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

where [we] . . . have to go" (Slaughterhouse-Five

, p. 18). But what of the child-soldiers who survive the massacre? When the Americans and their guards did come out [next noontime after the Dresden fire storm], the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead. {Slaughterhouse-Five, p. 153). What do you say after a massacre? "Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?" {Slaughterhouse-Five, p. 17). If the slaughterhouse itself, from which the novel takes its title, was once a house of death, it became, paradoxically during the inferno of the Dresden fire-bombing, a house of salvation when it gave oxygen to its occupants rather than to the fire storm. Similarly, while Vonnegut's novel is, in part, an account of the worst massacre of unarmed civilians in modern Europe, it is also a plea for a change in values and attitudes which would make other such massacres impossible. One way he accomplishes this mission is by playing the role of the messenger to Job and making the massacre itself public knowledge. The novel thrusts back into living memory in a way that cannot be ignored, a portion of American history which had never officially been acknowledged, and which had been either inadvertently or deliberately concealed. According to Vonnegut in the "twenty-seven-volume Official History of the Army Air Force in World War Two . . . there was almost nothing . . . about the Dresden raid, even though it had been such a howling success. The extent of the success had been kept a secret for many years after the war

—a secret from the American people" {Slaughterhouse-Five, p. 165). In the pre-Slaughterhouse-Five novels, the bitterest satire occurs in another novel of even worse destruction Cafs Cradle where the purpose of human beings, to love whoever is around to love, is completely thwarted. On 84