Comparative Critical Studies 7, 1, pp. 83103 DOI: 10.

3366/E1744185409000962

BCLA 2010

Time, War and The Bhagavad Gita: A Rereading of Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse-Five
SUKHBIR SINGH

I suppose that the idea of preventing war on Earth is stupid, too. (Billy Pilgrim)

In an unusual twist of fate the American writer Kurt Vonnegut not only witnessed, as a German prisoner of war, the re-bombing of Dresden by the Allied forces on the night of 13 February 1945, but also survived the ensuing re-storm that devoured the city in one of Dresdens slaughterhouses, hence the title of his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Witnessing the massacre of 135,000 innocent civilians left Vonnegut mentally traumatized and spiritually paralyzed. Understandably, the horror of the disaster haunted him for long even after the Second World War. Consequently, Vonnegut embarked on a kind of art cure; in order to exorcise the demons of Dresden by his creative endeavours, he set out on a search for spiritual solace. Beginning with his rst novel Player Piano of 1952 and up to his fth, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater of 1965, Vonnegut experimented with varying ctional techniques ranging from the realistic to the scientic. Notably in The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Mother Night (1962) he wrestled with such weighty motifs as war and extraterrestrial existence with the purpose to advance, as much for his life as for his literature, new concepts of time, death, and war through which he might contain his psychological distress. However, his best efforts to develop new conceptual and technical frameworks notwithstanding, they remained largely ineffectual in psychological terms, failing to turn his trauma into a truly expiatory art. It was not until 1969, when he published his sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, that he succeeded in achieving a semblance of a 83

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therapy when he synthesized these two seemingly incompatible interests, war and alien life, into a single novel. Tellingly, Vonnegut calls the newfound technique his telegraphic schizophrenic manner. It becomes a means of discovery as well as an agency of recovery. By spatializing time to create symmetry, balance, and orderliness he achieves what Aldous Huxley has called the multidimensionality and the quality of permitting free movement in all directions.1 Thus the narrative of SlaughterhouseFive consists by and large of ashes in the mind of the protagonist Billy Pilgrim oscillating back and forth in time and space. As Peter J. Reed observes, this enables the author to
combine his retrospective perspective as author rationalizing and ordering past experience and the contemporaneous reactions as participating in the events shown. It is also appropriate (and an effective structural device) in a novel which emphasizes time, the interrelationships of time periods, and the effects of time on the perception of truth.2

By allowing his mirror-image, or double, Billy Pilgrim to range freely across time and space, Vonneguts own fragmented and jumbled memories of the past and future may seem for him at last to cohere into the cosmic vision he was previously lacking. Incarnated in the novel as the mystical philosophy of the Tralfamadorians the time-travelling inhabitants of another planet this cosmic vision goes back to and is derived from Vonneguts close acquaintance with and immersion in Eastern philosophy in the mid-1960s, in particular The Bhagavad Gita (Sanskrit for Song of God) by the mythical ancient Indian sage Veda Vyasa.3 The echoes of the Bhagavad Gita in Slaughterhouse-Five have so far remained hidden, and hence underexplored in Vonnegut scholarship, not least because Vonnegut coats the spiritual content of his novel with the sugar of (Western) science, and science ction, thus on the surface transforming the subject of war into a comic parody while masking the provenance of many of his ideas on time and space. As a result, most critics have interpreted the novel as a kind of science ction fantasy in which the author employs a number of playful props in order to dispel the horrors of the Dresden bombing. In this vein, Karen and Charles Wood observe:
By the time he wrote Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonneguts integration of science ction with the literature of experience was so thorough that it became difcult for critics to determine just what the novel was. Is this novel science ction, or is it not? The

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answer must surely be that if the mere presence of some of the elements of science ction makes a work fall into that classication, then, yes this is science ction. If the author may be permitted to use the elements of science ction because they suit his ends, without being placed in the le drawer that Vonnegut has occupied so unhappily for so long, no, Slaughterhouse-Five is not necessarily science ction.4

However, they then go on to argue that it should be read as science ction primarily because
Slaughterhouse-Five is structured in terms of Billy Pilgrims ability to travel in time. The time-travel theme extends back into science ction to H. G. Wellss The Time Machine, but Vonneguts manipulation of the theme for his own ends [. . . ] demonstrates a control of material which goes far beyond that found in pure science ction. The time-travel theme is made by Vonnegut into more than just a motif; it is here illustrative of the fact that in science ction there often lies the germ of ability to communicate themes which have been thought not to belong to the genre.5

Similarly, James Lundquist traces the genesis of Vonneguts science ction to his discovery of Kilgore Trout. According to Lundquist, Vonnegut has effectively used science ction since his inclusion of Kilgore Trout in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions. Since the Trout novels always deal with life on another planet or the mishaps of other creatures when they arrive on earth, his books serve to increase the cosmic irony that Vonnegut relies upon so much.6 For much the same reason, Reed observes that the element of science ction in Slaughterhouse-Five continues from and is an extension of Vonneguts earlier novels: The science ction element in Slaughterhouse-Five shares the basic ingredients it provides in other novels: an outside perspective in human affairs; a means of projecting the mundane to bizarre extremes, which expose its characteristics by exaggeration; a limited universalizing of given conditions.7 In his review of the novel, Michael Crichton also considers the novel to be an embodiment of Vonneguts science ction heritage: Vonnegut, armed with his schizophrenia, takes an absurd, distorted, wildly funny framework which is ultimately anaesthetic. In doing so his science ction heritage is clear, but his purposes are very different: he is nearly always talking about the past, not the future.8 To justify Vonneguts use of science ction, another critic, Jerome Klinkowitz, afrms that it was necessary for him to turn his experience into a fantasy, because the art to break such a silence [over the horrors of Dresden] must [. . . ] be both indirect and extraordinary, cast into new tones;

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the recording of a personal and historical horror in the world of fact calls for an act of style and fantasy.9 In Stanley Schatts view, science ction in Slaughterhouse-Five helps Vonnegut reinvent himself like his protagonists Eliot Rosewater and Billy Pilgrim; Schatt observes how, in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,
Eliot Rosewater drunkenly praises science ction writers for their concern with human problems [like Vonnegut himself, S.S.]; and he singles out Kilgore Trout as Americas greatest prophet. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim suffers a nervous breakdown and draws Eliot Rosewater as his roommate in the hospital. Billy comes to love Kilgore Trouts novels as much as Eliot Rosewater does because both men were trying to reinvent themselves and their universe. Science ction was a big help.10

By treating Vonneguts novel one-sidedly as a scientic fantasy these commentators come to overlook a central spiritual dimension of his subject, namely his employment of meditation and the Hindu doctrine of dhyana yoga as derived from the Bhagavad Gita in order to provide a motivation for the spiritual recovery of Billy Pilgrim from the terrifying effects of war and the tortuous realities of life in postwar America. As we shall see, Slaughterhouse-Five is replete with echoes of Lord Krishnas divine message (upadesha) of dhyana yoga to the supreme archer and seeker Arjuna, which forms the foundation of the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita itself constitutes only a part of the larger sacred Hindu epic the Mahabharata, which was originally written in Sanskrit by Veda Vyasa to narrate the holy war between the Kauravas and Pandavas the two families of the Kuru clan that ruled Bharatvarsha (ancient India) more than two thousand years ago. Lord Krishna supported the Pandavas, even serving as Arjunas charioteer in the war. When the two armies are ready to charge on the battleeld of Kurukshetra, Arjuna nds himself face to face with his grandsire Bhishma, guru Drona, and numerous other near and dear ones. Suddenly confused, he refuses to shoot at his own relatives and implores Lord Krishna, who is serving as his charioteer: Seeing these my kinsmen, collected here prompted by war, my limbs fail me, O Krishna, and my mouth is parched (I 28). At this crucial juncture, Krishna gives Arjuna the holy message of the Gita in order to prompt the despondent archer to ght against his unjust opponents. In his divine message, Krishna dwells in detail on the very ideas of time, death and war that pervade Vonneguts Tralfamadorian view of war and vision of life in Slaughterhouse-Five. It is these striking afnities between

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Vyasas Bhagavad Gita and Vonneguts novel that ask for a comparative counter-reading of these two texts.
2

An awareness of the Bhagavad Gita permeates Vonneguts Slaughterhouse-Five11 and creates a more than tacit afnity between the two texts. Both signicantly comment on the three perennial subjects of life, death, and immortality. More specically, both the Bhagavad Gita and Slaughterhouse-Five are primarily allegories of war. The Gita springs from war and signies the divine character of war; Slaughterhouse-Five too originates from war and postulates the cosmic wisdom of war. In the former, Lord Krishna acquaints Arjuna with Cosmic Consciousness, imparting to him the sacred truths of war and the righteous ways of eternal victory. In the latter, Eliot Rosewater apprises Billy Pilgrim of Kilgore Trouts work on Tralfamadore, another kind of Cosmic Consciousness that likewise communicates the cosmic principles of war and the transcendent paths to spiritual recovery. Just as Arjuna grieves the impending death of his innumerable kinsmen in the war, Billy bemoans the violent death of his several friends and fellow soldiers in the Second World War. Arjuna nally wages and wins the holy war following Krishnas cosmic revelation to him. Likewise, Billy ultimately triumphs over his war trauma once he has been exposed to the Tralfamadorian worldview. Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five against the backdrop of the 1960s, a decade of cultural and spiritual discord in America due mainly to the repercussions of the Cold War and the ongoing Vietnam War. Many Americans, especially those on the New Left, felt spiritually starved and drawn to Eastern Gurus and meditative practices, the short-lived Nirvanas.12 Vonnegut and his family were among those Westerners who sought spiritual solace in the Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Vonneguts essay Yes, We Have No Nirvanas (1968)13 elaborates on how his wife and daughter were taught transcendental meditation by the Yogi himself. Vonnegut too was keenly interested in transcendental meditation and even arranged for a personal audience with the Maharishi in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1966.14 Transcendental meditation is discussed at length in the Yogis book The Science of Being and Art of Living, published in 1963; nothing less than a secular and practical version of the Hindu attitude of dhyana yoga in the Gita, this volume was freely distributed and

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was widely read by the Yogis Western followers (the most prominent among them being of course the Beatles). In subtly reframing the basic concepts by reducing the element of mysticism contained in Veda Vyasas Bhagavad Gita, the Maharishi makes the Gitas worldview more amenable to his Western reader, irrespective of nationality or religious belief, imparting to transcendental meditation a more universal appeal and generic applicability. However, the Yogis transcendental meditation is concerned with the welfare of people more in their physical lives than on a deeper spiritual level. It helps practitioners primarily to transcend the material realities of their worldly life by transporting them into the spiritual domain of the absolute Being, which forms the basis of all creation. Transcendental meditation in effect expands, as the Yogi himself puts it, the conscious capacity of the mind to the maximum, and thereby provides not only the basis for a great expansion of knowledge in every eld of science, but also a direct way to fullment in any sphere of life.15 The Maharishis meditation carries man only up to the point where boundaries of the three-dimensional world (being awake, sleep, deep sleep) touch upon the Fourth Dimension, or Cosmic Consciousness (turia). It does not cross into the territory of Cosmic Truth in the Fourth State, which is the ultimate aim of dhyana yoga according to the Upanishads, Gita, and Patanjalis Yogasutras or Yogadarshan. The Yogi actually derives all of his precepts for transcendental meditation from the Gita, which provides Vonnegut with a clue to the yoga of time travel in the transcendental state of samadhi. Vonneguts knowledge of dhyana yoga and samadhi is recognizably derived from the Maharishis teachings in The Science of Being and Art of Living, which Vonnegut cites in the above-mentioned essay in order to illustrate how, in the Maharishis view, transcendental meditation can save the world.16 This gave Vonnegut the cue for the ideas of Transcendental Meditation, Transcendental Being, Cosmic Consciousness, and the state of non-being in the absolute Being, which are all at the core of his cosmic vision in Slaughterhouse-Five. The original versions and appropriate explanations of these theological concepts are contained in Chapters 16 of Lord Krishnas upadesha (holy message) in the Gita which were also accessible to Vonnegut in Mahesh Yogis other companion piece, the Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation and Commentary Chapters 16, published in 1967. As indicated earlier, it is in the rst six chapters of the Gita that the process of dhyana yoga from initiation to culmination into samadhi is elucidated; it is for this reason that the Maharishi

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wrote his commentary only on these rst six chapters with the explicit objective to facilitate a proper understanding of his earlier commentary on transcendental meditation. It is this text that acquainted Vonnegut with the Fourth State, or Turia, and provided him with an answer to his predicament regarding the transcendental truths of time and death.
3

What Vonnegut learns from the Maharishi is the crux of the Gita and the culmination of Krishnas message to Arjuna on dhyana yoga. In the Yogis view, one can liberate oneself from earthly fetters of time and death (kaivalya) by merging with the absolute Being (Brahman in the Gita) through transcendental meditation. According to the Gita, Brahman, or the eternal Being, rests in the Cosmic Consciousness or Fourth State, which can only be realized or intuited by practising dhyana yoga every day over a long period of time. The practice of dhyana (meditation) will gradually turn into nirvikalpa samadhi (deep meditation), which in turn initiates the practitioners divya chakshu (cosmic sight), allowing him to see the unseen and realize the unrealized, unlike other ordinary mortals. It is this divine vision that Lord Krishna, the supreme yogi, bestows on Arjuna to enable him to see Krishnas viratroopa or Eternal Spirit or Cosmic Consciousness in the Gita (XI 1034): But you cannot see Me with these eyes of yours; I give you divine sight; behold My Supreme Self (XI 8). With the cosmic sight, Arjuna sees in the Fourth Dimension the Truth beyond all the truths of earthly life, which lies beyond the check and constraints of time and death: Imperishable, the being and the non-being, that which is the Supreme. [. . . ] Innite in might and immeasurable in strength, You pervade all and therefore You are all (XI 38, 40). Krishnas Cosmic Self sprawls over an immeasurable stretch in space with no beginning, middle or end (cyclical), and with no past, present or future (ceaseless). Arjuna surveys the three times together in an eternal continuum and sees what really goes on behind the visible veneer of the temporal world. To his amazement, Arjuna witnesses that all his kinsmen in the opposing army will soon be dead even if he did not kill them in the war (XI 3233). Vonnegut takes these principles of dhyana yoga from the Gita and adapts them to the theme and character conguration of SlaughterhouseFive. The theme of the novel is Billy Pilgrims spiritual quest into the timeless domains of Tralfamadore, which is an amusing ctional incarnation of the Fourth State, or Cosmic Consciousness (turia).

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Actually, his very name calls to mind John Bunyans Pilgrims Progress and conrms the spiritual nature of his adventures in the novel. However, it posits a contrast between the profane and sacred, and between the comic and serious in a postmodern parodic manner. The name sounds as if Billy the bum or buffoon is on a pilgrimage to become Billy the seer. This corresponds with the overarching convergence of the scientic and spiritual that is at the heart of the structure of Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonneguts spiritual concern in the novel becomes further evident from the fact that Billy Pilgrim survives the Second World War thanks to his spiritual mysticism whereas his war buddies Wild Bob (50), Roland Weary (57), and Edgar Derby (60) all fall prey to death due to their mere body consciousness. Besides, Vonneguts ironic delineation of these characters and sarcastic description of their physical decay also suggest the spiritual motif of the novel. As Paul Fussell rightly observes, everyone who remembers a war rst-hand knows that its images remain in the memory with special vividness. The very enormity of the proceedings, their absurd remove from the usages of the normal world, will guarantee that a structure of irony sufcient for ready narrative recall will attach to them.17 Through Billys survival, SlaughterhouseFive ironically signies the victory of the soul over the body, which is nothing less than the essence of yoga in Hinduism: Yoga is a turning away of the senses from the objective universe and the concentration of the mind within. Yoga is the eternal life in the soul or spirit.18 The yogic principles act as a basis for Billys time travel, allowing him to transcend the temporal barriers of our three-dimensional human existence through the practice of deep meditation or samadhi. Billy is seen meditating in the war for the rst time while leaning against a tree with his eyes closed. This is when Billy rst comes unstuck in time. Like an enlightened seer, Billy peeps through the time window, allowing him to travel back and forth over the full arc of his life from pre-birth to death (35). Although here Billy is in the initial stages of meditation (pre-samadhi), his time travel helps him to come out unscathed from the devastation of the Second World War in marked contrast to those around him. After the war, he obtains a degree in optometry underscoring his aptitude for seeing and is later abducted by the extraterrestrial aliens in a ying saucer, navigating in both space and time (55), to the far-off ctional planet Tralfamadore as in a science ction fantasy. On Tralfamadore, Billy nds the creatures friendly, and they could see in four dimensions. They pitied Earthlings for being able to see only three. They had many wonderful things to teach Earthlings,

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especially about time (25). There he learns from the Tralfamadorians about the truth of time, the negligibility of death, and the insignicance of war in the Fourth Dimension. Following his visit to Tralfamadore, Billy starts to practise deep meditation (nirvikalpa samadhi) and acquires a cosmic vision (divya drishti) which comes to rest in turia, or Cosmic Consciousness. The Tralfamadorians didnt have anything to do with his [Billys] coming unstuck [in time], the text informs us; they were simply able to give him insights into what was really going on (27, emphasis mine). From this point on Billy becomes a jeevanmukta couched in kaivalya a yogi liberated from the earthly travails of life and his divine vision contains the Tralfamadorian truths of time, death and war, truths to which earthlings living in three dimensions must by necessity remain oblivious. In the world on earth, time passes in a linear motion from past to future, and a moment lost in the ow can never be retrieved. Thus death on earth is inevitable and war is insufferable. By contrast, on Tralfamadore, where people live in the Fourth State, time is retrievable, death is an illusion, and war is completely ineffectual. Billys travel in time and the Tralfamadorian concepts of life together relieve his trauma of the war and serve to raise him above the tantalizing realities of the phenomenal world. With his new image Billy acquires an overview of life, a memory of both past and future, a vision that enables him to live in this world and yet transcend it at the same time.19 It endows him with a prophetic insight into what is really going on in the fourth dimension. Billy is thus able to foresee Edgar Derbys death (73), his own death (96), and that the city [Dresden] would be smashed to smithereens and then burned down in about thirty more days. He knew, too, that most of the people watching him would soon be dead (102). However, in his spiritual effulgence, Billy has to face the hostility of the naive Earthlings as his predecessor Rosewater did in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. His wife misconstrues his divine listlessness (41) as madness and his daughter mistakes his disengagement as senility, not knowing that, on the contrary, he was devoting himself to a calling higher than mere business (26). In the same way that Yossarian in Joseph Hellers Catch-22 (1961) and McMurphy in Ken Keseys One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (1962) feign madness to save their sanity, Billy seeks shelter in the Fourth State which acts as a geodesic dome (96) around him, protecting his soul against the coercive ignorance of crazy people in a war-phobic world. In essence, Billys Tralfamadorian concept of life in SlaughterhouseFive appears as a literary approximation of Lord Krishnas discourse

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with Arjuna on dhyana yoga in the Gita. In Hinduism, dhyana yoga is known as the yoga of time travel, a kind of time window that Vonnegut opens for Billy by creating a time-space continuum through his technical improvisation in accordance with the disruptive nature of his subject matter. The chronological and causal sequences of a traditional narrative are broken into a postmodern pastiche of temporal forays. Such heterogeneity of incursions into eternity is possible only in the Fourth State (turia) or Cosmic Consciousness, which a dhyana yogi attains in nirvikalpa samadhi, and where the concepts of time and death are conceived much like they are on Vonneguts Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians concept of time is cyclical rather than linear, linearity being the hallmark both of the Christian belief system as well as Western science:
All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. (25)

Vonneguts view of time thus implies the eternity of all the three times at any given moment. It also entails the human accessibility to any moment in the three times in the fourth state. In Hinduism, as indicated earlier, Brahman, or Cosmic Soul, is innite, imperishable, and without beginning, middle or end, innite in power (XI 19). We human beings on earth who think discursively are preoccupied, now with one object and now with another. We think consecutively, but the Divine Mind knows all as one. There is no past to it nor future.20 All moments of the whole past, present, and future are present to the Divine Mind.21 Hence the three times coexist simultaneously in the Cosmic Mind, and a yogi can recapture any moment at will in the past or future in his divine vision. For Tralfamadorians, All time is all time. It does not change. It does not bend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will nd that we are all, as I have said before, bugs in amber (61). This obviously excludes causation and free will (61) one has to act according to the nature or structure (80) of the existing moment, which cannot be altered in any way. One cannot even ask why. That is a very Earthling question to ask [. . . ] Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is (56). For Tralfamadorians, Everything is all right, everybody has to do exactly what he does (132). A mans relationship with time

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in the Tralfamadorian vision comes close to what Lord Krishna reveals to Arjuna while prompting the latter to ght against his kinsmen. In his viratroopa, or Supreme Form, Krishna tells Arjuna that he is the mighty world-destroying Time now engaged in wiping out the world (XI 32). Through Krishna, Arjuna is provided a glimpse into the Truth of all truths, namely that creation, preservation, and destruction proceed simultaneously in the cosmic mind. All things rst happen there and then are accomplished in the tangible world through the instrumentality of human beings.22 This approximates to what the Tralfamadorians have revealed to Billy: the structure and nature of all future moments and their corresponding events on earth have already been ordained in the cosmic consciousness. So whatever happens is irreversible and man has no control over it whatsoever. Krishna thus acquaints Arjuna with the doctrine of providential immanence or divine predestination, indicating the utter helplessness and insignicance of the individual and the futility of his will and effort. The decision is made already and Arjuna can do nothing to change it.23 This amply explains Billys inability to change the past, the present and the future (46) and illustrates the Tralfamadorian belief that all present happenings and future events have their causes in the Fourth Dimension, which people on earth living in three dimensions cannot but be ignorant of. Pilgrim can only pray to the Almighty for the necessary serenity and spiritual strength to accept the things he cannot change (46). As an example, Billy alone among all the passengers survives the plane crash, and at the same time his wife Valencia dies in a car accident while rushing to see him in a Vermont hospital (24). Billy already knows in his divine vision that the plane will crash and therefore he goes into samadhi whereby his body becomes totally immune to any pain and suffering caused by any modications in prakriti (nature). Billy, knowing the plane was going to crash soon, closes his eyes, travels in time to 1944. He is back in the forests of Luxembourg again with The Three Musketeers. Roland Weary is shaking him, bonking his head against the tree (105). In spite of a severe head injury, he remains conscious with his yogic power: Billy had a fractured skull, but he was still conscious. His lips were working, and one of the gollywogs put his ear close to them to hear what might be his dying words (105). Subsequently, in the state of unconsciousness, he continues in the fourth state and dreamed millions of things, some of them true. The true things were time travel (105). By contrast, Valencia rests in the body and therefore is overtaken by death like Billys war buddies. She is without spiritual inclination and

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is entrapped in the maya (illusion) of aspirations and desires. Valencia wasnt a time-traveler, but she did have a lively imagination. While Billy was making love to her, she imagined that she was a famous woman in history. She was being Queen Elizabeth the First, and Billy was supposedly Christopher Columbus (81). The acute antithesis between Billys miraculous escape and his wifes accidental death amply indicates that only those die who are destined to die in the cosmic realm. Radhakrishnans comment on the above-cited sloka 32 of Chapter XI illustrates the divine will controlling such events: There is an impersonal fate, what the Christians call Providence, a general cosmic necessity, moira, which is an expression of a side of Gods nature and so can be regarded as the will of His sovereign personality, which pursues its own recognizable aims.24 Interestingly, J. Robert Oppenheimer remembered precisely this sloka after the Trinity test of the worlds rst atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1945, which is the source and substance of Vonneguts Cats Cradle (1963), an amusing story about the end of the world in which everything happens in the universe with the permission of Time. As Lord Rama, an earlier incarnation of Krishna, tells Sage Vasistha in Vasistha Yoga, Time alone, O Sage, wears everything out in this world; there is nothing in creation which is beyond its reach. Time alone creates innumerable universes, and in a very short time Time destroys everything.25 On Tralfamadore too Time is eternal, and in Hinduism Soul is imperishable. The two are inextricably intertwined in SlaughterhouseFive, making them virtually synonymous. The Tralfamadorians concept of time bears directly on their vision of life and their view of death. By using the ashback technique, Vonnegut splits time and breaks the narrative into fragments, which in turn correlate to create a spatial circularity within the temporal ow. In cyclical time, one remains in all three times (eternity) at any given moment and is voluntarily able to retrieve moments lost in the ceaseless ux of time. If lost time can be retrieved, so lost life can be regained as well. As the Tralfamadorians see it, all moments are suspended permanently in the eternal expanse of time, and they can revisit any of them at will. When all moments are always present and any one of them can be recaptured at will, the human soul is perpetually present and the human view of death is rendered erroneous and illusory. This explains why Billy rebukes his fellow Americans with the words if you think death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word Ive said (97), and why he reprimands other Americans for not being able to understand the eternal truth concealed in

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the Tralfamadorian concept of death. This truth is implicit in the death of Edgar Derby, Nathan, and all others in the mortal world. Thus we are informed: Nathan, according to the Earthling concept of time, had died back in 1958. According to the Tralfamadorian concept, of course, Nathan was still alive somewhere and always would be (132). This sounds perplexing only until one accepts the two essential premises of the Vedanta, namely the immortality of the human soul and the immanence of its rebirth. In Hinduism, the human soul (atman) is immortal and eternally present in the world in one human body or the other. Thus Krishna famously enlightens Arjuna, the Atman is neither born nor does It die. Coming into being and ceasing to be do not take place in It. Unborn, eternal, constant and ancient, It is not killed when the body is slain (II 20). It is permanent, perpetual, and persistent: Weapons do not cleave the Atman, re burns It not, wind dries It not (II 23). After the death of the phenomenal body, the atman is reborn in another body. As a man casting off worn-out garments puts on new ones, so the embodied [soul], casting off worn-out bodies, enters into others that are new (II 22). The Tralfamadorians victory over time similarly demysties death and transforms it into a negligible event, one hardly worthy of grief. Hence Billy Pilgrims statement the most important thing I have learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past. So it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. [. . . ] When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just ne in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is so it goes (25). In the same vein, Billy tells his countrymen (whose spiritual bewilderment in the 1960s approximates Arjunas in the fear of war and death) what Krishna says to Arjuna: You grieve for those who should not be grieved for; yet you spell words of wisdom. The wise [yogis] grieve neither for the living nor for the dead. Nor I, nor you, nor any of these ruling princes was ever non-existent before; nor is it that we shall cease to be in future (II 1112). Thus Nathan is present somewhere after his death (132), hence Billy will remain existent after his death (96), and hence all others too will be around after their deaths (133). As Wai Chee Dimock aptly notes in her commentary on death and Krishnas defence of war in the Gita: The spilling over of death is a form of life after all, however odd it might seem. And while it lasts, densely exfoliated, it brings with it a corresponding luxuriance of outcome, erupting on many different levels

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and not pinned down to one.26 Thus there is no death, no dead, no slayer, no slain, and no need to grieve over death. Death is merely an illusion of the nite world. The soul is eternally present as one person or another in all times transcending the past, present, and future. One who is dead now is alive and ne in other moments of the unceasing continuum of time. Billys mystical swings from one place to another in different times also seem to bafe the rational mind. Keeping physically static like a dead person, he remains spiritually alive and present somewhere at another place and time. Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to nd himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between (23). Of all major religions, only Hinduism permits this kind of temporal osmosis. Billy thus behaves like a dhyana yogi who achieves through samadhi the Tralfamadorians capability of disappearing and reappearing at will in one place or another and in any moment of past, present or future. The yogi can be seemingly dead here, but alive somewhere else in the past or the future. Accordingly, Sage Vasistha informs us in Yoga Vasistha: Yogi can perform actions everywhere and experience all things in all the three periods of time, though apparently remaining in one place (VI 2, 124).27 Indeed, Hinduism believes, and it is recorded in the yogic scriptures, that through dhyana yoga the Siddhas, or perfect beings, are granted exceptional moral and spiritual enlightenment and are able to roam around unseen in space. Like them, Vonneguts Tralfamadorians are depicted as enlightened astral beings navigating unseen through our cosmos, taking Billy away to their planet Tralfamadore to acquaint him precisely with these truths of the Fourth State: It was a ying saucer from Tralfamadore, navigating in both space and time, therefore seeming to Billy Pilgrim to have come from nowhere all at once (55). In Hinduism, too, the Siddhas sometimes visit the yogi in the state of samadhi and carry his soul away with them into their own domain, or Fourth Dimension, of unalterable truths. Sage Patanjali testies to this belief in the following aphorism (sutra) of Yogadarshan: By meditation on the light on top of the head [Brahma-randhra], sight of the Siddhas (enlightened beings).28 The yogi is bodily present on earth but his soul has been removed to the Fourth Dimension for further illumination, much like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five. In their knowledge of the cosmic reality, the Tralfamadorians thus are a

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ctional equivalent of the Siddhas who live beyond the realms of time in the Fourth Dimension. But, as elsewhere in the novel, Vonnegut comically covers this equivalence by Billys naked exhibition in the zoo and his sexual intercourse with Montana Wildhack (91) on Tralfamadore. Though the pornographic subversion overtly seems to accommodate one of the popular tastes of the 1960s, the way that the Tralfamadorians subject Billys pilgrim soul to cosmic enlightenment in an instant of time suggests their covert correlation with the Siddhas. Like Lord Krishna (the supreme Siddha) showing Arjuna (the supreme seeker) several millennia of the three eras in merely a few moments of the gods revelation, the Tralfamadorians take Billy away from earth for only a microsecond, but he nonetheless stays on Tralfamadore for years (24). No one but Billy is able to see the Tralfamadorians or take note of his bodily absence from earth (55). Similarly, no warrior on the battleeld of Kurukshetra can see the eternal form of Krishna except Arjuna. He appears to them in his usual human form during his absence in the Cosmic Form, which is spread out over the entire space and the three eras of time (XI 16). The Tralfamadorians conquest of time and their containment of death together inuence their view of war. By his spastic simulations, Vonnegut allows the retrieval of time and creates a condition of inevitable recurrence over a cyclical scale of time. Life follows death, death follows life, and war follows war eternally. War enacts a terrible dance of death, as is evident from the two World Wars fought during the last century. But, Billy says, what he [the Tralfamadorian] meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that too. And even if wars didnt keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death (10). In other words, even where Tralfamadorians believe in the inevitability of wars, they do not bother about them, unlike Earthlings such as Arjuna who does not understand the immanence of war and therefore refuses to ght in the fear of killing his near and dear ones. His refusal occasions Lord Krishnas message to him in favour of the war, which is unavoidable due to its cosmic preordination. Both Tralfamadorians and Krishna thus express their views in favour of the acceptance of the inevitable as fate or destiny, which is guided by the will of time. Indeed, the Tralfamadorians idea of preordination renders the evils of war banal and ineffectual, leaving no scope for guilt, sin, or damnation. Billy happens to be in the war on the day the Germans shot dead Edgar Derby and in Dresden on the night of the re-bombing not by self-will but by his Fate (102), which is duly determined by the

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structure of the moment in the endless ux of time. Hence he need not feel guilty for something not of his doing, such as Edgar Derbys death or Dresdens re-bombing. Moreover, if time can be retrieved or recuperated there is no death, in which case war becomes void. Tralfamadorians simply disregard wars by attending to the happier moments of their life in the past. They tell Billy: Today we [have a peaceful planet here]. On other days we have wars as horrible as any youve ever seen or read about. There isnt anything we can do about them, so we simply dont look at them. We ignore them. We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments (8081). The Tralfamadorians statement is subtly imbued with the three main ingredients of dhyana yoga, i.e. ignore (detachment), eternity (Brahman), and pleasant (blissful). They form a yogic triad to be followed by all traversing the path of higher knowledge. These three qualities can be acquired in succession by renunciation through the constant practice of samadhi (deep meditation), which slowly replenishes the practitioner with eternal bliss-consciousness. He then lives in eternity or Brahman with the knowledge of the transcendent truth. The Tralfamadorians approach to war is thus characterized by divine inevitability and yogic dispassion, which gives them a saintly obliviousness to victory, defeat, and destruction. It renders war and violence bereft of their tragic consequences. By retrieving the past, they neutralize the brutal effects of death. For instance, Edgar Derby and Billy Pilgrim are both shot dead. But, Derbys death in three dimensions (11) stands in sharp contrast to that of Billys in the Fourth Dimension (97). The former disappears in the Fourth Dimension, but when Billy dies he comes back to life in the Fourth Dimension on earth. Derby in three dimensions could not choose the moment of his death; by contrast, Billy selects the moment of his end (97) and blissfully bears his violent shooting by a fellow American, Paul Lazzaro. He later admits: Still if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, Im grateful that so many of those moments are nice (140). Thats one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough, Billy observes elsewhere, [i]gnore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones (81). War is of course only one of the causes of destruction, and it is a human one; others are natural, such as meteorite showers, earthquakes, epidemics, glaciers, oods, and famines, etc. Nobody can control or change the course of these manifestations of the Cosmic Will. Hence wars, like the two World Wars or the Vietnam War, are inevitable in

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the phenomenal universe Vonnegut sums it up in the mantra So it goes, repeated over and again throughout Slaughterhouse-Five. Only those who meditate and come to rest in the eternal Brahman (eternity for the Tralfamadorians) undying in the dying (XIII 27) through the constant practice of yoga are able to live selectively in time against the perpetual dance of death in prakriti (matter, or nature). Unsurprisingly, Prakriti permeates Vonneguts description of Dresden by suggesting its evanescent, ephemeral, illusory and unreal nature. On reaching Dresden, Billy and the other American prisoners nd it the loveliest city that most of the Americans had never seen. The skyline was intricate and voluptuous and enchanted and absurd. It looked like a Sunday School picture of Heaven to Billy Pilgrim (100, emphasis mine). Billy is further excited by the architectural embellishments of the grandiose buildings: He was enchanted by the architecture of the city. Merry amoretti wove garlands above the windows, roguish fawns and naked nymphs peeked down at Billy from festooned cornices. Stone monkeys frisked among scrolls and seashells and bamboo (102). Billy already knew via his cosmic vision that this unreal city would be smashed to smithereens and then burned in about thirty more days (120). This echoes what Krishna says in the Gita: The unreal has no existence; the real never ceases to be. The truth about both has been realized by the seers (II 16). Billy sees this truth ahead of the massacre in his divine vision. With the re-bombing of Dresden, the veil of maya (illusion) breaks, the unreal (material) vanishes, and only the real (spiritual) remains. Billy and birds alone survive the massacre whereas the citys other inhabitants perish in the ery storm. Billy, the Pilgrim, lives a spiritual life in the Fourth Dimension, while the birds, in their life beyond the bondage of the human world, symbolize the human soul. Their survival marks the precedence of the immutable (spiritual) over the mutable (material). The signs of rebirth or reconstruction after death or destruction (as afrmed by Krishna in the Gita) are discernible in the image of a cofn-shaped green wagon, which Billy and ve other American soldiers who survived the bombing had found abandoned in a suburb of Dresden after the re-storm, complete with two horses [. . . ]. Now they were being drawn by the clop-clop-clopping horses down narrow lanes which had been cleared through the moonlike ruins (129). The green colour (symbolizing new life) of the cofn-shaped wagon (representing death) stands for rebirth and reconstruction in death and destruction. The horses (primal energy) drawing it rhythmically with Billy and the others through the narrow lanes (difcult ways of the world)

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represent the spontaneous ow of life force in the ruins of Dresden. The image even anticipates a new birth for Billy in his reminder of the sounds of milkmens horses early in the morning in Ilium, when he was a boy (129, emphasis added). This idea of revival or rebirth is further reinforced in yet another image of an old man pushing a baby buggy. In the buggy were pots and cups and an umbrella frame, and other things he had found (129). Here, the old man symbolizes the primal instinct of life, as does Santiago in Hemingways The Old Man and the Sea of 1952. The baby buggy signies rebirth, renewal and the onward movement of life after death and destruction, and the objects in the buggy suggest the perpetuation of material sustenance for the continuation of life. Standing out among the objects in the buggy is the frame of the umbrella; it suggests in the aftermath of the destruction of Dresden that the outer cloth as prakriti (matter) has disappeared, leaving behind the inner frame as purusha (substratum). Vonnegut ends his novel on an afrmative note, indicating a new birth for both himself as author and his character Billy Pilgrim. Both spring to life from the meat (death) vaults of Slaughterhouse 5 after the Dresden catastrophe. It is springtime. The trees are leang out and birds are chirping in the ruins of Dresden. And what do the birds say, the narrator asks, only to respond: All there is to say about a massacre, things like Poo-tee-weet (20). They sing Billys spiritual victory over the catastrophic conditions of the material world. In the end, Billy Pilgrim, the avatar of the seeker Arjuna, is transformed into the seer Krishna. Now Billy is selessly busy like a yogi with the welfare of other humans (propkara): His [yogis] mind being harmonized by yoga, he sees himself in all beings and all beings in himself; he sees the same in all (VI 29). He is giving his fellow countrymen corrective lenses (26) a new vision (divya drishti), allowing them to see through the unseen Tralfamadore or Fourth State and be at peace in the war-torn world. Finally, Billy succumbs to the bullet of Paul Lazzaro as Krishna did to the arrow of a wayward hunter. Vonnegut sublimates his trauma of war by what is known in Freudian parlance as transference transference of his trauma to his persona, Billy Pilgrim, in order to overcome it through him with the help of dhyana yoga or the Tralfamadorian principles of life.
4

Shortly after the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut openly confesses the spiritual renewal he felt by writing this novel: It was a

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therapeutic thing. I am a different sort of person now. I got rid of a lot of crap,29 he remarks laconically. He turns his nervous crisis, caused by Edgar Derbys death and the Dresden bombing, into an aesthetic amalgam which inspires faith into the secular manifestations of spiritual endurance amidst the existing religious scepticism of the postwar era. To a degree, Vonnegut gets a step ahead of Mahesh Yogi by turning the Hindu principles of dhyana yoga effectively into a mode of peaceful survival in a world torn apart by violence and war. Vonneguts unorthodox use of the Bhagavad Gita as a subtext in SlaughterhouseFive seems intended to clear dhyana yoga of the philosophical mist that surrounds it, making it, as he himself sees it, easy as pie.30 Signicantly, Vonnegut accomplishes two things in Slaughterhouse-Five: rst, he shows that science ction can be used as a serious literary tool to explore the para-psychic domains of human consciousness; second, his adaptation of Eastern philosophy reveals to the Indian reader as well as a Western audience that, behind its mystical coating, Eastern philosophy carries a universal message, and therefore one can avail oneself of it as a source of creative inspiration, psychological insight and philosophical reection irrespective of religion, race, and geography. The spiritual decit experienced by Vonnegut and his generation in the 1960s as a result of the Vietnam War and growing capitalist consumerism led them to look beyond customary ideological and religious afliations for an antidote to what they perceived as a militaristic, decadent and essentially anti-human worldview; in their search for peace and harmony, many found solace in Eastern cultures, philosophies, and religions, in particular Buddhism and Hinduism. For his part, rather than engaging in the pure escapism that many fell prey to, Vonnegut created a kind of survival kit resulting from the creative combination of Western and Eastern worldviews. With his ironic fusion of Western science ction and the Eastern philosophy of dhyana yoga, Vonnegut transforms the horrendous subject of Slaughterhouse-Five, Dresdens historic re-bombing, into a source of reection, and maybe even of solace, both for the war-wearied American public of the 1960s and the contemporary reader today, and certainly for himself much like the discovery of the Bokononism of the inhabitants of San Lorenzo in his earlier novel Cats Cradle (1963) came from the protagonists interest in the after-effects of the bombing of Hiroshima. To the same extent that in Slaughterhouse-Five Vonnegut might have been looking for ways to reconcile his own inner antagonisms, stemming from the trauma of the Second World War, in creating the surrogate religion of his Tralfamadorian vision the author seems to be

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simultaneously responding to and in sync with the spiritual cravings of his fellow Americans and their deep-seated anxiety about the destruction and death brought about by the war that was being conducted at that moment in time, the Vietnam War.

NOTES
1 Aldous Huxley, Some Reection on Time, in Vedanta for Modern Man, edited by Christopher Isherwood (New York: Collier Books, 1962), pp. 136140, this quote pp. 137138. 2 Peter J. Reed, The Later Vonnegut, in Vonnegut in America: An Introduction to the Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut, edited by Jerome Klinkowitz and Donald L. Lawler (New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1977), pp. 150186, this quote p. 153. 3 Veda Vyasa, The Bhagavad Gita, translated by Swami Cidbhavananda (Tirupparaitturai: Tapovanam Publishing House, 1967). All chapter (adhayaya) and stanza (sloka) references are to this edition. 4 Karen and Charles Wood, The Vonnegut Effect: Science Fiction and Beyond, in The Vonnegut Statement, edited by Jerome Klinkowitz and John Somer (New York: Delacorte Press/ Seymour Lawrence, 1973), pp. 133157, this quote p. 154. 5 Ibid., pp. 153154. 6 James Lundquist, Kurt Vonnegut (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977), p. 96. 7 Peter J. Reed, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (New York: Thomas Y. Cornell Company, 1972), p. 195. 8 J. Michael Crichton, Sci-Fi and Vonnegut: A Review of Slaughterhouse-Five, in The Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut, edited by Leonard Mustazza (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1994), pp. 107111, this quote p. 110. 9 Jerome Klinkowitz, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 63. 10 Stanley Schatt, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Boston: Twayne, 1977), p. 90. 11 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Granada, 1972). Hereafter cited with page numbers. 12 Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Nineteen Sixties (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 268. 13 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Yes, We Have No Nirvanas, in K. V., Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (Opinions) (New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1974), pp. 3141. 14 Ibid., p. 32. 15 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, The Science of Being and Art of Living (Jabalpur: Age of Enlightenment Publications, 1983), p. 21. 16 Vonnegut, Yes, pp. 3435. 17 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 326. 18 Swami Sivananda, Samadhi Yoga (Shivanandanagar, Tehri-Garhwal: The Divine Life Society, 1983), p. 21.

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19 John Somer, Geodesic Vonnegut; or If Buckminster Fuller Wrote Novels, The Vonnegut Statement, pp. 221253, this quote p. 245. 20 Ibid., p. 278. 21 Ibid., p. 281. 22 Swami Nikhilananda, The Meaning of God, in Vedanta for Modern Man, pp. 111117, this quote p. 114. 23 Vyasa, The Bhagavad Gita, translated by S. Radhakrishnan (Bombay: Blackie and Son, 1979), p. 280. 24 Ibid. 25 Sage Vasistha, The Supreme Yoga: Yoga Vasistha, translated by Swami Venkatesananda (South Fremantle: The Chiltern Yoga Trust, 1984), p. 15. 26 Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 13. 27 Sage Vasistha, Yoga Vasistha, p. 373. 28 Sage Patanjali, Yogadarshan, translated by Tulsi Ram (Jhajar, Haryana: Haryana Sahitya Sansthan, 1989), p. 222. It is believed in the yogic system that on top of the head there is a hole from where ows the light of knowledge (sattva), of vision, and grace. This hole in the crown of the head is called Brahma-Randhara. By meditating on this light of knowledge and vision, the yogi can experience the sight of the Siddhas and enjoy their company. 29 Richard Todd, The Masks of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: An Interview, in Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, edited by William Rodney (Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, 1988), pp. 3040, this quote p. 32. Also in Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), Robert R. Broer in his Freudian study of Vonneguts ction observes, [t]he cathartic process of Vonneguts ction allows the author and his characters to free themselves from neurotic fears and restrictions and to realize themselves in the present (182). 30 Vonnegut, Yes, p. 31.

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