Kurt Vonnegut: the Issue of Truth in Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night

I was really excited to see Kurt Vonnegut on my reading list for Life Writing, as he’s yet another of those authors I’ve been meaning to get around to. He’s a writer whose name seems to buzz when you say it and I’ve always wanted to know why that is. We were set Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night has been waiting patiently on my shelves for several months, I am pleased to report that I have finally read both.

When I think of Slaughterhouse-Five as whole, I find it a little heart-breaking. This might just be me, though, so if anybody else feels the same, comment so I know I’m not just being weirdly sensitive haha. As you read the novel and correlate these experiences, the images, with what Vonnegut must have seen and heard in WWII, there is something so enormous that even the Tralfamadorians can’t distract you from it.

Incorporating this SF element and displacing his experiences onto Billy Pilgrim seems to be the only way in which Vonnegut could write the story, appearing only once or twice as a background voice, claiming ‘That was I, that was me.’ (p.108). This particular example of where Vonnegut draws consciousness to himself seems to come out of the need to express to the reader that he was there and saw everything Billy Pilgrim is seeing, reminding readers of his credibility as a narrator and acknowledging the risk he has taken by fictionalising this experience using SF elements.

The recurrence of the character Howard W. Campbell Jr and the name Blue Fairy Godmother in Slaughterhouse-Five create a rewarding sense of crossover, highlighting Vonnegut’s playful nature as a writer, even when dealing with some of the most sensitive issues of the twentieth century. Even though it was written first, I read Mother Night second as my set reading had to take priority. Whilst I found the short snippets initially unmoving, they drew me into the book and the character of Campbell Jr very quickly, and before I knew it I cared what happened to him and his bizarre entourage, even if I didn’t entirely trust his version of events.

These are two very different approaches to the same topic, knocking within the thematic vein of truth. Billy is unable to tell of his Tralfamadorian experiences and be believed whilst Campbell Jr has nobody to confirm his claims that he is not a war criminal but a spy. The complicated nature of truth is one of the core essences of writing and Vonnegut's acknowledgements of this and how he overcomes it in his writing are I think what make him fascinating for me.