Time, War and The Bhagavad Gita: A Rereading of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

Abstract

In an unusual twist of fate the American writer Kurt Vonnegut not only witnessed, as a German prisoner of war, the fire-bombing of Dresden by the Allied forces on the night of 13 February 1945, but also survived the ensuing fire-storm that devoured the city in one of Dresden’s slaughterhouses, hence the title of his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Witnessing the massacre of 135,000 innocent civilians left Vonnegut mentally traumatized and spiritually paralyzed. Understandably, the horror of the disaster haunted him for long even after the Second World War. Consequently, Vonnegut embarked on a kind of art cure; in order to exorcise the demons of Dresden by his creative endeavours, he set out on a search for spiritual solace. Beginning with his first novel Player Piano of 1952 and up to his fifth, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater of 1965, Vonnegut experimented with varying fictional techniques ranging from the realistic to the scientific. Notably in The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Mother Night (1962) he wrestled with such weighty motifs as war and extraterrestrial existence with the purpose to advance, as much for his life as for his literature, new concepts of time, death, and war through which he might contain his psychological distress. However, his best efforts to develop new conceptual and technical frameworks notwithstanding, they remained largely ineffectual in psychological terms, failing to turn his trauma into a truly expiatory art. It was not until 1969, when he published his sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, that he succeeded in achieving a semblance of a