Vonnegut and Sebald
In both texts the disintegration of narrativization triggers the dissolution of self, because the self is contingent on narrativizing memories. In Slaughterhouse-Five there are at least three Kurt Vonneguts. First, there are repeated authorial self- insertions ‘[they] were being marched into the ruins by the guards. I was there’. 8 Second, there is his literary alter-ego science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout. Third, the highly privileged narration indicates Vonnegut is vicariously processing his experience through Pilgrim. Vonnegut shows that massacre has fragmented his identity between author, ordinary man, and still-traumatized veteran. In each role he must deny parts of himself. Despite its apparent first-person voice, there is much uncertainty about the consistency of the self in The Rings of Saturn . The opening sequence appears to be Sebald writing in hospital. The speaker attempts to recall remembrances past but appears as a blank slate onto which history embosses itself rather than a distinct personality. The extent of intertextuality, direct and paraphrased, confounds the reader as to whether they are hearing an authentic voice, or whether the sense of a speaker is an illusory conduit to convey the past. In the Southwold beach sequence, the speaker drifts between lyrical description and allusion to Thomas Browne: ‘I sensed quite clearly the earth’s slow turning into the dark… the shadow of night is drawn like a black veil across the earth’. 9 The speaker’s ‘authentic’ perspective and the textual allusion intermingle, highlighting that the self is a product of history. The more defined self in Slaughterhouse-Five better suits Vonnegut’s personal reckoning with Dresden. Sebald, through his ill-defined speaker, captures the complexity of the historical causation that carried 1940s Europe into the abyss. While his ultimate theme is entropy itself, the Holocaust and German firestorms are most prominent in this wider picture . Thus, Sebald expresses a profound struggle to narrativize history as, except briefly through reported speech in the Somerleyton and Berlin childhood sequences, he avoids his subject’s crucial evidence, creating the sense of the unspeakable past haunting the text. The clearest symptom of destruction wrecking narrativization is narrative unreliability. Sebald’s tangents, while containing fascinating accuracies, are routinely undercut by subtle inaccuracies highlighting memory’s fallibility. For example, the claim that ‘ until about the 1890s what was known as Eccles Church Tower still stood on Dunwich beach’ 10 is false, yet there was such a tower in Norfolk. The adverb ‘about’ modifies the precise temporal reference ‘the 1890s’, subtly blurring fact and fiction. Vonnegut creates narrative unreliability by suggesting naturalistic reasons for Pilgrim’s experience. He appears awaking after time travelling, ‘Billy dozed, awakened in the prison hospital again’. 11 Both writers undermine the reader’s sense that they stand on anyt hing but shifting sands, mirroring the limbo caused by narrativization deteriorating. The greatest difference in the writers’ approaches is tone. The abiding tone of Vonnegut’s speaker is absurd and comedic, responding to death with the deadpan refrain ‘so it goes’ and resorting to slapstick in describing Pilgrim’s relentless personal tragedies. Contrastingly, Sebald maintains a solemn elegiac tone, depicting an anxious mind consumed by entropy. Vonnegut, dealing with a single catastrophe,
8 Vonnegut 1969: 175. 9 Sebald 1995: 78. 10 Sebald 1995: 156.
11 Vonnegut 1969: 113.
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