Slaughterhouse-Five Expanded Universe

For this post, I figured it might be fun to talk about Slaughterhouse-Five in relation to other Kurt Vonnegut novels. It turns out that a good number of characters in Slaughterhouse-Five are reused in other Vonnegut books either as minor characters or full-blown protagonists. Having read some of these books, I'd like to compare some characters and how they're depicted in their respective novels compared to Slaughterhouse-Five in an attempt to explore the world of Vonnegut.

To be entirely clear, I'm not trying to make an overarching argument or anything here. I just thought it might be fun to talk about the Vonnegut expanded universe.

Kilgore Trout is far and away the most prolific character. Apparently based on Vonnegut's earlier friend Theodore Sturgeon (you can tell based on the last names), Kilgore Trout appears in a majority of Vonnegut's novels in some way, shape, or form. He's a catalyst for many characters, such as we see in Slaughterhouse-Five quite possibly inspiring Billy to start having encounters with Tralfamadore. In the novel Breakfast of Champions, the protagonist, Dwayne Hoover, believes a Trout novel to be real and goes crazy because of it. Vonnegut's later novel, Galápagos, is narrated by Kilgore Trout's son. Trout just ends up having some sort of impact in a lot of Vonnegut's long fiction. Is there a reason? I'm not entirely sure, but I get the sense that, despite working in science fiction, the effects of Trout end up being more real than in fantasy. It calls to question just what is believable with history, and how that doesn't always line up with what we choose to believe. In Dwayne Hoover's case, he fully believed in Trout's work and ended up going crazy. Billy Pilgrim's daughter, Barbara, thinks he's crazy because he likes Trout so much.

This goes even farther when we explore other characters, namely Eliot Rosewater, the man who shares a room with Billy when he self-commits himself in 1948. Eliot Rosewater is the main character of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, in which Eliot inherits a massive fortune, but a lawyer tries to convince the inheritance executors that Eliot is insane and incapable of using the money. I've read this, and I'd personally recommend it. Eliot travels around the country meeting firefighters and eventually settles down in an abandoned post office in Indiana, where he helps the residents find peace with their lives. In Slaughterhouse-Five, I'm of the opinion that Eliot is a bit more sane than in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. However, in both books, Eliot is a Kilgore Trout addict. Eliot centers on these strange obsessions with various things that normally leads him to engaging in extreme volunteerism. But the entire novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater grapples with the issues of what to believe about Eliot. Is he insane and should be put away? Or is he simply using his fortune to help everyone in the most altruistic manner possible? Helping people and reading Trout gives Eliot meaning in life, yet people want to take that meaning away from him and call him insane. Who are we supposed to believe?

While we're on the topic of people Billy meets in the hospital, let's talk about Bertrand Rumfoord, whom Billy meets while recovering from the airplane crash. Rumfoord is a self-important man, over-glorifying war and its great causes as necessary drivers to furthering humanity. What's weird about Rumfoord is where he appears in other Vonnegut works. He's a recurring character in more sci-fi short stories, and his biggest appearance is in the novel The Sirens of Titan, a giant space opera about battles with Mars and wave-traveling and, interestingly enough, Tralfamadorians. I can't even begin to describe the plot, but it's incredibly complicated and messy, but Rumfoord is the main character, existing as a "wave phenomena" that spirals throughout space, manifesting on planets whenever they intersect his spiral. If we apply the universe of The Sirens of Titan to the same universe as Slaughterhouse-Five, that means Rumfoord is temporarily manifesting on Earth and just happens to be in the same hospital room as Billy Pilgrim. Now unfortunately, I haven't read Sirens of Titan so I can't speak for Rumfoord's character in that compared to Slaughterhouse-Five, but the plots of the novel certainly makes it incredibly ridiculous and hard to believe what's actually happening. It's possible Rumfoord really is a space traveller, or maybe he's just hallucinating big-time.

The other character I need to touch on is Joseph Campbell, Jr., the American Nazi. Campbell is the protagonist of Vonnegut's novel Mother Night, which is structured as his memoirs while he's awaiting trial for committing crimes against humanity. It's a very interesting book, as it lays out Campbell's life in a way that is very different from the character Slaughterhouse-Five presents. Rather than being the self-centered, traitorous bastard that we get in Slaughterhouse-Five, in Mother Night, Campbell is an impassive man who became a Nazi via the United States government, where he is planted as a spy to relay secret messages through radio that he doesn't even understand the meanings to. Yet this is so secret that absolutely no one knows about it, and he takes all the fallout for being a traitor, never revealing that he is a spy. There's a certain sense of inevitability with him. In Slaughterhouse-Five, he talks about how inevitable it will be that the U.S. and USSR will turn on each other, so the POWs might as well get prepared for more conflict. Mother Night shows us Campbell's inner thoughts, as he struggles with realizing any point in his life when in the end, he will just be hanged or mysteriously rescued by the upper echelon of the government.

In general, we can see a lot of struggles for finding meaning in all of these characters, and even most of the other characters in Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy loses all sense of meaning and, to an extent, free will after becoming unstuck in time and knowing how everything will play out. Eliot Rosewater finds meaning by using his fortune to help the less fortunate, an act that is deemed insane by the rest of society. Rumfoord is a bit unclear due to lack of knowledge on my part, but I'd imagine that living throughout spacetime as a wave phenomena, it gets really hard to find real, human meaning. Joseph Campbell loses all meaning when forces out of his power control his life and then subject him to the opinions of the American masses. And then Kilgore Trout is the progenitor for a lot of this, using his novels to allow escapism for some characters, giving them ideas of how to cope with a loss of will to do anything. It's a lot to unpack that I really don't have the time or willpower to do now. But you know how it is.

So it goes.