Slaughterhouse-Five Through Morrison's Eyes

Slaughterhouse-Five was written in 1969, right at the peak of Vietnam, about World War II. Its most obvious theme is an anti-war sentiment. But after reading Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, and rereading certain passages, I’ve come to believe that there are subtle racial messages buried deep within the prose. I don’t think that Slaughterhouse-Five has a central, consistent racial theme, but the way Vonnegut writes certain does seem to reflect what Morrison would deem an Africanist presence.

The main way I went about criticizing Vonnegut through Morrison’s lens was to do exactly what Morrison did herself: document the points in the story where non-white characters appear and analyze why the writer chose to make that character a minority. There were two notable spots where this occurred.

First there is the scene where Billy huddled up in the corner of the stone cottage that held American prisoners of war just after he was captured by the Germans. At the end of that sequence Vonnegut points out that Billy fell asleep on the shoulder of the captain, who was also a rabbi. I thought hard why Vonnegut made a point of having that character be Jewish. He didn’t mention it just in passing either, (it was reasserted that the captain was a rabbi on the next page as well) which led me to believe that he purposely made that character Jewish.

Now I’m not sure if Morrison would consider this an entrance of a non-white character, and it probably isn’t, but Jews have been traditional victims of violence to the relative extent that Africans have been. I began to think that Vonnegut placed this image of intimacy between a Christian and a Jew to say something about the white Christians. He wants the character of Billy Pilgrim to seem innocent, and includes Billy’s dependence on someone different from himself to make this point: Vonnegut has to make this character Jewish, otherwise the point is lost. In fact, Vonnegut is really showing that he is aware that race relations are a major problem in America.

Vonnegut slightly switches tactics a few pages later. At this point, Billy is at a stoplight in what is assumed to be a violent neighborhood (it mentions broken grocery store window and graffiti). A black man taps on Billy’s window, but Billy “does the simplest thing. He drives on.”

By stating that Billy does the simplest thing, Vonnegut is implying that Billy (or quite possibly himself) feels guilty about this course of action. It shows that Billy and Vonnegut are aware that this is a moral cop-out, but in order to balance this scene with Billy’s innocence, Vonnegut must reassert that it wasn’t because the man was black that Billy didn’t roll down the window, it was time and simplicity (as if to say that if the man were white, Billy would have done the same thing). But then why make the excuse for Billy? The problem is that if the man were white, the message Vonnegut tries to make would not speak on race relations, it would speak on Billy’s relations with the poor. Vonnegut has to make this character black in order to make his point. This clearly shows Vonnegut sees this situation as a problem, and it also says a lot about Vonnegut’s inner struggle over the problems with race in America.

These two scenes show that Morrison’s book still holds merit even if the book seemingly has nothing to do with race. This even quieted my own doubts about the application of Morrison’s brand of criticism to Slaughterhouse-Five. I hope to make it clear that these two scenes are not contrasting but comparable. In both, Billy’s innocence holds true (it may not seem so in the car scene, but say the man tapping on the window were white. By saying that Billy did the simple thing, Vonnegut implies that Billy would have acted exactly the same had the man been white. Therefore he is technically innocent). And ultimately, in both scenes, Vonnegut subconsciously drops clues acknowledging race as a struggle in American society.