Comparing Slaughterhouse-Five And Cat's Cradle

Kurt Vonnegut places his own life experiences In Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle, in order to make the novels, which are frequently deemed ludicrous, more realistic and to answer problematic queries that have risen up in his past. In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut‘s experience in World War II, a prisoner of war forced to witness the Allied forces’ firebombing of Dresden, is the essence of the novel, while Vonnegut’s great distaste for war and his mother’s suicide are greatly personified in Cat’s Cradle. Both of Vonnegut’s novels reflect historical and experiential elements of his own life.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, snap-shots of the protagonist Billy Pilgrim’s life are depicted. Billy is taken on a journey through different time periods
of his life - past, present and future – with the help of aliens and inexplicable transportations. In the main insight into Billy’s life, captive of war Billy Pilgrim is transported in a crowded railway boxcar to a prisoner of war camp in Germany. Soon he and the other Americans captured along with him travel to the beautiful city of Dresden, still relatively untouched by wartime privation. Here the prisoners must work for their keep at various labors, including the manufacture of nutritional malt syrup. Their camp occupies a former slaughterhouse. One night, Allied forces carpet bomb the city, then drop incendiary bombs to create a firestorm that sucks most of the oxygen into the blaze, asphyxiating or incinerating roughly 130,000 people. Billy and his fellow POWs survive in an airtight meat locker. They emerge to find a moonscape of destruction, where they are forced to excavate corpses from the rubble. Several days later, Russian forces capture the city, and Billy’s involvement in the war ends.
The story of Billy Pilgrim is actually that of Vonnegut and his interpretation of one of the most horrific massacres in European history, the World War II firebombing of Dresden in eastern Germany. More than 130,000 civilians died in Dresden, roughly the same number of deaths that resulted from the Allied bombing raids on Tokyo and from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Inhabitants of Dresden were incinerated or suffocated in a matter of hours as a firestorm sucked up and consumed any available oxygen.
As a prisoner of war, Vonnegut witnessed and survived the Allied forces’ firebombing of Dresden. After the bomb raid, Vonnegut, like his protagonist Billy Pilgrim, emerged from a meat locker beneath a slaughter-house into the moonscape of burned-out Dresden. His surviving captors put him to work finding, burying, and burning bodies. His task continued until the Russians came and the war ended. Vonnegut survived by chance, confined as a prisoner of war in a well-insulated meat locker thereby missing the moment of attack, emerging the day after into the charred ruins of a once-beautiful city. i
Slaughterhouse Five is Vonnegut’s way of dealing with his past.
Up until this novel, Vonnegut unsuccessfully attempted to describe in simple terms what happened that day and to attach to it plausible reason. In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut discovers a way to successfully deal with the death and suffering he witnessed by shifting his perspective from that of human beings to that of god, or in this case, the Tralfamadoreans, which are toilet plunger shaped aliens who kidnap Billy in order to, among other things, explain their concept of time to him. We see the transformation of perspective when Billy Pilgrim finds himself in the Tralfamadorean zoo. Billy asks “why me?” The answer he receives is puzzling: “That is a very Earthling to ask Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why anything? Because this moment simply is…”ii The Tralfamadorean perspective is very similar to that of god; the Tralfamadoreans speak to him as though from a higher power and with immeasurable knowledge. Vonnegut uses this change in perspective along with the Tralfamadoreans’ sense of time to explain the mass sufferings of innocent civilians as he witnessed during the bombing. For the Tralfamadorians, time exists simultaneously in the fourth dimension. When someone dies, that person is simply dead at a particular time. Somewhere else and at a different time he or she is alive and well. The Tralfamadorians prefer to look at life’s nicer moments. It is the combination of Vonnegut’s change in perspective and his new
sense of time that allows him to deal with life’s harsher moments.iii By believing this new sense of time given to him by “god”, Vonnegut can now believe that those who died during the bombing simply died during that specific time period, and maybe the other time periods they still live in are more enjoyable. Vonnegut’s ability, or lack thereof, to deal with his wartime past is another example of his life interleaved into his novels. The references to Vonnegut’s life in Cat’s Cradle are more personal than those found in Slaughterhouse Five. In Cat’s Cradle, the narrator John sets out to write a book, titled The Day the World Ended, about the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. John’s work in progress was based on the actions of Felix Hoenikker on that specific day, the Nobel prize-winning physicist and one of the fathers of the atomic bomb. For purposes of research, John visited all of Felix’s children as well as investigating certain areas of Felix’s past.
John learns of a special mission once delegated to Felix. Once, a general asked Felix to produce a solution to mud, a constant problem for troops on the move. Felix theorized the existence of an isotope of water, which he named ice-nine. Even the smallest seed of ice-nine dropped into a quagmire would solidify the mud and solve the problem. John, realizing that such an action could easily lead to the freezing of all water on earth, wondered if Felix had actually succeeded in creating ice-nine, a deadlier threat to life on earth than the atom bomb. An unprecedented chain of events led John to being declared president of the island San Lorenzo, the same island on which Frank – Felix’s son – lives, after its current president, Papa Monzano, is diagnosed with severe cancer.
During the inauguration ceremony, John learns that Monzano has committed suicide; and upon looking at the body, John realizes that Monzano's condition could only have been caused by swallowing ice-nine. Soon after, a plane crashes into the cliffs above Monzano's castle which causes a landslide that knocks Monzano's body into the sea. All the water of the world became ice-nine within seconds. Shortly after the disaster, most of the island's survivors commit suicide, and the rest survive for six months.iv Cat’s Cradle plays off Vonnegut’s documented dislike of war and disapproval of advanced weaponry, and his mother’s suicide while he was serving in the army.v After surviving the bombing in Germany, Vonnegut made public his aversion for war and mass destruction. After being unable to deal with the death of so many thousands of civilians in Dresden, Vonnegut could not appreciate weapons such as the nuclear bomb. The ice-nine depicted in the novel is a play off the atom bomb, which has the potential to extinguish thousands of lives in mere seconds.vi Vonnegut makes it apparent that it is his view that weapons such as these should not be in existence, for they will eventually be used – even accidentally – causing mass destruction. Additionally, Vonnegut was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War for the same reason; he could not understand why so many soldiers and civilians were being sentenced to their deaths. Vonnegut explains through Bokonon, the founder of Bokononism, who says “write it all down… Without accurate records of the past, how can men and women be expected to avoid making serious mistakes in the future?”viiviii Vonnegut is saying that events such as the Vietnam War could have been avoided. As seen by the destruction of the world due to ice-nine, Vonnegut incorporates his experiences into his novels in order to attempt to influence his readers. When Vonnegut was only twenty one years old and serving in the United States Army, his mother committed suicide.
The theme of suicide is found frequently in all of Vonnegut’s works, not just Cat’s Cradle. However, suicide plays a large role in this specific novel. After the freezing of all the earth’s water, many of the inhabitants of San Lorenzo decide to kill themselves by drinking some of the leftover ice-nine. They would rather kill themselves rather than live in a world that harbors such destruction. Even John’s newlywed wife kills herself because her religion, called Bokononism, preaches love and lust. Before the ice-nine incident, John’s wife yearned for love and would perform strange Bokononist rituals that are intended to create love between to individuals. When John gets angry at her for preforming these rituals with other men, she states that she means nothing by it but was simply attempting to find love. The residents of the island, who all believe in Bokononism, prefer to die then live in a world filled with hate. Vonnegut discusses suicide in the novel to understand why his own mother killed herself. He is saying that his mother could simply not stand the hatred and violence that was found during world war two, and therefore she decided to commit suicide. Vonnegut, as usual, ties his history with his novel in order to better understand his
past. Both of the novels portray the limitless nature of applying one’s own past into ones work. In Slaughterhouse Five the protagonist is kidnapped by aliens, thus not confining the method to earth, is taken to his past, present and future, thus not confining the method to time and space and it even takes the method to its extreme by placing the author, Vonnegut, as a minor character in his own novel. In Cat’s Cradle, the method is applied to a novel where there exists advanced and undiscovered technology that displays the extent to which Vonnegut can use the method of applying his own life into his novels. Combined, the two novels exceed every possible boundary confining this method, thereby showing the limitlessness of the method. Vonnegut inserts different aspects of his life into his works in order to help himself better understand his past. In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut does this so that he can give an explanation to the reason many innocent people die too often while in Cat’s Cradle he does it to promote his anti-war message and to understand the reason behind his mother’s suicide. Vonnegut’s limitless inclusion of personal events in his novels demonstrates that art really does imitate life.