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

Vonnegut thus accepts the mystery of human suffering and the presence of evil in the world for which there is not now nor can there ever be a fully satisfactory human explanation. Like Job before them, characters in Vonnegut's fiction ask, "Why me?" And like Job they hear only an echo, "Why not you?" By accepting both motivated or unmotivated suffering as integral to human experience Vonnegut becomes free in the novels after Slaughterhouse-Five to satirize particular evils in the modern world rather than continuing to wrestle with the question of the nature and power of evil itself. Galápagos (1982), his eleventh novel, for example, makes brilliantly, satirically clear what many of his other novels along with a Kilgore Trout short story, 'The Planet Gobblers" {Palm Sunday, p. 209), had only implied: human beings are a danger to the planet, and if they are not controlled in some way, they will destroy all forms of life. Slaughterhouse-Five itself, however, reflects William Butler Yeats's belief that: "a poet writes out of his personal life [and] in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be . . . ." Vonnegut writes out of the "tragedy" he personally experienced which raised acutely the profound moral issues with which he has had to wrestle as an adult human being and as a writer. He says that Slaughterhouse-Five results from his "duty dance with death" without which, he adds quoting Celine, "no art is possible" {SlaughterhouseFive, p. 18). Perhaps the rigors of this duty dance help account for the difficulties he encountered in writing this novel as well as the relief he experienced in completing it: "I felt," he says, "after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn't have to write at all anymore if I didn't want to. It was the end of some sort of career."

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2 After wrestling with some of the most profound and some of the most difficult human questions in SlaughterhouseFive, Vonnegut promised himself: 'The next one I write is going to be fun" {Slaughterhouse-Five, p. 19), which proved true in the wild comedy of Breakfast of Champions (1973). It would be almost twenty years after the completion of Slaughterhouse-Five before Vonnegut would return to the Jobian issues raised for him 1

2 Wampeters, Foma & Granfaloons (New York: Dell Publishing, 1976), p. 280. 87