The Absurdity of War in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

            Kurt Vonnegut uses facets of irony and figurative language to describe the impact that war has made on his protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, in the novel Slaughterhouse Five.  Vonnegut displays the absurdity that Billy has experienced in the war by using nonsense words to describe the aftermath of a massacre and by using images such as birds and broken kites to show the way that Pilgrim’s sense of time has been altered due to his experiences.  

“The cattle are lowing, the Baby awakes.  But the little Lord Jesus, no crying He makes.” This epigraph from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five is from a popular Christmas carol that describes Christ as a baby, refraining from crying even though He “saw things worth crying about.” (331) The narrator likens Billy Pilgrim to Baby Jesus, saying that “Billy cried very little…and in that respect, at least, he resembled the Christ of the carol.”  (331)  The only time that Billy cries openly is when he sees the condition that his horses are in after some “horse pitiers” reproach him for letting the horses suffer.  Throughout the novel, Billy is a prisoner of war, trapped on a foreign planet, without proper clothing and watching those around him die horrid deaths, but he only cries when he sees his wounded horses.  Jesus cried when Lazarus died and He saw Lazarus’s sisters weeping for their brother, but Billy doesn’t cry because the sight of death and human suffering moves him, he cries because he is upset at the way the horses have been treated.  He doesn’t cry for himself or other people, he cries for animals, and this is not expected or logical, it is an absurdity. Throughout the novel, an important concept is that massacres are events that leave the people speechless, because there’s “nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.”  (211) Billy soundlessly reprimands his wife, claiming that Valencia was “simple-minded…to associate sex and glamour with the war.” (279) The narrator uses the indecipherable and nonsensical phrase “poo-tee-weet” to describe the only sound made after a massacre, and that is the chirping of birds.  Birds are often representative of concepts such as freedom and life, the ability to spread one’s wings and conquer gravity.  Birds are a symbol in this novel of how life goes on after great tragedies such as massacres, and that life is still possible after such an event, although there is really no sense to make of why something so terrible ever had to occur.  That is why they say such absurd things such as “poo-tee-weet.” Birds, freedom and flight however, take on a different light in this novel when Billy is described as another flying object, a kite. 

 An Englishman equates Billy to a “broken kite” during the war after the Englishman notices his dismal state and the way that his captors have taken him advantage of him.  The symbols of the kite and the bird have a few similarities and a few differences among them that are interesting comparisons between Billy and birds.  Kites have strings that anchor them to something or someone and although they do have the capacity to leave the ground and fly, it is a controlled flight unlike a free bird.  The kite string in Billy’s case may be his fate, the inescapable destiny the he is bound for, to die.  However, Billy is aware of his fate and he knows how and when he is going to die.  I think that being called a “broken kite” has two different meanings, one being the face-value fact that he is trapped as a prisoner of war and has had what little freedom he had, taken from him.  However, Billy is also aware of the Tralfamadorian concept of time in which fate is inevitable and free will is not real, so the idea that he cannot escape his fate makes him a broken kite because he has always been a broken kite once he realized that escape wasn’t real.  Flight is just an illusion, because free will never really existed to Billy Pilgrim, except when he didn’t know that it didn’t exist.  Even then, his free will was never actually there, he just thought it was, until the aliens enlightened him.  If a kite’s flight is just an illusion, then maybe the birds’ flight is also an illusion, depicting the concept that freedom from fate isn’t actually possible and that humans just have an absurd idea that it is.  We may all be broken kites but just not know it.  Vonnegut writes “even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.”  (201) The idea that fate is inescapable is key to Vonnegut’s novel and having Billy described as a “broken kite” is one way that this concept is communicated. 

The senselessness of massacres and war are underlined by the idea that death is inescapable and inevitable.  The concept that birds are the animals that have something to say after a massacre suggests that it is only our illusionary concept of freedom and escape that makes us believe that a meaningful life is still possible after massacres, because birds sing and birds are the symbols of freedom.  However, freedom in this novel is not really freedom at all, but a stringing along by fate.  Vonnegut reveals this concept of an illusionary free will through the statement that Billy is a “broken kite” and comparing him to Christ’s resistance to crying as a baby, suggesting that massacres are illogical and all reactions to them are illogical, such as crying, death, the birds’ response of “poo-tee-weet” and optimism for the future.  Vonnegut shows optimism through a rewinding of one’s life and looking back into happier moments that have already been lived, not in what’s to come.  There is no concept of being optimistic for the future once it is revealed that free will is not actually free to Vonnegut and that death and wars will never stop occurring. 

Vonnegut’s comparison of Billy to Christ shows the illogicality of Billy’s reaction to war and the idea that war only generates absurdity.  He also uses bird and kite symbolism to describe the concept of an illusionary free will and the fact that war and massacres are illogical and nothing that comes from them are rational either.  

Finding her Voice: Janie’s Story in Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God can be described as a Quest narrative in which the novel’s main protagonist, Janie, searches for fulfillment through a meaningful and loving relationship while gaining self-knowledge of what it means to be a woman in a predominantly patriarchal society.

The story that Janie tells Pheoby encompasses the novel itself and expresses how Janie has finally found her voice and is willing to tell her story to a future generation of women.  This process of finding her voice is a difficult journey in which she endures two loveless marriages and experiences social oppression that causes her to curb her speech and consequently hinders her personal development.  Janie’s first realization about marriage is that it does not “compel love like the sun the day.” (25) Janie wanted a love “sweet…lak when you sit under a pear tree” (29) but instead receives Logan, a man who wants her to “chop and tote wood” and calls her “spoilt rotten.” (31) Her compulsion to be married to a man that she never loved comes from her Nanny, a woman who knows the social obstacles that a woman has to overcome such as gaining financial stability, and wants Janie to be able to “sit” or have the luxury to refrain from working due to a well-to-do husband.  This compulsion that Janie’s nanny feels for Janie to be married reveals the expectation that women depend on men for financial security and that at this moment, Janie is willing to succumb to these social expectations. 

Janie’s second marriage begins with a personal choice that Janie makes to leave Logan and follow Jody, a “citified, stylish” man whose plan was to build “a town all outa colored folks” and become a leader in the new city.  Janie shows a bit of her natural spirit and voice by leaving Logan and telling him that he “ain’t done [her] no favor by marryin’ [her.]”  However, her voice is quickly suppressed by her new status as Jody’s wife, a mayor’s wife, when she learns that her high society status demands submission.  When they argue about Janie’s tendency to enjoy typically “lower class” entertainment such as the mule funeral, Janie “took the easy way away from a fuss.  She didn’t change her mind, but she agreed with her mouth.”  This suggests that Janie disagreed with her husband, but she chose not to speak up.  During her years with Jody, she “learned how to talk some and leave some…she got nothing from Jody except what money could buy.” (91) Janie finally speaks up when Jody begins to attack her appearance in the store and Janie “robbed him of the illusion of irresistible maleness” by telling him that he looked like “de change uh life” instead of keeping her mouth shut.  It is at this pivotal moment that Janie rejects social norms and speaks candidly to her husband instead of curbing her speech.  The irony in this exchange is that it did not seem shocking that Jody would call out his wife in public, but to have a wife call out her husband was scandalous and clearly against social norms in this scene.  This suggests that the oppression that Janie is under as a woman has implications in regards to how she speaks even to her own husband and that her place in society is expected to be a silent one.

Janie truly finds her voice when her husband Jody dies from kidney disease and instead of mourning for a “suitable” length of time for a high-society woman, Janie lets her hair down and proclaims that “mourning oughtn’t tuh last no longer n’grief” (113).  This suggests that she is no longer preoccupied with the opinions of the townspeople in regard to her behavior as a mayor’s wife, and she intends to live her life without the pressure of society’s judgment against her.  Janie has the freedom to marry who she likes due to her inheritance from Jody and she exerts her freedom by yoking herself to a poor man that she truly loves.  This suggests that although she is defying social norms by marrying a man like Tea Cake, she really gained the freedom to do so by accepting the inheritance of her late husband Jody, which suggests that she still retains some dependence on her previous marriages because of the financial fall-back plan that Jody provided her.  There is room for debate as far as what this says about her status as a woman in general in this society and whether her inheritance gives her power or leaves the power in the patriarchy.  However, Janie makes the decision to leave the money alone and depend on Tea Cake for their living.  The final scene in which Janie really finds her voice is when Tea Cake is sick and threatens her life when he is not in his right mind.  Janie could have been shot by Tea Cake since she knew that he had a “pistol under the pillow” (222) and gone down with him.  However, she chooses her own life and instead commits the most heinous act possible, which a wife could commit, in the eyes of society by shooting her husband when he threatens her immediate life.  This intentional choice of Janie’s to choose her own life over defining her life by her husband’s fate is the final choice in Janie’s process of finding her voice and defying social norms. 

Janie’s progress in finding her voice is one that leaves plenty to debate about the status of women in her era, but it leaves nothing up to debate as to whether or not Janie found her voice in particular.  Her decision to choose to live her life without a man is a climactic scene in which Janie displays the results of her life’s journey.  As a woman, she may still be under the thumb of a patriarchal society, but the novel ends on a hopeful note with Janie sharing her story with a younger generation and spreading the desire to find a woman’s free voice in a primarily patriarchal society.