Anti-glacier

In the first chapter of Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut presents one of the difficulties of writing a war book:

"Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.

I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised his eyebrows and inquired, 'Is it an anti-war book?'

'Yes,' I said. 'I guess.'

'You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books?'

'No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?'

'I say, "Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?"'

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too."

Re-reading this book, I was struck by this quote because it seems to sum up Slaughterhouse Five's attitude towards war. Vonnegut writes a strange anti-war book. We talked a little about how lots of war movies will try to shock you with the brutality of war -- gore, atrocities, death, etc, and Slaughterhouse Five sort of does the opposite. In the first chapter, Vonnegut writes, "Another thing they [University of Chicago anthropology department] taught me was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, 'You know -- you never wrote a story with a villain in it.'" Slaughterhouse Five includes no raving-mad general, and while some characters may take the war a little more seriously than others, they never seem particularly dangerous. The English POWs are friends with the Germans, and the Germans are really just a ragtag group of old farmers and babies (referring to them as babies is another way Vonnegut takes the glamour out of war: you'd have to be particularly sick to get excited about babies stumbling around in the snow trying to kill each other). Everyone is stuck in the amber of the moment.

Honestly, Vonnegut just makes war sort of boring. It seems like a glacier -- related to the free will question. It's not exciting but it's got to happen -- there's no glory for anyone. His war descriptions reflect this -- as we discussed in class, there's no real suspense in the book. Yeah, we don't exactly know what's going to happen, but we know Billy survives without major injury, we know the climax, and of course we know what's going to happen in Dresden (the German assurances that no one would bomb Dresden as it produces nothing war-related only create a sick sort of irony), as Vonnegut sets all this out in the first few chapters. Yes, we don't know what happens to some of the minor characters (and Vonnegut even goes ahead and spoils some of their fates, such as the high school teacher, much like Doctorow did in Ragtime), but there's a sense that it doesn't really matter in the end, evidenced by the "so it goes" refrain. It's not exciting, and so, really, why wage it?