In chapter one, the "author" or character of the author, has a conversation with Mary O'Hare about how he should portray those who fought. Mary tells him:
"You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And War will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs." (18)
Mary is thinking about who fights war, who leaves home and puts their life on the line. And I think that is an important question Vonnegut is trying to raise about all wars.
I think it is likely that he is thinking about the Vietnam War in his mind, because it was going on as he wrote the novel. The Vietnam War was fought by generally younger men than those who fought in WWII. People disagree about the average age of a Vietnam soldier, but it appears to be somewhere between 19-22.
One of the things that many interviewees in our counterculture oral history project mentioned is that they didn't know anything other than John Wayne. It was an accepted idea that if America was in a war, the young men went and served just like their fathers had in WWII. Or it was until the anti-Vietnam movement took off.
One of the interviewees, Joseph Miller, who served during the war, said:
I think perhaps this is what Vonnegut is trying to do with his novel. He wants to put out a war novel that isn't about John Wayne, that doesn't paint pictures of heroism and glory without showing the real cost and pain of war.We didn’t know anything about war, really, it was all movies, it was all John Wayne. Nobody really bled, nobody really got hurt.
I really agree with what he is trying to do. My friend's brother and his best friend have both joined the National Guard, and I hear they are planning to go active in the army (meaning they could be sent overseas) when they graduate from college. They want to make a career in the military. My cousin is also going to school to be a pilot in the air force. I worry about them because I'm not sure if they know what war is like, that they are as likely to come back in a casket or with PTSD than as a hero whose name will be in the history books. I think they may be more like children, more like Billy Pilgrim, than they see themselves as.
So maybe writing an anti-war novel is kind of like writing an anti-glacier novel. But at least Vonnegut is trying to show young people the other side of the movies.
2 comments:
I recently got back in contact with someone I used to be really close friends with and had a similar experience finding out that she was trying to decide if she wanted to join the army. In talking to her I realized that she had no idea what she was getting herself into. I do think that in a non-draft era, an anti-war novel isn't as futile.
In addition to war movies (and, to a lesser extent, novels), in today's world we should include video games and military recruitment (which sometimes involves sponsoring video-game tournaments and such as tie-ins) in the list of the kinds of messages Mary O'Hare is talking about. Especially the commercials for recruitment these days: less of an Uncle Sam, duty-for-nation approach and more of a "awesome! night vision goggles!" approach. The military goes to great lengths to make it seem *fun*, and fiction and film have played a role in this.
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