Unfortunately, in every case the self can be protected

only at the expense of its basic moral integrity-the reason that, finally, the

extreme “remedy” of schizophrenia is, like suicide and masochism, rejected

by the author.To interpret schizophrenia as, at least in part, a reaction to the feared

murder of self accurately reflects the author’s own sentiments. For, as a

“character” in his own novel-or anti-novel-Breakfast o Champions

Vonnegut has himself say: “You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your

mother did,” and then respond, “I know.’’ At which point the author begins

another of his endless mini-sections with the words: “There in the cocktail

lounge, peering out through my leaks [eyeglasses] at a world of my own

invention, I mouthed this word: schizophrenia.”It is certainly significant

that Howard Campbell determines to take his life after a wild array of



Creative Testament o Guilt 65

circumstances have, practically, destroyed all his remaining schizophrenic

defenses and forced him fully to come to terms with his moral responsibility

in the war. Writing from his prison cell, he argues that he was totally awareof the grotesquely scurrilous and morally repugnant anti-Semitic

propaganda he regularly aired on his wartime broadcasts. “But”-he

remarks- “I’ve always been able to live with what I did. How? Through

that simple and widespread boon to modern mankind-schizophrenia.”

Elsewhere Campbell refers to a “Nazi daydream” called (‘The FreeAmerican Corps,” which was to be a volunteer fighting unit made up mostly

of American prisoners of war-adding parenthetically: (‘WhenI call this

unit a Nazi daydream... I am suffering from an attack of schizophrenia-

because the idea of the Free American Corps began with me. I suggested itscreation, designed itsuniforms and insignia, wrote itscreed.” Such extreme

self-detachmentis also expressed by George Kraft, Campbell’sfellowartist,alter-ego, and traducer. For when Kraft is informed that the spy apparatus

he has constructed in America is comprised almost exclusively of U.S.

agents, and that the Russians have already decided to shoot him upon his

return, we are told: “Kraft thought this situation over, and schizophrenia

rescued him neatly. ‘None of this really concerns me,’ he said ‘Because

I’m a painter That’s the main thing I am.’ ”The uncanny resourcefulness of one’s consciousness in the face of guilt

or shame is not, however, always available. In extreme circumstances-such as a traumatic war incident-the consciousness either turns against

itself or goes into shock. When Captain Eliot Rosewater learns that he has

inadvertently slain three firemen (one of them a fourteen-year-old boy)

volunteering their lives to save a clarinet factory in Bavaria, he resolutely

deposits himself in the way of a n oncoming truck. When the truck stops just

in time and his men pick him up, they find that they have a living corpse-or

catatonic-on their hands. Eliot’s mental collapse is clearly a reaction to

irreconcilable guilt, and nothing less than this drastic schizophrenic

withdrawal is required to protect his already burdensome conscience. His

final breakdown in the novel occurs after an unfortunate scene with hisaristocratic father, who is infuriated by Eliot’s unwillingness or inability to

conduct himself like a Rosewater and to produce an heir for the family

fortune. Eliot is so overcome with guilt at having ruined his marriage and

thwarted his father’s hopes for him that during his father’s tirade he is

eventually compelled to cover his ears. Shortly after Senator Rosewater

departs, “he [freezes]as stiff as any corpse”; and when he finally thaws, we

learn that “he had no surface memory of the fight with his father.” WhenEliot’s repressive capacities begin to fail him, it is only a small

psychological step to his guilt-inspired hallucination of Indianapolisaflame, full-fledged schizophrenia and another bed in a mental ward.With Billy Pilgrim we are witness to a distinct movement in Vonnegut’s

fiction. For to the shell-shocked victim of World War11,schizophrenia is notsimply gross irrationality or grave mental collapse but a new andrevolutionary mode of life. To the extent that Billy is able to escape guilt

feelings inherited from the war, it is through adopting a transcendent view

of reality that sedates his troubled conscience. And freed from guilt and

anxiety generally, he can say of the Dresden massacre (asneither Campbell



66 Journa l of American Culture

nor Rosewateris ever able to): “It was all right....Everythingis all right, and

everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on Tralfamadore.”

Whether the Tralfamadorians really exist, or whether they constitute anelaborate schizophrenic fantasy, is left intentionally ambiguous by the

author, who somehow contrives to present Billy’s life as literal biography.

But ample evidence does exist to see the Tralfamadorians-and Billy’s

frequent time/space travels-as created and made “real” by an intenselydisturbed mind regularly craving release from a too-demanding reality. As

Vonnegut himself at one point concedes: “...Billy had seen the greatest

massacre in European history” and consequently needed to “re-invent’’

[himselfl and [his] universe. Science fiction was a big help.” And on the

novel’s unconventional title page the author, tongue-in-cheek, describes the

book as “somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic mann er of talesof the planet Tralfamadore ” According to the inhabitants ofTralfamadore (or according to Billy’s wish-fulfilling delusions about them)

all moments in life are “structured” to happen in a certain way and can in

no way be altered, so that the one thing Earthlings might profitably do is“ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.” Such advice

helps Billy to accept phlegmatically such things as the Vietnam War an

airplane crash that kills everybody but himself, his son’s teenage

delinquency, and the deaths of both his wife and himself. Having become

“unstuck in time,’’ Billy can live in past or future moments a s well as in thepresent, and the development of this strange cosmic perspective serves to

diminish his lingering feelings of guilt and personal responsibility. Yet

after all this is said, it must be added that the private world of Billy’s

imaginative schizophrenia-his massively defended fortress of illusion-is

still subject to periodic invasion from the not totally repressible reality of

his former life. Timetraveller that he is, he cannot resist returning to

moments that center on the emotionally crippling time he spent in Dresdenas a war prisoner. And the occasional turbulence of his otherwise calmed

stream-of-consciousnessis enough to overcome his Tralfamadorian poise

and lead him to weep tears of quiet hopelessness and pain.

The Tralfamadorians first appear in The Sirens o Titan, and their

creator employs them again in his fiction a decade later suggests that

what they represent is of enduring interest to him. In Sirens Winston Niles

Rumfoord finally denounces his faithful Tralfamadorian friend, Salo,

because Salo is undeniably a machine-and to Rumfoord, “to be a machine

...was to be purposeful without a shred of conscience.” Vonnegut’s own

conscience, apparently hyperactive and a constant source of disturbance,seems oddly reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn’s. For Huck, too, seems

plagued by conscience largely independent of any misdeed he may himself

be responsible for. s Huck puts it: “But that’s always the way; it don’t

make no difference whether vou do right or wrong, a person’s conscience

ain’t got no sense, and just goes for him anyway.” And whileit may only benatural for a person to harbor vague guilt feelings about surviving awartime holocaust that brutally killed almost everybody but himself, oneiscertainly a t an emotional advantage in not experiencing such guilt-as is

the case with the “enlikhteneZ’ Billy, who has learned from the



Crea t ive T es tament of Guilt 67

Tralfamadorians that “every creature and plant in the Universe is amachine.” Moreover, to be able to see the human-and moral-disaster of

Dresden as “all right” would seem to be one of Vonnegut’s fondest desires.And so it is easy to comprehend why the author is attracted to the notion

that people are mere machines, wholly determined by forces of which they

have no knowledge and over which they have no control. For if one can

genuinely believe in a mechanical conception of humanity, there would

seem to be no reason why he could not simply dispense with all “irrelevant”

feelings of frustration, anguish, shame, guilt, remorse and thelike. Such, no

doubt, is the “joy’’ of mechanism. It is precisely because the

Tralfamadorians know they are devoid of free will that their lives are so

totally devoid of guilt.

It is obvious that Vonnegut envies his completely programmed

creations this “freedom”; and in Breakfast o f Champions he explores the

relative satisfactoriness of regarding humankind mechanistically. Over

and over again in this cynical and deeply pessimistic book, he offers

chemical, as opposed to moral, explanations of human behavior. Consider,

for example, these two passages:

Dw ayne certainly wasn’t alone a s far as havin g bad chemicals insideof him wascon cerned.

He had plenty of company throughout all history. In h is own lifetime for instance the people in acountry called G ermany were so full of bad ch em icals for a while th at they a ctually built factories

wh ose on ly purpose waa to kill people by the million s.

As for myselE I had come to the con clusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or

about any h um an being that we were all m achines doomed to collide and collide and collide. Forwant of anything better to do we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about

collisions which meant I was a writing mac hine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly whichmeant I was a writing machine in bad repair.

After Vonnegut has fully articulated this radical viewpoint, which

systematically disencumbers humans of all responsibility for their

behavior, the immediate practical advantages of sucha perspective begin topale in the face of its ultimate moral repercussions. For the death of

individual accountability inevitably deals the death blow to one’s

humanity. And-as the author has had Eliot Rosewater proclaim earlier-

“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind,” an empassioned plea joined later in the

novel by Trout’s similarly concerned avowal th at “people can use all the

uncritical love they can get.” Regardless, tha t is, of what humans are or do,

they still have a n almost boundless capacity for hurt and suffering and, if

for tha t reason alone, merit one’s generosity and mercy. If all humans are

programmed by their chemical constitution and thus automatons, then

whether they happen to be governed by “good” chemicals or “bad”

chemicals they still deserve pity as victims. And that virtually all humans

are capable of such feelings as chan ty and compassion-as well as of

shame an d guilt-is what, finally, makes them “sacred” to the author an d

spiritually superior to the machines they invent. To renounce certain

ethical imperatives in order to be freed of humanity’s collective guilt for the

evils of history is, ultimately, not worth the exorbitant moral cost.

Conscience may plague us disproportionately for acts of little or no



68 J o u r n a l of American Cul ture

culpability, but conscience is the price we must pay for whatever dignity, or

sacredness, it is possible for us to achieve.

Vonnegut communicates this “reformed” vision of humanity inBreakfast of Champions by having Rabo Karabekian (the nonobjective

painter he heavy-handedly employs as his spokesman) pronounce: “Our

awareness is all that is alive and may be sacred in any of us. Everything else

about us is dead machinery.” This “awareness” (or “unwavering band of

light,” as both Karabekian and Vonnegut describe it) is something that, in

the end, the author is absolutely committed to uphold. And th is humanistic

commitment explains why the last of Vonnegut’s many whimsical

illustrations-a caricatural self-portrait with one huge tear streaming down

the author’s right eye-is meant, however ironically, to be understood as afinal affirmation of all that is most human. Seen from th is perspective, the

book leads naturally enough into Slapstick. This connection has already

been anticipated by Richard Giannone, in his critical study Vonnegut(1977).19 Noting the author’s poignantly expressed fondness for those

immortal slapsticks Laurel and Hardy, he observes: “They personify

human dignity born of its own ineptitude. Slapstick is peopled by the

blundering idiots and scurvy knaves of th at zany world, and their perpetual

blundering explains th at our humanity is bound up with imperfection. This

sympathy for human shortcomings leads Vonnegut to plead for simple

kindness.” Slapstick takes place in the af termath of a holocaust, whichsuggests th at it looks back, almost nostalgically, to the author’s other

“routinely” cataclysmic fictions. For Vonnegut’s novels from the very

beginning have dealt comically-yet critically-with the exasperating

human bent for stupidity, savagery and assorted viciousness. While

Vonnegut’s indignation over this seemingly universal proclivity remains

constant in his fiction, it is also possible to trace in his works a gradually

increasing acceptance of flawed humanity. This somewhat begrudging

movement toward acceptance and reconciliation accounts both for

Vonnegut’s consideration of humans as programmed robots (so that he

might absolve them-and himself-for otherwise blameworthy acts) andfor his ultimate rejection of this mechanistic view so that he might salvage

from the moral wreckage of history some relic of human dignity or

sacredness). Since B r e a k f a s t o f C h a m p i o n s resolves (though

paradoxically) many of the conflicts th at have provided Vonnegut’s novels

with their tension and drama, it is fitting to close this study with the

author’s description there of his favorite mouthpiece, Kilgore Trout:

But his head no longer sheltered ideas of how things could be and should be on the planet, a s

opposed to how they really were. There was only one way for the Earth to be, he thought: the way

it was.

Notes

‘David Standish, “Playboy Interview.” Playboy 20 July 1973), 70. This interview has been

reprinted in Vonnegut’s collection of writings, Wampeters Foma and Granfalloons New York:

Delacorte, 1974).

:Joe David Bellamy, ed., The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative Fiction Writers

Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1974).pp. 202-203.



Creative Testament of Guilt 69

?“Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: The Canary in a Cathouse,” in The Vonnegut Statement. eds. Jerome

4Kurt Vonnegut:Fantasist o Fire and Ice (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1972),p. ix.

“he Bright Book of Life (1973; rpt. New York: Delta-Dell, 1974), p. 86

7 Kur t Vonnegut Jr. (Boston: Twayne, 1976), p. 16.

8‘‘KurtVonnegut for President: The Making of a n Academic Reputation,” in The VonnegutStatement p. 86.

91t should be noted th at this article was accepted for publication before the appearance ofJailbird (1979), and therefore does not take thi s latest of Vonnegut’s fictions into account.

However, since this novel is in many ways similar in tone and substance t the author’s other

post-Slaughterhouse-Fiveproductions, the perspective taken generally toward Breakfast ofChampions and Slapstick may be understood as including Vonnegut’s most recent fictional

undertaking as well. Moreover, Jailbird which has as its moral-political context both the

Cuyahoga Massacre (highlighted in the book’s protracted prologue) and the “disaster” or

“catastrophe” of Watergate, clearly echoes Vonnegut’s earlier works-as, likewise, does the

narrator Starbuck’s inadvertent testimony aga ins t Leland Clewes reflect the author’s enduring

fictional motif of betrayal and guilt.

Klinkowitz John Somer (New York: Dell, 1973), p. 16.

5“Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (New York: Crowell, 1972), p. 93.

‘“Slapstick New York: Delacorte, 1976), p. 6.

I‘ rom the vantage point of Dresden the basic rationali ty and responsibility of Vonnegut’s

determinedly non-partisan position is hard to ignore. For instance, writing about the invasion of

Crete he observed: “We must know the shortcomings of the British-and of ourselves-as well as

of the Germans ifwewouldcreateany kindoflastingremedy when thedangers ofthe moment are

averted.” For this and other references t Vonnegut’s contributions t The Cornell Daily Sun, I

am indebted to Robert Scholes, “Chasing a Lone Eagle: Vonnegut’s College Writing,” in TheVonnegut Statement pp. 4554. This essay originally appeared in Summary 1 ( 2, 1971), 35-40.

‘2Slaughterhouse-Fiue1969; r p t New York: Delta-Dell, 1970), pp. 2, 12.’“‘A Talk with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,” in The Vonnegut Statement p. 115.

““Chasing a Lone Eagle,” p. 46.

”The Eden Express: A Personal Account o f Schizophrenia (New York: Praeger, 1975),p. 120.

’“See God Bless You M r . Rosewater (1965; rpt. New York: Delta-Dell, 1968). pp. 120-121.

(“Sons of suicide seldom do well. Characteristically, they find life lacking a certain zing.They

tend t feel more rootless th an most.. They are squeamishly incurious about the pas t and

numbly certain about the future t his grisly extent: they suspect tha t they, too,will probably kill

themselves.”) See also p. 159. (“Sons of suicides often think of killing themselves a t the end ofthe

day, when their blood sugar is low.”).

’7“Playboy nterview,” p. 216.

’“Fora fuller discussion of the father and son theme in Vonnegut’s fiction, see Schatt’s Kur t

lgVonnegut:A Preface to His Novels (Port Washington, New York: Kennikat , 1977),p. 119.Vonnegut Jr. pp. 26-27, 128130.

NOTE: I would like to acknowledge Cleveland State University for the Senior Research Award

that facilitated work on this article.

Leon F. Seltzer, till recentlya specialistin American fiction, taughtat Queens College, CUNY, for

three years and a t Cleveland State University-where the present article was supported by a

Senior Research Grant-for eight years. In spring 1978, Dr. Seltzer resigned his tenure topursuea

second Ph. D., and a new career, in clinical psychology at the University of Cincinnati. His

literary-critical publications include The Vision o Melville and Conrad (1970), and articles on

Melville, Conrad, Dreiser, Hemingway, Faulkner (2), and Heller.

Documents

Vol 4 Issue 4 1981 Leon F. Seltzer - Dresden and Vonnegut's Creative Testament of Guilt