Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)

STUDIES - Donald E. Morse: 'Why Not You?": Kurt Vonncgufs Debt to The Book of Job

of being turned into a pillar of salt, Vonnegut, too, "because it was so human" looked back at the conflagration of Dresden.

2 Further, he insists that, as in the case of god's destruction of "the cities of the plain," the human destruction of Dresden in all its horror was done in the name of the best of causes: the overcoming of evil. Looking back Vonnegut raises anew Job's questions: "Why do the innocent suffer?" "Why do the evil prosper?" The answers Job heard finally from out of the whirlwind puzzled him for they explained nothing. God's words implied that a person's goodness does not guarantee that he or she will escape evil nor that he or she is incapable of doing evil. Job's expectation, that evil would not be visited upon a good or an innocent person, was as ill-founded as the modern American belief in the end justifying the means and, therefore, no evil will be committed in a good cause; such as the defeat of Hitler, Japan, or Iraq. Vonnegut demurs suggesting that the destruction of the innocent was as common during the second world war as it was when Job bewailed his fate. For much of his career as a writer and for half his career as a novelist, Vonnegut wrestled with the attendant Jobian issue of why he personally survived while one hundred-thirty-five thousand people died during the Dresden fire storm in which "the city appeared to boil" (Palm Sunday,

; p. 302). Returning home after being repatriated as a prisoner of war he discovered that although he could share interesting stories of the war and the camaraderie he experienced, again and again he failed to find the right words or theme through which to describe the massacre, its aftermath, or its meaning

—if any. Unable to accept passively the destruction, he asked the survivor's questions, "Why was I allowed to survive when so many innocent, good people perished?" "How could this terrible destruction have been allowed to happen?" "How could human beings do such awful things to one another?" In novel after novel Vonnegut tried to deal with these difficult questions either directly or indirectly. In The Sirens of Titan (1959), for 2 Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Dell Publishing, 1969), p. 19. All quotations are to this edition, since the various paperback reprints, although more readily available, use different pagination. 76