Coward or Genius

I really liked Francisco Serna’s blog post "Another Piece to the Puzzle". He discussed two points that I recognize as being very interesting, and give the book that complexity we’ve all seen. First of all, it’s the dilemma of what role Vonnegut plays in the novel, and what was the relation between Billy Pilgrim and Kurt Vonnegut. Like Francisco, I was very confused on this. First I thought Billy was the personification of Vonnegut’s war trauma. Then I was doubtful if Vonnegut was the narrator or an actual character in the book. But as Francisco says it, all these doubts are ended in “Chapter 5”, when Vonnegut says “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.”. There is clearly no point in disagreeing now, that Vonnegut is as real as a character as Billy Pilgrim is. They two were war veterans, in the same war. The lived the Dresden bombing together, they lived in the concentration camp with the British together. But now the question arises, how does Vonnegut know so much about Billy Pilgrim?

Another interesting detail of the book, that I hadn’t caught onto until Francisco told me, was how Vonnegut critiqued the Christians and the American people, but in an “indirect” manner. What do I mean? It’s obviously Vonnegut’s idea to critique them, it’s his opinion. But in the book, those opinions appear to be from other books, as if other people had written them, not Vonnegut. He critiques the Christians in “The Gospel from Outer Space” by Kilgore Trout, and critiques the Americans in Howard W. Campbell Jr.’s monogram. I completely agree with Francisco that this has a level of cowardice in it. But, I also think that putting those things behind those books is essential to the novel. Because it could be interpreted that Billy built part of his life after war based on Trout’s book. And clearly Vonnegut couldn’t say that he thought that, hence Billy thought that. Vonnegut had to place those ideas somewhere in the novel for Billy to access them.