Animal Cruelty in Slaughter House Five

One thing that I wish we had more time to discuss in class is Vonnegut’s depiction of animal cruelty in Slaughter House Five.   Vonnegut’s descriptions of animals are often more graphic and “inhuman” than his descriptions of the war. One of the few “beautiful” moments we discussed briefly in class is the scene where Billy is crying at the bloodied horses.  Billy had not shed one tear in the entire war, and here he is bawling at a couple of horses.

Billy opened his eyes. A middle-aged man and wife were crooning to the horses. They were noticing what the Americans had not noticed—that the horses' mouths were bleeding, gashed by the bits, that the horses' hooves were broken, so that every step meant agony, that the horses were insane with thirst. The Americans had treated their form of transportation as though it were no more sensitive than a six-cylinder Chevrolet.

[…] Billy asked them in English what it was they wanted, and they at once scolded him in English for the condition of the horses. They made Billy get out of the wagon and come look at the horses. When Billy saw the condition of his means of transportation, he burst into tears. He hadn't cried about anything else in the war.  

Later on, as a middle-aged optometrist, he would weep quietly and privately sometimes, but never make loud boo-hoo-ing noises.  (196)

Billy has witnessed the destruction of an entire city and 130,000 lives, never seems to feel one bit of “emotion” towards any of it, and then breaks down when realizing that the horses he had been using for transportation were badly hurt.  Why would Vonnegut choose for Billy to cry at the horses out of all of the horrible things in the war?  It reminds me of how in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the most disturbing part of the book for me was the murder of the water buffalo.  There is something about the destruction of something as innocence as an animal that shows the credulity of humans. Why is Billy not as bothered by humans being cruel to humans?  I think Vonnegut is trying to get us to ask this question and then apply it to our own lives. 

Another significant scene in the book depicting animal cruelty is when Lazzaro describes to Billy how he got revenge on a dog:

“You should have seen what I did to a dog one time.”

“A dog?” said Billy.

“Son of a bitch bit me. So 1 got me some steak, and I got me the spring out of a clock. I cut that spring up in little pieces. I put points on the ends of the pieces. They were sharp as razor blades. I stuck 'em into the steak—way inside. And I went past where they had the dog tied up. He wanted to bite me again. I said to him, 'Come on doggie—let's be friends. Let's not be enemies any more. I'm not mad.’ He believed me.'”

“He did?”

“I threw him the steak. He swallowed it down in one big gulp. I waited around for ten minutes.” Now Lazzaro's eyes twinkled. “Blood started coming out of his mouth. He started crying, and he rolled on the ground, as though the knives were on the outside of him instead of on the inside of him. Then he tried to bite out his own insides. I laughed, and I said to him, ‘You got the right idea now. Tear your own guts out, boy. That's me in there with all those knives.'” So it goes.

“Anybody ever asks you what the sweetest thing in life is—“ said Lazzaro, “it's revenge.”

When Dresden was destroyed later on, incidentally, Lazzaro did not exult. He didn't have anything against the Germans, he said. Also, he said he liked to take his enemies one at a time. He was proud of never having hurt an innocent bystander. “Nobody ever got it from Lazzaro,” he said, “who didn't have it coming.” (139-140)

To me, this is the most disturbing scene of the entire book.  It just seems so incredibly wrong to torture and murder a dog for biting you.  Why am I bothered more by Lazzaro torturing a dog than the lives of 130,000 people?  Vonnegut juxtaposes the murder of the dog with Lazzaro feeling like the “Germans didn’t have it coming” and that they were “innocent bystanders”.  “It is all in your perspective”, Vonnegut might say.  Vonnegut intentionally depicts the cruelty towards animals in especially graphic terms to make us question how we can do the exact same things to humans.  

Goes it So?

            The phrase “so it goes” is used exactly 106 times in the entirety of Slaughterhouse-Five. As we have discussed in class, the phrase is used every time anything is considered to be “dead.” A “typical” example is Vonnegut’s first usage in the third paragraph of the novel: “[O’hare’s] mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes.” (2) The “so it goes” almost shrugs off death in a way that makes the reader question the truth of the circumstances of that death.  It can be infuriating for the reader because we want to know exactly what happened: “so it goes” is almost like Vonnegut’s cop out of taking responsibility for the accuracy of his statements.  If you think about what “so it goes” actually means, it is similar to as if Vonnegut were saying, “that is the way I have heard the story told.” 

In Billy’s letter to the newspaper about his trips to Tralfamadore has says:

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "so it goes.” (27)

This attitude toward life is very difficult for many readers to adjust to.  As humans, we want to find meaning in life (*cue Tralfamadorians closing their hands/eyes at our stupidity*) and are disturbed by the idea that life can just be “shrugged off”.   It’s interesting to consider that if Slaughterhouse Five were to have a thesis it might be something like: “135,000 people in Dresden were killed.  So it goes.”  This is supposed to upset and aggravate the reader.  “It matters that these people were killed!” the reader may say.  “You can’t just casually dismiss the gravity of the first statement by saying ‘so it goes’!”   “Maybe it did happen, maybe it didn’t, that’s just the way it goes” is what “so it goes” conveys to the reader.  This “thesis” of course can be undercut with the irony that the numbers Vonnegut uses are widely considered to be “false”.  According to Wikipedia, 22,700-25,000 people were killed.  But yet, does that difference in numbers really matter?  We cannot even begin to image 25,000 unique lives, let alone the 110,000 person difference between Vonnegut's and Wikipedia's numbers. Just imagine 25,000 individual “crayon-lines” coming to a halt at the same day.  So it goes.

            Vonnegut additionally diminishes the gravity of “so it goes” by offsetting all of this seemingly real and painful death with that of drinks, books, and fleas:

“Billy uncorked [the bottle] with his thumbs.  It didn’t make a pop.  The champagne was dead. So it goes.” (73)

“There was a picture of one cowboy killing another one pasted to the television.  So it goes.” (112)

“The Americans' clothes were meanwhile passing through poison gas. Body lice and bacteria and fleas were dying by the billions. So it goes.” (84)

“There was a still life on Billy's bedside table-two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So it goes. Air was trying to get out of that dead water. Bubbles were clinging to the walls of the glass, too weak to climb out.” (101)

“[The literary critics] were going to discuss whether the novel was dead or not. So it goes.” (205)

I was hoping to talk more about the significance of each of these quotes but do not want to write a whole short essay here, so please feel free to comment about why you think Vonnegut chooses these instances to mock his own “motto” of ‘so it goes’.