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

the day the world ended, the question, "Who is left for me to love?" becomes as meaningless as a bird's call at the end of a massacre, "Poo-teeweet," and in its place is another terrible question: "How can I, in this now empty world, vfind some neat way to die, too'?" (Cat's Cradle, p. 190). Vonnegut, so clearly passionate about the sacredness of human life, thus comments trenchantly on human stupidity and folly. His view of humanity, however, culminates

—at least in his fiction through SlaughterhouseFive

—not in continued bitter reproaches nor in invective and threat, but in the serenity embodied in the Tralfamadorian total view of all time which eventually the hero of the novel, Billy Pilgrim, is able to share. Like the writer of the Book of Job, Vonnegut affirms the essential goodness of all creation: "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt"

—an appropriate Tralfamadorian epitaph for Billy Pilgrim or anyone else able to "come unstuck in time." Critics, such as Tony Tanner, negate this consolation, however, when they ignore or argue away the fantastic premise of the novel which is essential if Billy is to experience then adopt the Tralfamadorian view of time. Tanner asserts that: Billy Pilgrim . . . takes refuge in an intense fantasy life, which involves his being captured and sent to a remote planet .... He also comes "unstuck in time" and present moments during the war may either give way to an intense re-experiencing of moments from the past or unexpected hallucinations [sic] of life in the future.

1

0 Following such critics' reasoning, one might equally well suggest that Gregor Samsa only hallucinates becoming a cockroach in Kafka's "The Metamorphosis." But both Vonnegufs and Kafka's stories are fantastic, rather than realistic and neither hero is bound by the conventions of realistic fiction. Billy does not hallucinate; instead, as Vonnegut tells us repeatedly, he simply, if fantastically, comes unstuck in time and is, therefore, able to move in time forward as well as backward. In other words, 1

0 Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction, 1950—1970 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), p. 195. 85