Bonus: (sub)Text #2: Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five”: Is There Such a Thing as a War Story? (Part One)

0:07 Mark: Hey folks, this is another Partially Examined Life bonus episode, the second in Wes Alwan's new project about literature and film and other things. The tentative title is now Close Reads, but we are open to your suggestions. The topic today is the novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. From 1969. You'll hear that Wes on this is joined by Mary from the Phi Fic podcast. Actually no longer in the Phi Fic podcast, but she was in many, many episodes. I encourage you to subscribe to Phi Fic as well as the other podcasts in our podcast network. You can find them all@PartiallyExaminedLife.com as last time, you're only going to hear about the first half of the conversation here on our public feed. If you want to hear the whole thing, you need to become a Partially Examined Life citizen or a $5 a month Patreon member. You can go to partiallyexaminedlife.comsupport to find out how. Enjoy.

0:55 Wes: This is Wes Alwan and I'm joined by Mary Ricci, who is the Managing editor for the Partially Examined Life blog. Welcome Mary hi Wes, how's it going?

1:05 Mary: It's well. Thanks for having me.

1:08 Wes: Thanks for coming on and thanks for suggesting this remind me of how this particular reading was the one that we decided we wanted to do.

1:15 Mary: I had picked it up and was reading it again for the first time in something like 30 or 40 years and just asked you one day, have you read Slaughterhouse five recently? Because I was so astounded at what a masterpiece it is, or at least I think it's a masterpiece, and then asked if you would be interested in talking about it and you said yes.

1:38 Wes: I said yes, let's do an actual recording and talk about it. I forgot how many years since I read this, but it's been a long, long time. I do remember that when I originally read it I loved it. I don't know that I thought as much about it when I read things now if I'm doing a recording, I'm thinking about what I'm going to say. I'm thinking about how I'm going to mine this for things to talk about. And it's so rich. There's so much to talk about. I was really, really excited to read it.

2:04 Mary: I keep thinking I wish I could go back and ask my whatever 15, 16 year old self what I think of it because I don't remember what I thought of it. I remember thinking it was great. I remember after reading this, reading everything else by him that I could get My hands on. But I don't have. You know, I can't hark back to any of the actual feelings that I had. And I wish I could ask her.

2:28 Wes: Yeah. See, I wasn't that young when I read it. I came to it somewhat late, even though it's still been. Been a while. And I did read a few other things by him after that. But, you know, I remember having heard his name a lot, of course, before I ever read anything by him. And I didn't have any associations to it. So I was surprised by sort of the understated. I don't know if you'd call it dry, but the really engaging sort of irony and sense of humor that runs throughout the whole thing because I simply didn't have that association before I had read anything by him.

3:00 Mary: Yeah. Isn't it strange that he's. The main character is so even. He's just so flat and so incredibly engaging. I mean, obviously it's Vonnegut who's so engaging. But that was one of the things I was thinking about last night. It's like, why do I care so much about this person who is absolutely flat? And I guess that it's. You know, you look at someone and you see how much pain they're in, what makes them so flat. And it adds something to it. But, yeah, I definitely. I thought you must. With your psych background, I thought you must have many thoughts about Billy Pilgrim's psyche.

3:41 Wes: Yes. Well, you know, that's interesting. I'm not sure we'll find out how much I even thought about that. Yeah. So before we give a brief summary, we should just say, so this was published, right. In 1969. And it's not. I think Vonnegut had written a few novels before this, but he really hadn't made a name for himself. And this pretty quickly catapulted him to fame. Am I right about that?

4:08 Mary: I don't know. I know that it was the first book that I read by him, and it was. I think I read it in the mid to late 70s, so it was fairly new at the time.

4:21 Wes: Yeah. So he had written a few things, including Cat's Cradle, which is something that I read later. God bless you, Mr. Rosewater. Player piano, which was his first novel that he published in 1952. And I think he'd made enough of a name for himself because I know he taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, which is a very famous. I mean, it's still like the number one writing program. And then he got the contract to do Slaughterhouse 5. But that was really the first commercially successful novel he had had. He had been sort of scraping by for a long time, I think, living on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

4:56 Mary: Yeah, the Lean years. That first chapter where he talks about his life and how he came about writing the book, I found just incredibly engaging. And at various points it's like, I wish that he didn't even have to tell the story almost. I love the story of how he wrote the story.

5:16 Wes: Yeah. So that's the way the whole novel is structured. It's bookended by Vonnegut being Vonnegut and talking in the first person about himself and his attempt to write the book. So that's the first chapter really, is him talking about the struggle to construct this narrative. And then he launches into. It's a little bit of a. It's not a little bit of a surprise. It's a big surprise, which is that when he finally does get to the story, which is. This is. I think a lot of our listeners have read this or they should really read this before they listen to this. I know that's different from our regular podcasts where we say you don't have to read it, but in this case I think it'll be better. So it's about the bombing of Dresden during World War II, which is terrible for a number of reasons. So I think he lists the casualties

6:04 Mary: at something like it's 130,000.

6:07 Wes: Yeah, something like that. Although I think there's a lot of dispute about that. So I've seen, just doing a little research for this, figures as low as in the 2000s, but I think there's dispute. And I don't know if that. It's entirely known what exactly the casualties were. But it was towards the end of the war, it was incredibly devastating to a really, really beautiful city. And it wasn't clear what the strategic purpose of it was or if there was any real purpose to it. And that's one of the reasons why it became sort of a famous thing as one of the things that, you know, the good guys, one of the many terrible things that the quote unquote, good guys did during the war that killed a bunch of civilians and possibly gratuitously without any real purpose at some

6:53 Mary: point in the book, when he's in the hospital talking with that guy who's just such a horse's ass. Not when he's with Rosewater. Yeah, when he's with the whatever general major, the 70 year old guy who comes in with a 23 year old wife and mocks Him.

7:09 Wes: Basically, it's Rumfoord. R U M F O O R D and I had translated that into Roomford in my notes. R O O M F O R D and I think he was a colonel. It's really hard to keep track of all the. All the details in this.

7:27 Mary: It's hard to keep track of anything. I was thinking about how he's using whataboutism, something that the world is rife with right now in what happened in Dresden, they talk about how more people were killed in Dresden than were killed in Hiroshima. And then goes to the what abouts, like, well, it had to be done. You know, you realize it had to be done. I mean, they say the same thing about Hiroshima, that it had to be done. And it's just fascinating to me that it's in those moments where I expect Billy to go over the edge, but he always just stays even, just like, I know it's okay.

8:05 Wes: So this is one of the things. Yeah. That I had been about to say is when we do get to chapter two, we are now talking about this character, Billy Pilgrim, instead of Vonnegut. You know, you might get the impression from the first chapter that with all the lead up that, okay, you know, he's finally going to be able to write about his experience in the war and we get a story about someone else's experience. And it's a crazy story because Billy Pilgrim, it's not just going to be an account of Dresden. And by the way, Vonnegut also pops up in there saying, I was there.

But it's almost entirely about, through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim, being in the Battle of the Bulge, getting captured by Germans, being put on a boxcar and being in a prisoner of war camp, and then being shipped off to Dresden where he and other Americans are kept in a slaughterhouse. So Slaughterhouse 5 and then being in a bunker. I don't know if the slaughterhouse is the bunker, if it's underground.

9:01 Mary: For some reason, I think that they were in the bunker during the raid and then were moved back to the slaughterhouse after the raid.

9:09 Wes: Okay. And then coming out and seeing everything destroyed.

9:13 Mary: The moon.

9:14 Wes: Yes. And the landscape like the moon. And that's basically the story for Billy Pilgrim, except it's also about Billy Pilgrim becoming, quote, unquote, unstuck in time. And so you're getting all this jumping around between different time frames into Billy's past and future and his life as an optometrist and is getting married. And also he's being kidnapped by a flying saucer.

9:43 Mary: By these Tralfamadorians.

9:46 Wes: Yes. There you go. I was trying to figure out how to pronounce that. Tralfamadorians. It becomes a little bit of a science fiction story at that point. So that's one of the strange things about the whole way this is set up. It's not just Vonnegut's Dresden experience. It is that, of course, but he's using this really interesting narrative distance to accomplish the telling of the story by going through Billy. I think the science fiction element is part of it by the jumping around in time and the sort of free, associative way that the story is told. And we can talk about why do that. I think that's part of the. That immediately confronts you when you read this.

10:25 Mary: But, yeah, he tells the story of why he's doing that in the first chapter. I love the image that he is a pillar of salt, that he's looked back like Lot's wife. He can't tell it any other way. He's looked back and he's become a pillar of salt.

10:42 Wes: Yeah.

10:42 Mary: And he won't be going forward. This is the last he's going to be looking back. And how difficult it is to tell a story, the circularity of it, of the entire book, is. It's astounding. And it's. At first, it's a little confusing, but then it makes perfect sense. And after you read the first chapter, I think that all of it can easily make perfect sense, but you have to kind of go into it with that feeling of, this is a story that nothing can be avoided, nothing can be changed, nothing dies, because it lives in his memory and it comes back to his.

In his life in so many ways. And so it goes. The use of repetition in this book is really fascinating and also funny and odd. And it starts in the first chapter. The second time that I read through, I wanted to see where's the first time he says. So it goes. Where's the first time he talks about blue and ivory? Like, blue and ivory being colors of skin. You know, mottled skin, dead skin, cold skin.

11:52 Wes: Yeah. I think he talks about blue and ivory feet a lot. There are a few references to that. There are a lot of different repetitions like that.

11:59 Mary: Mustard gas and roses. Every time I have a drink now, I think about mustard gas and roses. Like, oh, he's gonna give me mustard's breath.

12:10 Wes: He talks about. Yeah, that's in the context of him drinking and being drunk and saying his breath smells like that. And for most of the novel, you don't what he means by that until the very end when you find out it's the smell of rotting corpses which he's being made to dig up as

12:25 Mary: a soldier in Dresden, that killed the other guy. I'm getting ahead of ourselves, of myself. Was it a Native American he was digging with when they were Maori? Right. And the smell eventually killed. You know, I think that he vomited so much that he died.

12:42 Wes: Right.

12:42 Mary: But I thought that that was interesting that when he gets drunk, which is when, you know he's going to fall into these reveries about the war, he's most likely staying up late, making phone calls, getting drunk because of the effects that the war has had on him. His drinking is going to produce breath like mustard gas and roses. Yeah. It comes back to death again. And then so it goes. I tried to use so it Goes the other day and realize that, like, despite finding it incredibly, in a weird way, charming in the book, I was walking and there was a dead bird on the sidewalk. And I tried to say, so it goes. And it didn't work. Like, I can't have that.

13:27 Wes: Right, right.

13:28 Mary: I can't have that reaction myself. And that made me think even more about the book.

13:33 Wes: So this is a phrase Vonnegut uses every time he mentions death in any form. So he sort of caps it off with so it goes every time. So it's at the end of a paragraph. Usually, you know, you don't initially know what that's about either until I think it's explained in the context of the. How do you pronounce it? Trammel?

13:56 Mary: Tralfamadorians.

13:57 Wes: Tralfamadorians. I should practice that before this recording. So this is on. So I'm going to use page number references that are not going to be relevant to you or necessarily to the readers. It's in a PDF and it's out of 97 pages. So people can try. And I have a 97 PDF of this reading, so you can try and translate that. But in my version it's around 16 to 17. So the neat thing about the Tralfamadorians is that they're aware of the fourth dimension, time as well, and they see across that in the same way that we would see a picture in the present.

So they're aware of past, present and future at the same time, and they're all sort of collected together. And that's comforting in the sense that if someone has died, they still simultaneously exist or something as bad has happened to them, they still simultaneously exist or are Having nice things happen to them at every other moment that they have lived. So this is the way he puts it, page 16 in my version. This is Billy writing a letter to the editor. He's going to get himself in trouble by trying to tell people about all this stuff, but especially with his daughter.

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past. So it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are. And they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that at one moment follows another one, like beads on a string.

And that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is. So it goes. And this is Billy talking. And I don't know that we ever hear Billy actually say so it goes in the narrative. But we hear Vonnegut say it a lot.

16:16 Mary: And Billy isn't saying it there, is he?

16:18 Wes: It's in his letter. This is his letter that I was reading.

16:21 Mary: Oh. I think that that's the only time that he says it.

16:23 Wes: Right. And he's just talking about how he says it, the fact that he says it. But yeah, in the book it's Vonnegut who repeatedly says it. And so it's a way of saying that after there's death, it's acceptance, basically.

16:36 Mary: Yeah.

16:36 Wes: There's an element of fatalism to it in the sense that everything already has happened. That is also another thing that runs through this book. You mentioned it earlier. Yeah, go ahead.

16:46 Mary: At one point, Billy is kept in a zoo on Tralfamadore with Montana Wildhack.

16:54 Wes: Yes. They all have great implausible names and.

16:57 Mary: Yeah, yeah. And the Tralfamadorians communicate with him through the guide who poses questions to Billy. He asks him what is the most interesting thing he's learned on Tralfamadore. And Billy makes this beautiful speech about being someplace where there's no war.

17:16 Wes: Yeah.

17:16 Mary: And how can they do that? They laugh at him, basically. Or they do the equivalent of rolling their eyes, like, oh, he's so stupid.

17:23 Wes: The Tralfamadorians are little hands with eyes in the middle of their palms. Like little.

17:28 Mary: Yeah, they're like plungers.

17:30 Wes: Plunger suction cups for the bottoms. And something that they do when they think people are being stupid, which is they close the hand over the eye, I think.

17:40 Mary: Yeah. And they say, of course we have wars. We just prefer not to look at them. In talking about it, they say that they know how the world is going to end and it's going to be a pilot on Tralfamadore actually destroys the universe.

17:56 Wes: And experimenting with a new fuel for his flying saucer.

18:00 Mary: Yeah. And Billy asks, if you know that it's going to happen, why don't you stop it? And they say, it always happened. It always will happen. We always let him do it. We always will let him do it. It's basically so just relax.

18:17 Wes: Yeah.

18:17 Mary: It's gonna happen anyway. Close your eyes and think of England.

18:21 Wes: Yeah. And they use this phrase, the moment is structured that way, which is another phrase that comes up repeatedly. So Vonnegut will use it in the narrative a few times. The idea that it's structured, it fits into a larger whole or something like that.

18:35 Mary: Speaking of the structure of the novel, so starting with chapter two, you right away go into Billy becoming unstuck in time. And all through the book, he's traveling. I mean, sometimes just really rapid fire, traveling from one time to the next. And with the time, the place changes also. So he's basically living in 4D the way that Tralfamadorians live in 4D. And I have so many thoughts about that that if you actually spend too much time or so much time dwelling on the past, you will become unstuck in time. Your life will become like a Tralfamadorian, like Billy Pilgrim.

You will become unstuck in time and you won't actually ever be anywhere. His affect is just so neutral. He never gets angry. His daughter, who's 23 or 24 years old, comes to his house and he's trying to write something that he thinks is very important. And she treats him like a child and says she's gonna put him in a home where his mother is. And he's only in his 40s, but she's acting like he's a doddering old fool. She's obviously concerned about the way that he's acting, but there's A point where it says, he never gets angry.

19:52 Wes: Yeah. And I think we are all unstuck in time in the sense that there is this timeless element to the psyche, and I think it's associated with trauma, so that there's memory in the sense of explicit memory that we look back. And that's one of the ways in which we really do transcend time in an odd way, just by virtue of memory, which Billy's time travel is a variation on memory. But there's also our procedural memories, our emotional memories. And then there are traumatic memories which can't really be expressed or talked about or be part of a story or be made part of a narrative.

And those things we just live out, they're blind spots that affect us without us knowing it. And we act on those memories. They cause us to repeat things within our own lives, which may be destructive, but there's a timeless element to them. They don't live in time in the sense that they can't be made part of a story with cause and effect and narrative. And that's really important because I think a lot of this novel is really. Is just about how war can't really be represented. It can't be talked about or traumas like that. And so that's where all this narrative innovation that he's doing becomes a story about how one can't tell a story about massacres, about wars.

21:08 Mary: It seems to me, even with all of the things that he does and all of the things that happened to him, this idea that here's this man who's living with what they would call PTSD now, and I never see a real break. He goes flat. When Vonnegut's talking about it in the beginning, he's talking about getting drunk and calling people, and that's probably not very cool, but he seems to be getting on just fine. I've been trying to come to terms with that myself. Like, how do you live having been through this and never have a huge breakdown? Maybe it's just because of the way that it's written. Was the trip to New York a huge break, do you think? When he went to New York and got on the radio show and talked about Tralfamadore. There are a few times that he went to a hospital.

22:02 Wes: We get lots of hints that this is insane and we're not supposed to take Billy's account about Tralfamadore at face value. That includes the fact that a lot of his ideas come straight out of the novels of this guy, Kilgore Trout, the Science fiction writer. There are lots of other little hints as well that it's basically assembled. Billy has assembled this from various materials in his life from other sources. And yeah, so he ends up having a breakdown and going into a mental hospital right after he gets back and is in optometry school. Then there's a plane crash at one point, which is what people think finally makes him crazy, even though it isn't.

Then he wants to tell everyone about this whole Tralfamadorian view on time. It's less about telling everyone he was kidnapped by flying saucers than trying to comfort people. You don't have to worry about death so much because if you just understand this way of thinking about time. But obviously he looks like a raving lunatic. That's one way to deal with trauma. Right. So other people might become drug addicts or alcoholics or self destructive in other ways. There could be really manifest itself in all sorts of different ways. And in a way this is not like the most unproductive coping mechanism for him to be having these psychotic delusions about time travel.

Because time travel and memory are very close in a way. And if you have to think of yourself as time traveling in order to remember, then that might be a productive thing. Because trauma, again, I think it's a form of memory, but it's a failure of memory. It's a failure of memory in the sense of. It's a failure to make something part of a story. And it really is time travel in the sense that the memories in trauma become enactments. It's not something I can remember in the sense of telling a story about, but it's just something that affects my life in all these various different ways.

And I don't know what the hell is going on.

23:48 Mary: I'm trying to remember. I don't think that he ever does violence, any act of violence. Billy Pilgrim in the entire book. But great violence is done to him. I love that he says there are no real characters in the book because there aren't characters in war.

24:05 Wes: Yeah, this is part of the whole war. Can't be part of a narrative. Can't be represented.

24:10 Mary: The different people who are with him and whom he talks about. Some of them are just completely psychotic. It's interesting they got there that way. The first guy, Roland Weary.

24:23 Wes: Yeah.

24:24 Mary: Who is just this tragic, violent little boy almost. I mean he is only 18. It is the children's Crusade, Right. So he is this young, overly coddled by his parents apparently, who has a really incredibly insane dad. The other person who eventually Kills Billy.

24:43 Wes: Paul Lazzaro.

24:45 Mary: Paul Lazzaro. When I was listening, I actually like, fast forward it a little bit through the stories about killing the dog because this is just too gross for me and too heart wrenching. An incredibly violent, vile person. But it's interesting to me that when people start a war and people are conscripted, it's everybody. There's no soldier's personality. I guess there are people who do better and worse in times of war, but there are really violent people. There are people who are pacifists, there are people who are everywhere in between. And that I think that's really interesting too, in the circularity of the idea that you can never stop war, is that we're all in it, we all get thrown into it, and it will affect everyone. Whatever you do, whatever happens, a lot of it comes in with you. Paul Lazzaro would be a lot quicker to kill someone than Billy Pilgrim.

25:44 Wes: We all have our traumas, and one of the things that Pilgrim will flashback to is being thrown into the pool by his father, trying to teach him how to swim via the sink or swim method, and ending up at the bottom of the pool almost dying and being saved and regretting. Being saved.

26:01 Mary: Yeah, being pissed.

26:03 Wes: In the case of Roland Weary, he has this obviously really messed up childhood with a father who collects instruments of torture, which Weary is now into himself. And so you just get the sense that there's this element of sadism that's already there and you see it in ordinary moments too. So on page 61 in my version, Barbara, his daughter, is chastising him for going crazy and talking about being unstuck in time. She says to him, oh, my God, you are a child. If we leave you alone, you'll freeze to death, you'll starve to death, and so on. And by the way, Roland Weary, also, despite his sadism, is always trying to save Billy.

And Billy just wants to be left to die, just like he wanted to be left to die at the bottom of the pool. So the next thing Vonnegut says is, it was very exciting for her. Taking his dignity away in the name of love. So that struck me, because there's another point. This is page 32 in my version where the word exciting is used and I associate it between the two. Billy found the afternoon stingingly exciting. There is so much to see. Dragon's teeth, killing machines, corpses with bare feet that were blue and ivory. So it goes. So this idea that there's the sadistic element to us in general, and some people it's more pronounced than others, but that even Billy can get excited by the violence.

That is one of the central worries of this book, Right. Is that in writing about the war, it could just become a form of glorification. It could just become one of these Hollywood war movies. That's exciting. There are heroes, there are men. And this is the contrast, right, that you brought up Mary, where the wife of one of Vonnegut's war buddy, O'Hare, we ought to read that part too. But who basically is angry at Billy, who's over at O'Hare's place trying to gin up war memories for his book. And she's upset by the idea that he might glorify war and says something to the effect of, you were just babies, but you're going to write it as if you were men, as if you were heroes.

And so he makes a promise to her that no, he will write it as if they're babies, just these kids going off to war. And he'll call it the Children's Crusade.

28:07 Mary: I mean, it's fascinating because they can't come up with any stories. He goes to see O'Hare, he brings his daughter and one of her little friends. And O'Hare's wife, whose name is Mary and is a nurse, which is a lovely profession for a woman to have, which I just cracked up. Yeah, she mixes the kids up with her own. She's just a wonderful hostess. And then she comes back and she's just furious with him. Before she went off on him, he had a picture in his mind what he had imagined they would be doing. That was a lot closer to the glorification of it. You know, a couple of leather wing back chairs in front of a fire,

28:47 Wes: drinking whiskey, trading war stories. And instead she has them sit in the kitchen in interrogation, screaming with reflected light is the phrase that he uses.

28:57 Mary: Yeah, I think he says a 200 watt bare bulb with their head.

29:00 Wes: Like an operating room, basically.

29:02 Mark: Yeah.

29:03 Mary: And she doesn't put out a glass for her husband. He can't drink hard stuff since the war. And the husband is embarrassed, but says, oh, you know, don't worry about it. I got the idea in that the reason that he let him come was because Vonnegut calls him in the middle of the night drunk. Yeah, he was trying to take care of Vonnegut and says, I need to talk about the war.

29:24 Wes: And he wasn't excited about it?

29:25 Mary: No, he wasn't excited about it, but he said that they were like Mutt and Jeff during the war. Which is interesting because Billy Pilgrim and Roland Weary have that physical semblance of Mutt and Jeff. Although I don't think either of them was actually really modeled on either O'Hare or Vonnegut. So there's this caretaking going on. She's a nurse. Her husband is going to do the caretaking. She turns around and is furious. And when he finally promises that there won't be a part for John Wayne or Frank Sinatra if there's ever a movie made of it, she drops her anger and allows herself to like him after that.

But they have no stories. They come up with two little anecdotes, nothing to actually write a book on. And then O'Hare has some big book of atrocities or whatever in the past. Atrocities. And they look up the Children's Crusade. And he talks about in the first chapter what the Children's Crusade was, which

30:23 Wes: is basically just a scheme to sell children into slavery.

30:29 Mary: When I read this when I was a kid, I did not pick that up and take that with me through the rest of my life. I did not know about the Children's Crusade.

30:35 Wes: So it's one of the starker examples of the great gap between glorification and reality. Right. This supposedly noble purpose to liberate the Holy Land, which in fact, is just a scheme to sell people into slavery.

30:51 Mary: Yeah. I don't think it was until I lived in earthquake country that I realized one aspect of war being the confusion. When there's an earthquake, you're not expecting it. And I remember when we first started the first Iraq War, when we were bombing Iraq and just thinking about it, one day you're just sitting at your kitchen table and somebody drops a bomb. And the kind of confusion surrounding that war was always displayed as just this orderly thing through movies and in historical accounts. Never really get the idea of what it would actually be like to be on the ground.

And of course, we got a much better look at that with the Vietnam War. But it wasn't until I actually had a few wake you up from a dead sleep or just, here's my day, my day, moving along, and oh, there goes the bookcase. Which is nothing compared to having a bomb dropped. But still, that kind of horror, and everybody is in it that speaks to

31:53 Wes: the fact that it can't be represented adequately. This is really one of the most amazing aspects of the book. There's a lot in here about the very essence of what it means to tell a story is incompatible with war. It's not just that they can't remember is that there's no such thing as a war story. So, for instance, just thinking of you mentioning O'Hare and Vonnegut not being able to think of any good war memories for the book. There's also a scene later on page 28 in my version where he's taken to a cottage as a prisoner. And he says There are about 20 other Americans in there sitting on the floor with their backs to the wall, staring into the flames, thinking whatever there was to think, which was zero.

Nobody talked. Nobody had any good war stories to tell. So this is a recapitulation of the kitchen scene. And there are, by the way, lots of parts of this where you get the sense that Vonnegut's telling you, look, I've fabricated this based on something that I've mentioned earlier, which happened to me. So this is Billy's world version of the kitchen scene with o'.

32:52 Mary: Hare.

32:53 Wes: But the larger point I'm trying to make is that there's something essentially helpless about war. That's the whole point of saying soldiers are babies. It's not just that they're young. It's just that there are forces that are so. So beyond their control. And you mentioned this passage earlier, by the way. He says there are almost no characters in the story and almost no dramatic confrontations because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

But old Derby was a character. Now Derby is confronting this American turned Nazi at this point. So. And so this is like one of the really unusually dramatic scenes where, you know, you have an American standing up for himself and giving this speech, talks patriotically and it begins to look right, like one of those classic war movies. And it's as if, oh, no, we're getting a glorification moment here. Here's the hero, Derby. And then Vonnegut backs us off that very quickly.

33:53 Mary: Doesn't Lazzaro say something horrific? Or was that after they made poor old Edgar Derby their leader, who he refers to as poor old Edgar Derby, through the entire book? I think it was after they elected Edgar Derby their leader. Paul Lazzaro just said something vile. He could always be counted on to say something vile. Billy Pilgrim has these fantastical moments throughout the war. They were being captured. One of the Germans was old. He had been wounded four times and patched up and sent back. And he was wearing gold boots. I'm going to read a little passage from it because it's just amazing.

Those Boots were almost all he owned in this world. They were his home. An anecdote. One time, a recruit was watching him bone and wax those golden boots. And he held one up to the recruit and said, if you look in there deeply enough, you'll see Adam and Eve. Billy Pilgrim had not heard this anecdote, but lying on the black ice there, Billy stared into the patina of the corporal's boots, saw Adam and Eve in the golden depths. They were naked. They were so innocent, so vulnerable, so eager to behave decently. Billy Pilgrim loved them. And then down the next paragraph, there's someone standing next to the guy with the golden boots and his feet are swathed in rags and he's a German boy.

35:13 Wes: One of the soldiers who's captured him.

35:15 Mary: Yeah, yeah. And Billy looked up at the face that went with the clogs. It was the face of a blonde angel, a 15 year old boy. The boy was as beautiful as Eve.

35:24 Wes: Yeah, that's just great.

35:27 Mary: Yeah, I mean, it's beautiful writing. So there's Billy Pilgrim. I think Roland Weary has just beat the living shit out of him. And these soldiers have come up. Roland Weary is upset because he won't be part of the Three Musketeers. He's fantasized that these two scouts that they've been traveling with were going to be his friends and they were going to be the Three Musketeers. And he's just living a fantasy. He's been ditched by people his entire life because he really is an unpleasant little person. And interestingly, they ditch him and immediately get shot.

But he's so furious with Billy Pilgrim that he's beating the shit out of him. And these soldiers who are going to capture him are just two old men and two young boys. I think Billy Pilgrim looks up and sees that they're basically being watched by German soldiers. And the German soldiers just can't believe it. Like, I can't believe that you're kicking the shit out of somebody on your own side. Like, what did he do? So this terrible thing is happening to him and he goes into a flight of fancy about these boots. So there's the magical thing that Vonnegut is doing in telling us about this thing that obviously he couldn't know the anecdote about the boots.

The magic being that Billy Pilgrim actually did see Adam and Eve in the boots. And then you look up and realize that this young boy is so beautiful that he has the face of Eve. I mean, he's standing next to the guys who must have seen them. Reflected in the boots, I don't know, but I found that just one of those beautiful lyrical passages that kind of bring home the horror even more. Because he's. I mean, he's pretty much at the point of death, right? He's like a matchstick. He's 6 foot 3, probably weighs 140 pounds, dripping wet or something like that.

He's got hardly any clothes. They haven't eaten, he hasn't slept. He really does want to die at this point. And he sees beauty. That also made me think about the ways that we use beauty to calm ourselves, to salve ourselves from all of the horrors in life. Why make art to plaster over the demons or something? I don't know.

37:30 Wes: This goes back to the whole wars are fought by babies thing. Right. So instead of looking up and seeing German anti heroes, powerful people, of course, he's just getting a picture of innocence and helplessness.

37:44 Mary: Yeah. And weariness.

37:46 Wes: Yeah. And the aesthetic part of it. It reminds me of the part where he's looking at Tralfamadorian books, even though he can't really read them on the saucer because the only other book they have is Valley of the Dolls. That's the only physical human book that he can read. So he's looking at them and there are clumps of symbols, and Billy says they might be telegrams. And one of the Tralfamadorians says each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other.

There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages except that the author has chosen them carefully so that when we see all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time. And that's really what that golden boot scene in Adam and Eve, it's really one of those moments. It's the type of thing you see in literary fiction, as opposed to pulp fiction.

It's not about the plot there. It's about this aesthetic moment which transcends plot and so therefore transcends this whole system of causes and effects, because that's what the plot of a story is.

39:03 Mary: It does do a little work with character development.

39:05 Wes: Yeah. But the larger point is, you know, when we do something purely aesthetic, we are attempting this time and plot and causality, transcendence, and this by the way goes back to the point I was making about the ways in which storytelling and war and trauma don't mix. Because telling a story is inevitably about this beginning, middle, end. Suspense, morals, causes, effects. It's about the exertion of a certain kind of power. And we see that, by the way, in Roland Weary and his fantasies about being at home, telling his parents and family and friends about the fact that he was part of the Three Musketeers, even though in the present he's in this pathetic state.

And we see that in Wild Bob, this other character, if you're ever in Montana, yeah, he's having a fantasy about a kind of triumph, even in defeat, and then getting home and having a great life. But the real situation, there's nothing story like about it. It's completely helpless. And the kind of sense of power that we get from narratives, the sense of meaning and the exertion of power and the sense of mastery that's not present there in the moment itself, it really, really falsifies in any story. Falsifies in this way. But with war, it's especially poignant because when you're there, the world is very obviously vastly indifferent to your suffering and the suffering of all the people around you, and you're completely helpless.

And any sort of engagement in storytelling, empowerment and fantasy, for instance, like Roland Weary, is just absurd, and it doesn't change anything. Roland Weary dies of gangrene because he's given the clogs. He's given those nasty rag clogs and eventually gets gangrene in the feet and dies because of it.

40:48 Mark: All right, so that's all you get. You've only heard less than the first half of the conversation. There's lots of good stuff still. So if you enjoy this, if you want us to keep producing supplementary content like this, if you appreciate the main content that you perhaps enjoy regularly as a part of your life, please go sign up to be a supporter@partiallyexaminedlife.com support. Thank you.