“Slaughterhouse-Five” and “The Things They Carried” Place in Protest Literature

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Table of Contents

Introduction
The Protest Literature
Criteria for Protest Literature
Analysis of Novels
Conclusion
Works Cited

Introduction

Society at any time is represented as a single system consisting of many spheres. The system, as a rule, is in a state of quasi-stable equilibrium with the environment, with the transformation from one state to another occurring cyclically and permanently through some limit states of the system. Primary sign of achievement of such states are internal reaction manifested in the form of protest. Opposition can look differently affecting cultural aspects as well. In this vein, protest literature appeared aimed at criticizing or destroying the source of problematic situation for the society. Nevertheless, we should note the versatility of the genre, which allows it to be interpreted differently. It is necessary to analyze what is meant by such literature and whether Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried belong to such a genre.

The Protest Literature

To begin with, the literary current of angry young men originated in England. This current included several authors who were similar in their style of describing English society, the realistic manner of depicting reality and characters. The key criterion that united the books into a separate genre was the presence of socio-political protest in the works. Later such literature was isolated into a separate genre, called the social novel. It should be pointed out that the social novel itself is a work with a social problem established by the author. In turn, the characters must necessarily be affected by an established theme, such as gender prejudice or social injustice. The theme does not always have to be broad, so it often boils down to a narrower issue, such as working conditions in a mine or child labor. So what emerges from such novels is a work that does not necessarily advocate, but emphasizes the obvious need for change. Because of this, such literature can be considered one of the mechanisms for protesting against existing realities.

Thus, protest literature is that which portrays social problems and injustice. And one of the founders of scientific sociology, Emile Durkheim, considered the main feature of social fact to be its coerciveness. If a person took off his hat to escape the heat, it is a fact of his personal biography; if he took it off to enter a church, that is, to obey a custom, a ritual, it is a social fact. Thus, in the liberal paradigm, only literature in which the hero struggles against the power of the state or custom can be called social literature. All other literature deals only with the private lives of private individuals. Therefore, in a liberal society where only the law rules, social literature will sooner or later have to focus on the conflicts of personality and law, and of personality and war. This is largely what happens in Hollywood productions: the noble gangster wanders from film to film.

Criteria for Protest Literature

Although protest novels may differ greatly from one another, at the very least by the problem in question, it is worth identifying certain criteria for such literature. In the first place, the main criterion is the presence of a struggle, one state against another, an interclass race or interpersonal conflict. This is explained by the fact that it is only through a harsh and complex environment that the shortcomings of the system being criticized become maximally evident. From this follows a second criterion, namely the presence of criticism or realism in the book. This implies that the main problems of the novel are presented by the writer in a harsh and realistic manner, but in a more grayish tone.

Since the aim of such literature is considered not to draw the public’s attention to the problem, but to show the conflict from the worst side at once, these tools are essential. Finally, another main criterion is the presence of a sociopolitical agenda. Most often the acute issues of society are addressed, but nevertheless other aspects of life, such as war, religion or self-knowledge may also be touched upon. In any case, the work is an active or passive critique of an established problem, putting it in a worse, but real, light. Authors of works may try to arouse different feelings in readers from pity to anger, the main goal is considered to be the creation of sufficiently strong emotions. In turn, such feelings should help to change humanity’s opinion about a particular sphere, which is considered one of the ways to solve the analyzed problem. There is a direct correlation between strong negative or sad emotions and condemnation, so such novels can be considered an effective means of protest.

Analysis of Novels

In order to understand more deeply the essence and methods of social novels, it is necessary to analyze two works to determine whether they belong to this genre. The first book is Slaughterhouse-five, which has an anti-war character. The novel Slaughterhouse-five, or the Children’s Crusade is a milestone work for Vonnegut, primarily because it represents his creative autobiography. The space of the novel is a detailed symbol of the artistic consciousness of the writer himself, who is trying to make sense of himself. And it’s not only because in “The Boyne” the figure of a reflecting author appears as a character in his own right; we can also see the hidden image of the writer himself in the other characters. Discussing the vicissitudes of Billy Pilgrim, Kilgore Trout, Roland Viry and Edgar Darby, Vonnegut is really just talking about how he became a true artist and learned to write. In this way, the ethical pathos of the novel, its external eventuality, and its poetics are tied together by the author into a coherent whole.

Vonnegut, however, clearly shows that war is an inevitable and important product of the mind. Reason places man above the world, forcing the individual to regard himself as the supreme goal of evolution. This provides the right to power over the world, the right to reshape it according to one’s own purposes. In this case, reality is subjected to violence, “The body of the world cannot fit into the Procrustean bed of human ideas and concepts, so it is subjected to torture, to violent dismemberment” (Vonnegut 62). He who starts a war, always aims to throw a scheme on the world, identifying the main thing for himself and destroying everything unnecessary that does not fit the project.

War as a realized project of reason demonstrates the absurdity of reality, the incoherence of its components. The conception of war, claiming to return order, meaning, and truth to reality, leads to the opposite: chaos is brought to the surface and the original foreignness is revealed. The author offers possible variants of the ideological justification of the need for military operations – attempts to present the Dresden massacre as an event that restored meaning to the world. But all we see before us is an attempt to regain lost power over the world. The sense of life denies any hierarchy, recognizing the equivalence of each phenomenon.

The book opens with a story about the author himself, about his postwar prosperous life. This story takes a short first chapter and precedes the main narrative. Vonnegut writes directly how long he went to his “main”, as he calls it, the book – about the war and the bombing of Dresden, how he hatched plans, but could not write it until he was “old”. The end of this chapter is very important for understanding the intent of the novel as a whole and the author’s attitude to the events described. Vonnegut reproduces the Biblical story of the destruction of the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah: “But she looked back, which is why I love her, because it was so human. And she turned into a pillar of salt” (Vonnegut 70). And further through the discharge: “Now I’ve finished my war book. The next book will be very funny. And this book failed because it was written by a pillar of salt” (Vonnegut 130). What follows is the main narrative, in which the author himself appears only two or three times as an episodic character.

The main character is Vonnegut’s peer Billy Pilgrim, who, as a result of the shock of the war, begins to travel through time, and, after a plane crash in peacetime, begins in addition to visit the remote planet of Tralfamador. Such a state of the hero can be rationally motivated by his mental disorder, the influence of immoderate reading of science fiction novels. It can also be accepted as a conditional sci-fi reality. Most likely, however, it is both, and a third, and also a philosophical allegory. In terms of the poetics of the novel, it is a metaphor that organizes its artistic construction.

As Billy jerks from one period of his life to another, the action unfolds in several time strata at once. Separate fragments of different temporal realities and “Tralfamadorian” episodes are mounted together and shed additional light on each other. The reader unwittingly begins to compare America of the mid-sixties with its disgrace – Vietnam, the Dresden disaster and the dystopian Tralfamador with its wise and happy inhabitants of their sanity, who simply do not take into account the living human life, indeed full of mistakes and errors.

At the same time, the simultaneity of the existence of the hero’s entire life experience allows Vonnegut to abandon the chronological and plot sequence and highlight in this experience the main thing to which Billy Pilgrim returns again and again. And again and again he returns to World War II, which he got into as a boy of twenty-one (as does the author), and especially often to the most terrible and also completely incomprehensible, as unnecessary, bombing by Allied forces of Dresden, a city with no strategic or defense facilities (Wicks 330). It happened on February 13, 1945, when the war was already at an end. The city was practically wiped off the face of the earth; over 130 thousand civilians were killed.

So the word “massacre” in the title refers to Dresden, to the war in general, not only to Slaughterhouse-Five where American prisoner of war Vonnegut worked underground in the freezing chamber which saved his life. The second part of the title emphasizes the very terrible moral aspect of what was going on: on both sides the war was fought by the hands of children-Billy, who was twenty-one. Other characters are eighteen-year-old Ronald Vieri, who died of gangrene, a lovely angelic fifteen-year-old German soldier boy, and other “babies,” as one character, a captive English colonel, calls them. “When I saw those faces,” he says, “I was shocked. My God, I thought. – This is a children’s crusade!” (Vonnegut 30). That’s what Vonnegut, not just the fictional Billy Pilgrim, experienced and understood, wanted to tell us about in his fantasy novel, with the strange, at first glance, but figuratively accurate title Slaughterhouse No. 5, or The Children’s Crusade.

The novel uses an unusual and composite time that includes both the past and certain elements of the present. In this way, the main character’s consciousness is built on a constant journey through consciousness, where it is difficult to distinguish between memories and what is happening now. These temporal plans combine in Billy’s consciousness through associations. For example, in 1967, Billy goes to breakfast at the club through a neighborhood that was burned down in the Negro riots. It is important to note that the work is built on metaphors: “Look! Billy Pilgrim has passed out of time.” This metaphor unfolds consistently as the action progresses. Billy “travels” through different periods of his life and memories. The important point here is that his travels are uncontrolled, so the novel’s script is extremely inconsistent, jumping to different points in time (Brown 103). The reader is confronted with the juxtaposition of the past, present, and future arising in Billy’s memory. The connection between all sorts of places, from nonexistent planets to Dresden itself, shows the character’s mental instability. Moreover, embedded in this type of narrative is the idea of a skeptical rationalism that presents itself to the reader in absolutes.

In addition, there is a noticeable mental change in the protagonist. He has turned into a violent and resigned man who believes that war is the way out. In the hero’s memoirs, the team looks like it’s making its way through “lunar surface” of what used to be a large city a few hours ago. “Only one thing was clear: the entire population of the city, without exception, was supposed to be wiped out, and anyone who dared to stay alive was spoiling the cause” (Vonnegut 59). Among other things, the hero analyzes the planes emerging in the sky, producing the destruction of everything on the ground, but his reaction is absurd: “It was all designed to end the war sooner” (Vonnegut 62). The same fate affects the rest of the American soldiers, with whom it has become impossible to talk about the war – “this bombing didn’t seem like something outstanding at all.” The fictional planet of Tralfamador is terrifying in its utter callousness (Barrows 393). The secret of Tralfamadorians is very simple: There is a direct correlation between insensibility and peace, and in order to experience any satisfaction one must give up humanity. This idea sits tightly in the mind of the hero, which clearly demonstrates the rigidity and pernicious effect of military action on the average man.

For the Tralfamadorians, time is a purely physical concept. It is as devoid of all human reality as the chain of peaks of a mountain range: a moment follows a moment, as a peak is replaced by a peak, and man is simply frozen “in the amber of this moment” (like an insect). It makes no sense to teach good and confront evil (Barrows 395). Every moment in time has a definite structure and no one can change it. So it is pointless to try to stop a test pilot from pushing a button and thereby blowing up a galaxy. “No beginning, no end, no plot tension, no morality, no cause and effect” is a characteristic of the novels read on Tralfamador (Vonnegut 89). This characteristic also applies to life itself on a planet where technocratic rationality has won the ultimate victory.

Thus, through the protagonist and the reference to mental disorders and syndromes received by soldiers because of the war, a protest is expressed. Its essence is that war does not show winners or losers. The main problem is that all soldiers of any country are people who have their own destinies and lives, often healthy (Brown 103). But warfare affects everyone negatively, even the victors, by burdening them with mental disabilities. In this sense, the protest goes against the war, which gives mankind only losses, without perceiving any heroism or worldview.

The Things They Carried, a collection of short stories by the American writer Tim O’Brien, published in 1990, solves several difficult creative problems. It builds a coherent narrative about the Vietnam War and its participants that combines documentary and fiction – while insisting that they are inextricably linked (Buchanan 637). O’Brien’s characters (and among them himself) find themselves at the center of a horror that is created solely from an inability to question the “heroic ideals” of army service.

The book literally screams that war is filthy at its maximum. At the same time, it is presented both as mud, clay and streams of earth, and as spiritual mud – in the form of contrived bravado, attempts to ironize and laugh at death, withering of feelings and exasperation. All of the characters in the book carried something personal with them – whether it was a picture of someone dear to my heart, a Bible, or a girl’s stockings. The idea is that no one was helped by this value to leave a person. Personal possessions, almost weightless, are a fragile bridge between the reality of war surrounding yesterday’s children. More than once or twice the novel emphasizes their unreality and, therefore, their importance.

The content suggests that the numerous fighters are, in fact, weak people and will not face what they need, in case it affects them, all showing signs of quitting smoking. Examining O’Brien’s character, one finds both fearlessness and weakness in his journey. At first it is seen that O’Brien portrays valor; if his project sees that he would not want to go to war, it would be wrong, “I was too good for this war. It couldn’t have been. I was above it” (O’Brien 39). His departure for Canada demonstrated that he had courage as he stood firmly against the war and did his best to maintain a strategic distance from it, especially when everyone else did the opposite.

Thus, the book also stands in the genre of anti-war literature. Although the war is portrayed in a slightly different way than in the previous example, the main aim of the work is still to criticize the war effort (O’Brien 13). Again we touch on the psychological aspect of the soldiers, and it is expressed even more vividly. Here the author is not trying to tell the reader that the soldiers are people, he makes it sound like an axiom. Meanwhile, the emphasis is on the fact that war makes a man a cruel and immoral creature. Again, this idea leads to the idea that war does not recognize winners or benefits, but only brings destruction, above all psychological destruction (Jarraway 700). Thus, for example, O’Brien shows the valuable things for each hero that they brought with them as part of their memory or what allows them to retain their former personality. At the same time, such values are powerless against the harshness and relentlessness of war and the reader sees that people invariably change in a negative direction.

Finally, a separate key to both works is a serious critique of the institution of heroism. In the first work, the writer notes that heroism in general is a vague notion, and each individual interprets it in his own way. And, as a rule, what is brave and heroic for one person is absurd for another. In the second work, there is a conflict between heroism and compassion, humanity. The author draws a parallel between how one tries to preserve the goodness and sense of nobility and how cruelty and bloodthirstiness are justified by bravery.

One striking example of moral failure is characterized by the story The Things They Carried. Love appears to be a very pure, carefree and high-minded feeling that should motivate many soldiers, but a change is taking place. Very soon such reflections cease to be acute as the modernization to the hard side begins. In such a truth, unrequited emotion or acceptance of ordinary love leaves men dependent on love unresolved and invalid, searching for meaning (Jarraway 700). The first mention of love is in The Things They Carried, when Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’s intense infatuation with Martha is revealed (Genzale 509.) His attitude seems innocent enough as he wants Martha to love him as he loved her.

The situation of the hero’s relentless desire to spend the night with the girl against her will most vividly and climactically describes the demonization of personality. The man has an unhealthy excitement, which is noticeable even from the structure of the letter, reinforced by a number of lapses. If we analyze wartime, the act is not akin to being scary or dangerous, but from a moral and human point of view it remains atrocious. It is at this point that one senses the complete loss of human feelings by the individual, his pre-talent and withdrawal from the love that in the beginning was all.

Conclusion

As a result of the analysis of the genre of protest literature, it becomes clear that it is an extremely effective tool for changing the worldview in society. The social novel appears in the nineteenth century with a specific genre content. Inherent in the novel as a whole, the desire to present the private fate as a product of public life determines the interest in social problems. Genre specificity of the social novel in all its aspects is a product of the New Age. First of all, the problematics is connected with the development of the civilization of industrial capitalism. Second, type of thinking forces us to look for cause-and-effect connections in the relations of man and society, the regularities of social development and to assume a positive progressive movement of history. The priority of scientific knowledge in the dynamic social development predetermines the special place of intellectuals in the life of society. A negative consequence of the “end of history” is the loss of the future. The traditional understanding of history, which takes into account the lessons of the past and builds the perspective of movement, is irreversibly disappearing.

The examples of the works analyzed show that war leads to the transformation of the individual and his detachment from the human past. One way or another, the individual changes for the worse as a result of the psychological burden. In the end, man surrenders and modernizes into a rigid insensitive being. The point of this is to draw attention to the fact that war brings sacrifice not only on the battlefield, and destruction not only in material terms. Humanity never gains from aggression, but only loses people. The soldier’s duty, patriotism, and heroism turn out to be nothing but dangerous delusions. The man at war is first of all a violent body, involved in the absurd reality of war, he is deromanticized and deprived of a heroic halo.

Works Cited

Barrows, Adams. “Spastic in time: Time and Disability in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.”Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 12 no. 4, 2018, pp. 391–405. Project MUSE.

Brown, Kevin. “The Psychiatrists Were Right: Anomic Alienation in Kurt Vonnegut’sSlaughterhouse-Five.” South Central Review, vol. 28, no. 2, 2011, pp. 101–109. Project MUSE, doi: 10.1353/scr.2011.0022.

Buchanan, David. “Reporting Is Not a Holy Word: Tim O’Brien’s Edits in If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home and The Things They Carried.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 65, no. 4, 2019, pp. 618–642. Project MUSE, doi: 10.1353/mfs.2019.0047.

Genzale, Ann M. “Joining the Past to the Future: The Autobiographical Self in The Things They Carried.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 40, no. 2, 2016, pp. 495-510. Project MUSE, doi: 10.1353/phl.2016.0033.

Jarraway, David. “Excremental Assault in Tim O’Brien: Trauma and Recovery in Vietnam War Literature.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 44, no. 3, 1998, pp. 695–711. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/mfs.1998.0063.

O’Brien, Tim. (2009). The Things They Carried. Hounghton Miffin Harcourt.

Vonnegut, Kurt. (2009). Slaughterhouse-Five. Random House Publishing Group.

Wicks, Amanda. “All This Happened, More or Less: The Science Fiction of Trauma in Slaughterhouse-Five.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2014, pp. 329 –340. EBSCOhost, doi: 10.1080/00111619.2013.783786.

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