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

John Wayne, riding into the sunset to save Western civilization from the Fascists nor Jesus preaching the necessity of "doing good to those who do evil to you." Instead he is a young soldier in war and a child in peace who illustrates Celine's observation

—quoted with approval by Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five

—that: "When not actually killing, your soldier's a child." The child is, of course, not morally responsible as an adult would be. Someone else besides the child-soldier must be in charge and that person or persons can be held morally accountable for what happens. Vonnegut extends Celine's identification of soldiers as children through the novel's subtitle Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade which in turn links the great war to end all wars with one of the most futile, exploitive, cynical events in all of western European history: the Children's Crusade

—a crusade that never went anywhere and never accomplished anything, except to provide ample prey for all kinds of human vultures to feed upon. In Slaughterhouse-Five the soldiers in World War II, like the children on their crusade, have little or no idea about what they are doing and often do not know even where they are. It was the generals who planned such glorious operations as the destruction of Dresden (see, for example, SlaughterhouseFive, pp. 161-62).

9 The reduction of a monument of human civilization, such as the lovely city on the Elbe, to a pile of rubble overnight or the metamorphosis of hundreds-of-thousands of unarmed people into a "corpse factory" can, and, indeed, has happened in a world where "everything is permitted." In such a world, says Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, the issue is not whether to believe in God or not, but the sheer overwhelming horror of the power of evil. Yet, as Eliot Rosewater, who also "found life meaningless, partly because of what [hel ... had seen in war," says to Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five

: "everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov

. ... 'But that isn't enough any more' . . ." (p. 87). Perhaps all anyone can do is to follow Theodore Roethke's advice, which Vonnegut quotes with approval, to "learn by going 9 Vonnegut may also be echoing the title of General Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous account of World War II Crusade in Europe. 83