While sitting on the toilet the other day I sent a text to a friend I’ve known since the second grade. It read: “I’m beginning work on my masterpiece about Vonnegut’s masterpiece about Dresden. If all goes well it should be a failure like his.” To which he beautifully replied, “One can only hope…” I didn’t start working. I went and moved the wet clothes from the washer to the dryer.
For as long as I can remember I always seem to look at the clock at 2:22. I probably look at the clock at 7:43 and 12:49 and 4:15 as well, but I always notice 2:22. More recently it’s started popping up in places other than just on the face of a clock.
If I would have had the foresight to know what a masterpiece I wanted this to be I would have started reading Slaughterhouse Five first and started drafting this paper around week two. But, now in hindsight, all I can say is, “Should have given yourself more time to reread the book.” Although, if I started it then I most likely wouldn’t be where I am now, having come up with this bizarre concept, and not enough time to properly explain it. It’s possible I can’t explain the emotions and the feelings this book brought about in me. Maybe Mr. Vonnegut wasn’t writing fiction when he created a story about a man who would just “bob up-and-down, up-and-down” through life with the knowledge that he has no free will. Perhaps Kurt Vonnegut is a time traveler like Billy Pilgrim, and has seen his life and death and everything in between many times over. Maybe you and I are right where we are supposed to be at this exact moment in time.
I guess that’s where I’ll start to try and make sense of, in a few short pages, the work of a man that took almost a lifetime to write. When I say start, though, no doubt I am already finished. I figure it doesn’t really matter where it begins or ends, and this is probably why Vonnegut begins his book by telling us just that.
Mine will end: “Poo-tee-weet?”
A few nights back I was ripped from a pleasant dream state by the sound of my phone ringing next to my bed. Normally I would shout obscenities at the person on the other line for calling at such an inappropriate time, but the caller ID read: Ian, so I calmly answered, “Hello?”
Ian was strangely pleased to discover he had awakened me, and told me to go back to bed and he’d talk to me tomorrow. It wasn’t until my brain had caught up with my body in the present moment that I fully realized what had gone on. Ian had been making sure that I wasn’t in his front yard yelling at my girlfriend for ruining my birthday. He was making sure I didn’t have “breath like mustard gas and roses.”
The clock on my phone brightly glowed 2:22 as I hung up. This did not surprise me.
Life seems to keep happening to Billy Pilgrim no matter how hard he tries to get out of the way. The first time Billy time travels he is taken back to a time when his father is about to throw him into the deep end of the Y.M.C.A. pool. “Billy was going to learn to swim by the method of sink-or-swim.” He sinks, but to his dismay he is rescued. When Billy is shaken back to reality after the pool incident he is staring face to face with Ronald Weary, the man who had just moments before saved Billy’s life, and would continue to several more times. Billy Pilgrim keeps getting saved because Billy Pilgrim isn’t supposed to die yet. Life is involuntary. Vonnegut keeps metaphorically throwing Billy Pilgrim into the deep end of life to “bob up-and-down, up-and-down”, and people keep saving him.
Vonnegut carries this theme of free will, or lack there of, throughout the book in several ways. Another way he does this is by use of the story of Cinderella. Cinderella has and will always have a destiny to live happily ever after. Billy Pilgrim survives a massacre, gets married and has children, and becomes a very successful optometrist; he becomes rich. Who’s to say Mr. Pilgrim didn’t step into Cinderella’s fairytale life when he stepped into her silver spray painted boots. As Vonnegut points out, “Billy Pilgrim was Cinderella, and Cinderella was Billy Pilgrim.” Kurt Vonnegut and I are Cinderella.
Ian is a heroin addict. I met Ian rehab. I am an alcoholic with an affinity for cocaine. Often times Ian will say he doesn’t understand how I can put that poison in my body. There isn’t a hint of irony when he says this; he means it. And, it makes sense, too. My liver was failing, not his. Still, we were both killing ourselves on one way or another, and our families were standing nearby with their shovels. We were too “doped up” and “glassy-eyed” to notice.
Both Billy Pilgrim and Edgar Derby have seen the exact way in which they die. The only difference is that Edgar Derby was buried after he saw his death, and Billy Pilgrim continues to springboard through time.
From the beginning of the novel Vonnegut presents the idea that he will have “the execution of poor old Edgar Derby” be the climax of the book. It’s hard to say if he ever really achieves this, though, considering the book doesn’t really follow the linear path one is accustomed to. However, right in the middle of the book, where climaxes often come, and where Billy Pilgrim is on his honeymoon, arguably the climax of any relationship, and not too long after Billy himself has climaxed, Billy comes to a startling truth while talking about “the execution of poor old Edgar Derby”. The realization that “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt” seems to resolve some ongoing mental conflict for Billy. Creating a character to express this realization seems to have resolved some on going mental conflict for Kurt Vonnegut.
You don’t have a lot of free time when you’re living in a hospital; every minute of the day is structured for you. On those times, though, when you are structured to have free time, you try to do things that make you feel normal. Ian and I would often play dominoes, and laugh. It occurs to me now “what a Tralfamadorian adventure with death that had been, to be dead and to” play dominoes at the same time.
With Vonnegut’s novel, as is in life as well, the small little details seem to make no sense on an individual level, but when seen as a whole everything becomes clear. Vonnegut structures his novel in the exact way the Tralfamadorians structure theirs; “in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars”. I can’t explain something so complex any better than the Tralfamadorians explain it: “There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep”. Kurt Vonnegut got as close to this as humanly possible.
While sitting in group therapy one afternoon my counselor, a short, pudgy black man, began reminiscing on his stay in rehab. He told us that some ten years ago he had stayed in the very hospital we were now patients in. His roommate at the time, Gil, a nearly seven foot tall, white as can be, Native-American, was now employed at the hospital as well. They had both remained sober from that time on.
“Room 222A,” he said. “A lot of good karma in that room.”
“Holy shit!” I yelled. “222A? That’s my room!”
I suppose if this book is an anti-war book, as some like to point out, then it is a failure like Vonnegut says. Wars and death will keep coming, “like glaciers”, no matter how “anti” people are.
It’s only fitting that Vonnegut ends his failed work the way he does, because after all, “everything is supposed to be quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.
And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like ‘Poo-tee-weet?’”
I got an A.
I got an A.
