Armageddon in Retrospect
Kurt Vonnegut, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008

Armageddon in Retrospect

Kurt Vonnegut, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008

A new collection of previously unpublished pieces by the late Kurt Vonnegut begins with a quote from the author: “I trust my writing most and others seem to trust it most when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am.” This, I would argue, is the key to Vonnegut’s appeal: that he was a Midwesterner who brought to his writing about the largest of human flaws and disasters a Midwesterner’s lack of cultural baggage. It’s easier to trust the judgments and conclusions of a naïve boy from Indiana than it would a Northeasterner or a Southerner whose perceived agendas would color their words. Vonnegut knew that, and he capitalized on it. 

Of course, Vonnegut’s naivete would have carried no weight at all if he didn’t have the specific experience necessary to write about a subject knowledgeably. But he did, and his subject of knowledge was war; he saw a side of war that even most soldiers never see, and his credentials gave him an authority that was irrefutable. Having entered World War II near the end, his unit was captured by the Germans almost before it could do any fighting. Vonnegut and his fellow soldiers endured inhumane treatment by their Nazi captors and, after being transferred to a labor camp in the German city of Dresden, were caught in one of the worst war-time atrocities in history, an Allied firebombing of the city that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. Eventually liberated by the advance of the Russian army, Vonnegut came home forever affected by what he had witnessed and participated in. 

Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of works that were not published before Vonnegut’s death in 2007, all of which were inspired by his time in Dresden (as was all of his work, in one way or another). Beginning with a concise, but elegant letter home to his parents in Indiana describing his experience as a prisoner of war, the collection is made up mostly of short stories concerning war, many of them specifically about the plight of American prisoners in Dresden. Vonnegut is present in these stories in a very unmistakable way. 

Almost all the pieces are undated – they could have been written any time in the 60 years after Vonnegut returned home – but there are historical clues in many of them. Cold War fears permeate some of the stories, most overtly in a story like “The Commandant’s Desk,” in which the author envisions Czechoslovakia under the American occupation after a great war that wrested the country from the control of the Soviet Union; Vonnegut, his first-hand experience of war-time behavior in hand, suggests that one occupier is little better than any other, a suggestion that seems painfully obvious to us in our current era (although the narrator’s relief that under the American occupiers there were “no shootings or torture” feels horrifyingly out of date these days). To Vonnegut, all wars were the same, and he was never shy about telling us so. 

There are examples here, too, of Vonnegut’s penchant for utilizing fantasy to get his anti-war point across. In “Great Day” irrelevant soldiers living in the peaceful world of 2037 use technology to return to the good old days of war, and in “The Unicorn Trap” a father and son struggle to maintain hope and dignity under a cruel Medieval ruler. 

Vonnegut was not, however, very good at promoting hope. “Happy Birthday, 1951” is a simple (and nearly simplistic) story about a man trying to show a young boy something beyond the horror of a war-ravaged city, only to find that the boy is interested only in destruction. The story is the opposite of of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and manages to be even bleaker than McCarthy’s incredibly bleak novel. “Unknown Solider,” a brief piece about the death of a child, is worse; it is, essentially, a parable about the grim future of humanity. 

Perhaps the collection’s most poignant piece is “Wailing Shall Be in All Streets,” an essay about the author’s experience in Dresden. It is undated, but it has the feel of a plea from a young man newly returned from hell, a man who thinks that if people just knew what war really looked like, they would turn without hesitation to peace. 

Vonnegut spent the last 60 years of his life realizing how wrong he was to think that, a fact made clear by the inclusion of a speech he wrote not long before his death. Rambling and nearly incoherent, the speech is relentlessly bitter and sarcastic. It is devoid of hope, which is a grim thing to see. If there really is no hope for us, Vonnegut, with his experience, is one who should know.

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