A Duty Dance with Exploring Death in Slaughterhouse Five
From Ancient Greek playwright, Euripides, ("To die is a debt we must all of us discharge" (Fitzhenry 122)) to renowned Nineteenth Century poet, Emily Dickinson, ("Because I could not stop for Death/ He kindly stopped for me -/ The carriage held but just ourselves/ And Immortality" (Fitzhenry 126)) the concept of death, reincarnation, rebirth, and mourning have been brooded over time and time again. And with no definite answers to life's most puzzling question of death being given, it only seems natural that this subject is further explored. Kurt Vonnegut is one of many modern writers obsessed with this idea and spends many of his novels thematically infatuated with death. His semi- autobiographical novel, dealing with his experiences in Dresden during WWII, named Slaughterhouse Five, The Children's Crusade or A Duty Dance With Death, is no exception to his fixation. "A work of transparent simplicity [and] a modern allegory, whose hero, Billy Pilgrim, shuffles between Earth and its timeless surrogate, Tralfamadore" (Riley and Harte 452), Slaughterhouse Five shows a "sympathetic and compassionate evaluation of Billy's response to the cruelty of life" (Bryfonski and Senick 614). This cruelty stems from death, time, renewal, war,
During his time back as a prisoner of war Billy finds himself caged up with many men like himself on grueling train rides. So many men that they cannot move and when someone dies, which happens frequently, it takes days before he is located and even longer before the corpse is taken out of the train. He and the other stoic soldiers are viewed as "ridiculous [American] creatures" (Vonnegut 150), "incapable of concerted action on their own behalf" (Vonnegut 131). The Germans are "filled with a bleary civilian curiosity as to why one American would try to murder another [person] so far from home, and why the victim should laugh" (Vonnegut 51). The lack of compassion or care for death continues after Dresden is destroyed, when "absolutely everybody in the city was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were, and that anybody moved in it represented a flaw in the design" (Vonnegut 180). This incident in Dresden "becomes to Vonnegut, the example of the horror of the war, the epitome of man's inhumanity to man, and the terrible pain with which life confronts the human being" (Riley and Harte 453). Now Billy is left shameless to clean up the corpses who can "never say anything or want anything ever again" (qtd. in Shepard 5) in "a terribly elaborate [and sanguinary] Easter egg hunt" (qtd. in Shepard 4). Vonnegut laconically describes all of this in a dry but brutal way which emphasizes his disagreement with war. But even though he feels this way he still understands that "there [will] always be wars [and] they [are] as easy to stop as glaciers... [And] Even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death" (Vonnegut 3). The Tralfamadorians agree. They know that there isn't anything that they can do about war so they "simply don't look at them. [They] ignore them. [They] spend eternity looking at pleasant moments... [They say to] Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones" (Vonnegut 117). Fitzhenry, Robert I., ed. The Harper Book of Quotations. New York City: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993. Shepard, Sean. "Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse Five." http://erme.bgsu.edu/~jdowell/kvandsh5.html
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2316
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)
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