In Slaughterhouse-Five, at the beginning of Chapter 3, Vonnegut completely un-glamorizes the German soldiers and their police dog. He strips off their intimidating appearances by giving the soldiers and dog a background. The effect reminded me of the scenes in war movies, where the American soldier tumbles into hand-to-hand combat with an enemy soldier.
The American soldier is clearly the protagonist of the movie. We get his background, see him with his squad mates, see his hopes and fears. In a battle he fires from a distance at the German soldiers who are clearly the antagonists of the movie. They look intimidating without faces in the background, running behind panzers, and their helmets are the only visible part of their head.
But when the American soldier runs into a German soldier and they start rolling around on the ground and their helmets come off, you see that the German soldier looks just like the American soldier; they both have fear in their eyes, and are both struggling for their own lives just to live to see the next day.
The American soldier is clearly the protagonist of the movie. We get his background, see him with his squad mates, see his hopes and fears. In a battle he fires from a distance at the German soldiers who are clearly the antagonists of the movie. They look intimidating without faces in the background, running behind panzers, and their helmets are the only visible part of their head.
But when the American soldier runs into a German soldier and they start rolling around on the ground and their helmets come off, you see that the German soldier looks just like the American soldier; they both have fear in their eyes, and are both struggling for their own lives just to live to see the next day.
I think Saving Private Ryan does a good job of un-glamorizing war (What Mary O'Hare fears that Vonnegut will do) by making each killing scene more personal, and making the German soldiers more human. The beginning of Chapter 3 does the same thing; shows us that the German soldiers are young and old, are farmers, and have a female dog, which is quite relatable to the American soldiers and to the readers. By drawing similarities between the enemy soldiers and the American soldiers, both Saving Private Ryan and Slaughterhouse-Five un-glamorize war.
War is one of those things that is so unforgivably cruel that it must be glamorized and hyped to be made acceptable. Seeing enemies we've built up in our minds with hate, actually suffer and show vulnerability definitely always has a striking effect.
ReplyDeleteIt seemed to me that the way Slaughterhouse-Five portrayed war was so radically different than the way other anti war books (or media) portrayed it simply because of how much less build up there is to scenes such as the scene where the five German soldiers show up with the dog. It puts a different spin on it when you know the basics of Slaughterhouse-Five and those of other anti war media are still the same though.
ReplyDeleteVonnegut, I'd say, doesn't merely "humanize" the "enemy" (although this is a big part of the effect of meeting these "soldiers")--he depicts them as "caught up in enormous forces" just as much as Billy and his crew are. Their presence in the war, too, is absurd--they were until recently farmers, and none of them is of typical draft age. But even draft age is revealed to be staggeringly *young* by Vonnegut--Billy is drafted, and he's just a "baby."
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