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

by World War II, and in Bluebeard (1987) present a picture of the end of the war in Europe as a field crowded with people: the lunatics, the refugees, the war prisoners, the concentration camp victims

—all the ragged remnants of an exhausted world, but more important: all survivors. These are living human beings, rather than the stacked corpses of the Hospital of Hope and Mercy in Cat's Cradle or the "corpse mine" found in the desolate Dresden landscape of Slaughterhouse-Five. But Bluebeard with its happy ending in praise of human creativity and community will appear only two decades later.

1

3 In Slaughterhouse-Five Vonnegut as the Jobian messenger having looked into the depths of the fire storm brings news of the disaster together with an incisive examination of the profound moral, social, and theological issues it raises

—issues which will remain central to all human experience: the question of the power of evil, the awareness of inhuman destruction, and the omnipresence of human suffering. Like the author of the Book of Job, he parries the most human of all questions "Why me?" with the unanswerable assertion "Why not you?" Like the editor of the Book of Job who hundreds of years after the book's composition tacked on the happy ending in which Job receives everything he lost back and more

—except for his children

—Vonnegut, too, adds the Tralfamadorian affirmation about all life in whatever form: "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt." A most fitting epitaph for Billy Pilgrim who "alone .. . escaped to tell you." 1

3 See my forthcoming essay, "'0 Happy Meat': Joy and Acceptance in Kurt Vonnegut's Galápagos and Bluebeard

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