The American Century: Literature since 1945 569For Mailer himself, the American history that mattered for him personally began
with World War II. That war inspired a powerful vein of fiction. Some of it was
written in what Gore Vidal (1925–), commenting on his own war story Williwaw
(1946), called “the national manner ... a simple calculated style.” Apart from
Williwaw, such novels included From Here to Eternity (1951), a grimly realistic story
of army life in Hawaii on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor, by James Jones
(1921–1977), and The Gallery (1947) by John Horne Burns (1916–1953). But Vidal
himself, as his remark suggests, did not remain long within the constraint of realist
simplicity. His later work shows him using a mixture of realism and satire, sardonic
comment and acerbic wit, sometimes surreal fantasy and always irony, to explore
such disparate subjects as homosexuality (The City and the Pillar (1948)), politics
ancient (Julian (1964), Creation (1981)) or modern (Washington DC (1967),
Hollywood (1990)) or both (Two Sisters (1970), Live from Golgotha (1992)),
transsexuality and the media (Myra Breckinridge (1968), Myron (1974)), and the
heroes and villains of American life and society (Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln
(1984)). And two of the most notable novels to come out of the war exploited the
techniques of the absurd to capture the bleak, bitter absurdities of that conflict:
Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller (1923–1999) and Slaughterhouse-Five; or
The Children’s Crusade (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007). Catch-22 shows its
protagonist, Yossarian, as the victim of mad, conspiratorial military and political
systems, caught in a closed system (the military, the war machine, society) his simple
desire to escape from which proves his sanity and so his fitness to go on serving it.
And Slaughterhouse-Five circulates around the firebombing of Dresden, which as a
prisoner of war Vonnegut had witnessed. The Heller novel uses a disjointed narrative
technique, nightmare sequences, and bleak humor to depict a world gone crazy.
The Vonnegut novel goes further. Mixing science fiction with satire, comedy with a
bleak determinism, it shows its protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, inhabiting zones of time
and space. Haunted by a punitive air raid that burned to death more people than died
at Hiroshima, Billy plods through dull middle age in suburban America while
simultaneously alive and comfortable on the distant planet of Tralfamadore. The
time-warp technique allows Vonnegut simultaneously to offer ironic commentary
on our inhumanity and the opportunity for destruction provided by twentieth-
century technology, to satirize middle America and the bourgeois standards of
suburbia, and to explore human inconsequence and impotence. “Among the things
Billy Pilgrim could not change,” the reader is told, “were the past, the present, and
the future.” Vonnegut has written many other fictions that move between satirical
humor and surreal fantasy, among them Player Piano (1952), The Sirens of Titan
(1959), Cat’s Cradle (1963), Breakfast of Champions (1973), Bluebeard (1987), and
Timequake (1997). Heller also wrote several other novels, including Something
Happened (1974) and a sequel to Catch-22, Closing Time (1994). Neither of them,
however, equaled their absurd comedies set in and around the nightmare of war.
In Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five, human beings grapple to find meaning in the
meaningless, and fail; and the conflicts that haunt them defy both reason and
morality – they seem illogical as well as obscene.GGray_c05.indd 569ray_c 05 .indd 569 8 8/1/2011 7:31:31 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 31 PM