One of the things that's been bothering me most about Slaughterhouse Five is that I don't really care for Vonnegut's science fiction writing for the most part. In addition to that I think I agree with the sentiment that science fiction as an art form isn't as taken as seriously as many other literary art forms. When you combine these two things it doesn't make it easy for me to understand the value of science fiction as it functions in the novel. To explain my feelings towards Vonnegut's particular skill as a science fiction writer here, I feel like he tries to tackle a subject which no human can possibly do correctly and fully: time and the 4th dimension. Specifically I don't think he does a particularly convincing job writing what the Trafalmadorian's would be like as creatures. In my opinion he makes them way too humanesque. Consider for instance the way they react to Billy, " Now the first question came---from the speaker on the television set: 'Are you happy here?'About as happy as I was on Earth,' said Billy Pilgrim"(147), which was true. For a species who don't believe in free will, it escapes me why they would believe that happiness or sadness mattered in any way. Perhaps, I just don't grasp the concept on an intellectual, but regardless of that I just don't think the quality of the science fiction in the novel is that good.
Wait, let me rephrase my previous statement. I don't think that Vonnegut's science fiction in Slaughterhouse Five is particularly "realistic". While I agree with all of the critiques stated above I think I might be missing the point of the science fiction in the novel if I tried to read it for how convincingly it portrays an alternate reality. As we've stated in class, simply because something isn't correct doesn't necessarily mean it's not true. So as I try to reconsider my stance on the science fiction aspect of the novel I have to ask myself, What if it's supposed to unrealistic? And I think I like that approach much more than my previous feelings. In addition to it being a bit shoddy on how it portrays time traveling, it's also just blatantly ridiculous fiction. Billy is abducted by little green aliens who look like toilet plungers. It doesn't get much farther from our perceptions of reality than that. And some people wonder to what extent this jeopardizes the seriousness of the novel novel. I'd say that in some ways it jeopardizes the seriousness completely. I don't think it's moral standpoint is one of those areas. In fact I would argue that the sheer ridiculousness of the fictional aspect of the novel actually adds to it's moral seriousness.
As we've agreed throughout our discussion of Slaughterhouse Five is that in our traditional context we generally hear about war as a glorified and hyper-masculine event. In reality, at least according to Kurt Vonnegut, wars are just babies killing babies. When reading a character such as Billy Pilgrim from a narrator like Vonnegut I'm totally struck by what we've been calling de-familiarization. I think that the science fiction scenes are absolutely supposed to seem unbelievable because Vonnegut doesn't want us to see any of the novel as reasonable. He wants to emphasize for us exactly how unreasonable and ridiculous war is, and that the type of person who isn't bothered by the killing of thousands of people, or being made a prisoner of war, is the same kind of person who's going to believe he was abducted by little green aliens shaped like toilet plungers.
Vonnegut began his writing career as an aspiring sci-fi writer, and his juvenalia has been collected in a recent book, if you want to see him writing (attempting) "real" sci-fi. I always look at the _S-5_ stuff as sci-fi in quotation marks--Vonnegut isn't really *trying* to do what a "real" sci-fi writer would do, to make his heterocosm a convincing and internally coherent world unto itself. Instead, we get "flying saucers," "little green men," and "zap guns"--like the way "sci-fi" looks in a Bugs Bunny episode. He's not really trying to make it "good," or "real"--it's more or less explicitly identified as a feature of Billy's own mind trying to project a new fiction to make his absurd experience make some kind of sense. Especially near the end of the book, we can trace so many of the details about space travel and the extraterrestrial zoo and time travel to what Billy's been reading in Trout's novels. Billy himself is influenced by sci-fi, and thus Vonnegut filters it through him.
ReplyDeleteAnd there's also just the question of tone, how comical the "UFO" stuff is alongside the historical urgency of the Dresden narrative. Of course, "real" sci-fi can be deadly serious in its tone, and maybe even can sometimes be accused of taking itself *too* seriously. No one would accuse Vonnegut of that!