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

for unmotivated human suffering he looks to the accidental nature of life. Some of this reasoning is already familiar from The Sirens of Titan where the Space Traveler maintains that "I was the victim of a series of accidents. ... As are we all." There is an important difference between the novels, however, for in The Sirens of Titan the accidents are caused by visitors from Tralfamadore who manipulated all human history for their own ends. Worse, as Salo their messenger, points out, these visitors are not even human beings or sentient creatures, but are machines. In Slaughterhouse-Five, on the other hand, there appears no purpose whatsoever in human history nor is anything or anyone in control. Rather than continue to wrestle with the issue of "purpose" or lack of it, Vonnegut replaces the question, "Why me?" with its twin to which there is no answer, "Why not you?" Exactly the same pair of questions were posed in the conclusion of the Book of Job first by Elihu then by God as each asks Job in turn: Why did you expect that your goodness would give you immunity from the effects of evil or from accidents of nature? Human beings do not enjoy such immunity. Good people suffer and bad people suffer

—"the rain falls on the just and the unjust." Suffering, by itself, is no measure either of a person's evil

—as Job's three friends mistakenly maintain

—nor of a person's goodness

—as Job had assumed. Suffering simply is a part of this world and all human experience, and as Vonnegut suggests through his choice of epigraph from Martin Luther's Christmas carol "Away in the Manger": suffering is part of the human not the divine condition and no divine force will interveen in human history to modify much less to stop it: the little Lord Jesus No crying He makes. Informing Vonnegufs novel, therefore, is what might be called a fairly orthodox form of Judeo-Christian theology which nevertheless has often proven too challenging for some narrow-minded American school boards and other official bodies who, like Job's three friends, hold a simpler, safer view of human beings and their relation to the deity. Such people have many times attempted to ban, censor, or otherwise destroy the novel. Once, at 81