Vonnegut's Humor

In my group’s panel presentation our article brought up the question of what Vonnegut actually meant with his humor. Our article claimed that the novel at face value presented two “antithetical” options: either Vonnegut’s humor was meant to inspire “political quietism” or it was meant to instill, with its lack of moral distinctions and constant irreverence towards literally everything, a need for both realism and actual meaningful societal change, in the reader. Our article also brought up evidence that Vonnegut himself seemed to fall, at least in his writing, more into the “fatalistic resignation” camp.





In class discussion, there was no real straight answer, which makes sense. The novel offers plenty of material to justify either idea. For a novel that’s anti-war, there doesn’t seem to be many efforts made to make the reader angry about war’s injustices or violence: instead, all moral weight is essentially erased. The narration of the novel treats the death of both champagne and 130,000 people in Dresden with the same degree of “so it goes” casual-ness. The tralfamadorian perspective on life and time, with its emphasis on “enjoying the good moments,” isn’t questioned: instead it is shown on some level to bring Billy Pilgrim peace with his life. No one in the novel seems to even be capable of being a hero or a villain: each character is only one of many “listless playthings of enormous forces.” When, like the noble but doomed Edgar Derby, to take a stand, it’s still meaningless in the end. Considering all of this together, the Tralfamadorian view on life doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.





In the opening of the novel, Vonnegut’s narration about his writing process seems to emphasize the futility and lack of success in his efforts to write an anti-war novel. He quotes his acquaintance Harrison Starr, who told him: “Why don’t you write an anti-glacier novel instead?” Vonnegut then follows it with, “What he meant, of course, is that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too. And even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.” With all of this taken into account, it seems reasonable to believe that Vonnegut’s purpose with the humor he uses might genuinely be to persuade the reader that nothing really does matter. The Tralfamadorians are right: so it goes.





The article we were reading says that, taken at face value, Vonnegut’s writing about his humor generally seems to advocate the fatalistic interpretation. However, it seems like maybe taking Vonnegut’s humor at face value misses the point of it entirely. The article claims that Vonnegut, by rejecting common facts and distinctions, forces the reader to realize the important of those facts and distinctions. I think that effect is prevalent throughout the novel. Beneath the overt nihilism of the narration’s “nothing matters!!” attitude, the real moral statement of the book is how it makes the reader want to disagree with that attitude. The apparent indifference to moral distinctions and the irreverence towards ideas that are normally of great importance is disorienting to the reader, but it seems like it kind of makes the reader think more about the importance of those ideas. In erasing moral weight it almost makes the moral weight even more strikingly apparent to the reader because it makes you think about it yourself.