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
he enjoys the nonhuman consolation of seeing time and events as God or as the Tralfamadorians see them: all at once. Equally fantastic is Billy's ability to escape suffering by viewing only those good moments in his life where "nothing hurt." But besides Billy's non-human perspective Vonnegut offers a more human, less Godlike one through the many references to Reinhold Neibuhr's prayer which Montana Wildhack carries in a locket about her neck. The prayer asks for help in viewing the human situation in light of each person's individual abilities to cope with suffering and loss: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom always to tell the difference. (Slaughterhouse-Five , p. 181). Familiar to many Americans as the prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous, Neibuhr's words describe the end point of Vonnegut's moral odyssey through his first six novels as, like Job, he moves from anger through disbelief to rebellion until finally coming to accept what is and what must be. Such a change in vision comes about through Vonnegut's acceptance in this novel of suffering's central place in human experience — suffering which may be as total as the fire-bombing of Dresden or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima or the destruction of all that Job held dear. Donald Shriver, writing about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the martyred Lutheran German pastor executed for his part in the plot to assassinate Hitler, describes the value of such acceptance: Suffering is the chief equalizer of human experience, and the authority of suffering . . . goes far on the way toward convincing us that there is such a thing as a "human community." Whatever the anthropologists tell us about human differences, a touch of suffering makes the whole world kin. 1 1 1 1 "Bonhoeffer Remembered," Union News (New York: September 1984), p. 2. 86
