Characterizing War

Is there a way to understand the horrors of war? Is there a justification to any war?
The readers of Chapter 8 of Slaughterhouse Five are shown Kurt Vonnegut’s views on war and its destructive characteristics. As Edgar Derby states, “Mere are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after an, is that people are discouraged from being characters.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 58) It’s not only the casualties of the actual act of war but the huge repercussion it has on the specific communities and individuals who suffer it. This can be seen in the vast quantities of war veterans which have to be treated after the war because they just don’t know who they are and what they want to do anymore. Their appetite for life is gone and they have no way of returning to who they once were before the war. War not only kills people it kills the souls of the living. They are too devastated by the lead boots they have to drag through their lives, the memories of destruction and indescribable horror and pain.

At his eighteenth wedding anniversary, Billy Pilgrim is astoundingly affected (gets pale, has to sit down and finally leaves to his room) by a quartet which was playing at his party. “Billy thought hard about the effect the quartet had had on him, and then found an association with an experience he had had long ago.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 63) This is extremely significant in proving Vonnegut right about the effects war has on veterans. Being the eighteenth anniversary means that the relationship between Billy and his wife is of age and has become another problem in Billy’s life. This quartet in his wedding anniversary is connected to four guards back in Dresden, a story he narrates to Montana in Tralfamadore. “He told Montana about the four guards who, in their astonishment and grief, resembled a barber-shop quartet.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 63) These four German guards, are the first one’s to emerge from the room under the Slaughterhouse and see the destruction of Dresden. It is incredible how a simple event in such a traumatic situation can mean so much for so long. It vividly shows that no one is immune from the disaster, the guards, the prisoners, those who win, those who loose. All are victims of the insanity of war. If this seemingly minor event means so much to Billy, what would a devastating memory such as the assassination of his friends do to him? One wonders what other events will soon be uncovered to show us more complexities of Billy’s intricate and traumatized inner landscape and Vonnegut’s mind?