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.
Wow James, the animal cruelty in Slaughterhouse is a really interesting detail that I hadn't put too much thought into before. I think the juxtaposition you pointed out, between the war scenes and the tortured animal scenes, is telling. When people die in this book, Vonnegut treats it with the classic "so it goes" mentality. The details are glossed over, and all we are left with is this vague idea that they died. Here, though, the animals' feelings are given out relentlessly. The dog is crying, the horses are in agony, etc. Maybe this is another way in which Slaughterhouse Five is an antiwar novel, where Vonnegut is relaying the horrors of war in an unconventional way -- through the animals.
ReplyDeleteAnd I think that this is particularly evident when Billy is crying at the horses -- the only thing that breaks through his "so it goes" mentality is seeing how horribly he accidentally treated the horses
DeleteMaybe Vonnegut had a reason for writing the gruesome details about the dying animals instead of about humans. Many people nowadays, including myself, think much less of humans dying than they do about animals. In movies for instance, I don't always have any emotional reaction when they are killed. But, if an animal dies I get really sad. It's possible that Vonnegut doesn't bother to try making us upset about the deaths of humans because he knows it is uncommon for us to have this sort of reaction. Interesting post! I'd never thought about it that way before.
ReplyDeleteWow, I'm not sure would go so far as to say that I don't have any emotional reaction when humans are killed in movies, but yes I think Vonnegut is using animals because our media does not portray animal cruelty nearly as often as human mistreatment.
DeleteI also think that Vonnegut uses graphic cruelty against animals because he is too disturbed by what he saw in the war done against innocent humans that he's unable to write about it. He uses this animal cruelty to bring out in us the emotions of disgusted and fear and shame in the human race to, like you said, allow us to understand what we should feel towards humans who can do such horrendous things.
ReplyDelete