![]() ![]() However, there are those who have accused it of the sin of “quietism,” of a resigned acceptance, even, according to Anthony Burgess, an “evasion” of the worst things in the world. ![]() Its reception was largely positive, it has sold an enormous number of copies, the Modern Library ranked it eighteenth on its list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century, and it is also on a similar list issued by Time magazine. I am not suggesting that “Slaughterhouse-Five” has been poorly treated. This is the manner of the entire novel, and it has led to the novel being, in many cases, misunderstood. Beneath the apparent resignation is a sadness for which there are no words. It occurs in the text almost every single time someone dies, and only when death is evoked. But that is not its purpose in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” “So it goes” is not a way of accepting life but, rather, of facing death. Life rarely turns out in the way the living hope for, and “So it goes” has become one of the ways in which we verbally shrug our shoulders and accept what life gives us. I suspect that many people who have not read Vonnegut are familiar with the phrase, but they, and also, I suspect, many people who have read Vonnegut, think of it as a kind of resigned commentary on life. Something of this sort has also happened to the phrase “So it goes.” The trouble is that when this kind of liftoff happens to a phrase its original context is lost. “Come up and see me sometime” and “Play it again, Sam” are misquotations of this type. Sometimes a phrase from a novel or a play or a film can catch the imagination so powerfully-even when misquoted-that it lifts off from the page and acquires an independent life of its own. I had not remembered, until I reread “Slaughterhouse-Five,” that that famous phrase “So it goes” is used only and always as a comment on death. ![]() The two books do, however, have this in common: they are both portraits of a world that has lost its mind, in which children are sent out to do men’s work and die.Īs a prisoner of war, age twenty-two, which is to say three years younger than I was when I read his story, Vonnegut was in the famously beautiful city of Dresden, locked up with other Americans in Schlachthof-Fünf, where pigs had been slaughtered before the war, and was therefore an accidental witness to one of the greatest slaughters of human beings in history, the firebombing of Dresden, in February of 1945, which flattened the whole city and killed almost everyone in it. His predominant tone of voice is melancholy, the tone of voice of a man who has been present for a great horror and lived to tell the tale. If Heller was Charlie Chaplin, then Vonnegut was Buster Keaton. It sees war as a tragedy so great that perhaps only the mask of comedy allows one to look it in the eye. There is much comedy in it, as there was in everything Kurt Vonnegut wrote, but it does not see war as farcical. It sees war as insane and the desire to escape combat as the only sane position. “Catch-22” is crazy funny, slapstick funny. It hadn’t occurred to me until I read them that antiwar novels could be funny as well as serious. As a matter of fact, I read both “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Catch-22” in the same year, a decade later, and the two books together had a great effect on my young mind. I did not read “Catch-22” in 1961, because I was only fourteen years old. In those days, I was living in Britain, which did not send soldiers to fight in Indochina but whose government did support the American war effort, and so, when I was at university, and afterward, I, too, was involved with thinking about and protesting against that war. “Catch-22,” like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” was a novel about the Second World War that caught the imagination of readers who were thinking a lot about another war. Kennedy began the escalation of the United States’ involvement in the conflict in Vietnam. Eight years earlier, in 1961, Joseph Heller had published “ Catch-22” and President John F. I mention Vietnam because, although “Slaughterhouse-Five” is a book about the Second World War, Vietnam is also a presence in its pages, and people’s feelings about Vietnam have a good deal to do with the novel’s huge success. 1972 was the year of inching slowly toward the Paris Peace Accords, which were supposed to end the war in Vietnam, though the final, ignominious American withdrawal-the helicopters airlifting people from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon-would not take place until three years later, at which point, by way of a small footnote to history, I had become a published writer. I first read “ Slaughterhouse-Five” in 1972, three years after it was published and three years before I published my own first novel. Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” is humane enough to allow, at the end of the horror that is its subject, for the possibility of hope.
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