Today's class got me thinking about how even though Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five is an anti-war novel, it is also very different from the standard anti-war novels. While the standard anti-war novel focuses on the atrocity of war and how much death and destruction it causes, Vonnegut tries to undermine the glory that is often associated with it.
This difference can be seen in the phrase "so it goes." While the typical anti-war novel treats death in war with grave seriousness--the reason wars should not be fought--Vonnegut follows each death in his story with the somewhat callous "so it goes." The phrase is even applied equally to the death of insects and dogs as it is to humans. The phrase makes death in war seem like a random occurrence with no significant meaning, instead of something of enormous meaning like anti-war novels make it out to be.
I think Vonnegut's method is better at dispelling ignorant conceptions of war than the other anti-war novels. Although I don't doubt their intentions, I think it is important what was said in class earlier about how they can accidentally glorify war. By placing such significance on the deaths and destruction caused by war they can make it an exciting, life-or-death struggle. Instead of a metanarrative of heroically striving for nationalistic victory, they can replace it with a metanarrative of heroically trying to save lives, when I think it is really more like the way Vonnegut depicts it as a bunch of fools stumbling around following orders and trying to survive. This makes more sense to me. I am 18 now and registered for selective service, which means I could be drafted at any time. It is not so hard now to picture myself in a war as it once was, and when I try to imagine what it would be like for me to fight in a war I imagine myself stumbling around trying to obey orders and not get killed. I think Vonnegut is right.
In view of your first paragraph, may I again propose my extremely clever way of couching this distinction? _S-5_ might not be a straightforward "antiwar" novel (that is, a novel that itself functions to fight "against" war as a phenomenon of human history) and more of an "anti-war novel" (that is, a novel that itself challenges conventions of what a "war novel" is, a qualitatively different approach to telling a war story). In many ways, this novel is aligned with postmodernism by being more "about" other kinds of representation than the thing it tries to represent itself. So we read Derby's impassioned speech with a degree of skeptical distance, as a sudden eruption of "war movie speechmaking" rather than a guy actually saying what he believes (although it also is that). Or we see Wild Bob as living in his own self-directed "war movie," where the enemy "wishes like hell" it never ran into the good old boys of his regiment. These moments of self-dramatization fall flat in Vonnegut's novel, stripped of their dramatic capacity.
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