Armistice Day and Kurt Vonnegut's Birthday
Or: Waiting for the Sound of God
Few writers have written about the horrors of war with the empathy and imagination of Kurt Vonnegut, who was born on this day in 1922. November 11, once known as Armistice Day, was deemed Veterans’ Day in 1954, when Congress passed a bill signed by President Eisenhower declaring November 11 as Veterans’ Day. Vonnegut did not support this change. In the preface to Breakfast of Champions, he wrote, “Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not. So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.”
Why did Vonnegut consider it sacred? He wrote, “When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover (Breakfast of Champion’s protagonist) was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.”
For Vonnegut, Armistice Day is sacred because instead of honoring military service, it commemorates a moment of peace. "It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another.” He adds, “I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God.”
In 2024, there is little talk about peace. Kamala Harris boasts of building “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” While Donald Trump sometimes references his opposition to “stupid wars,” his record as president includes using “the mother of all bombs”, and his comments about the slaughter in Gaza show that he thinks Israel should be even more brutal. But this isn’t about Harris or Trump. It’s about a country that every day loses more of whatever is left of its soul, its devotion to militarism and enthusiastic acceptance of all war, all the time, a national disgrace.
Vonnegut, a POW in World War II and survivor of the bombing in Dresden, knew firsthand about how war injures body and mind. Lawrence R. Broer, author of Vonnegut & Hemingway: Writers at War, explored the psychic wounds both writers experienced from their involvement in war. In an interview published in Talking Vonnegut: Centennial Interviews and Essays, Broer said:
“When I first addressed the question of “wounds,” I explained that while Vonnegut escaped Hemingway’s physical wounds, their career-long efforts to deal with the psychic damage was very similar, the purging of which, as Frank McConnell says, allowed both writers to come to terms with their experience of “apocalypse.” In fact, Charles Shields in his biography, And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life, shows us that Vonnegut’s wounds as a 20-year-old prisoner of war were physical as well, not as permanent as Hemingway’s, but torturous enough. Not only did Vonnegut experience near death by starvation and frost bite, and constant waves of strafing and bombing, but was beaten and knocked unconscious for insubordination while standing up for abused fellow prisoners.”
It took years and successive attempts before either writer could face such an experience directly, spread out over a lifetime. In Kilgore Trout’s words, “these were memories he could only exorcise by telling what they were.” Using their work as therapy and self-discovery, both writers make what Vonnegut calls in Slaughterhouse-Five his “duty dance with death,” a painstaking process of literary exorcism by which the authors become ever more open and courageous definers of embattled childhoods and traumatizing war.”
For the complete interview, see Talking Vonnegut: Centennial Interviews and Essays.
The question of whether Vonnegut had PTSD is addressed in Tom Roston’s book The Writer’s Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five. In an interview, Roston wrote, “Salman Rushdie had a great quote about how Vonnegut left it open to interpretation about whether or not Billy Pilgrim is actually experiencing time travel and Montana Wildhack and the Tralfamadorians. Or is it somehow a symptom of something else, whether it's trauma or the plane crash or something that happened during the war? To me it's clearly the latter but I find it surprising and wonderful that people can experience the book so differently.
Roston added: “I do find it surprising that Kurt throughout his years was never able to say that he was fucked up by the war. He refused to say it. There are a couple of interviews that I found where he said, "That was quite something I went through." But then he says, "But if you're going to experience something you might as well experience something intense." He seemed to talk about it as if it was just something that happened. I don't like to be the armchair psychologist, but it does seem like he is in some form of denial about how awful his experience was.
Now, it's also possible that he had incredible fidelity to the pact he made with his fellow soldiers which was to never talk about it with anyone else. In which case let's talk about saving Kurt. What's amazing is that he can never talk to anybody outside of his circle of fellow soldiers and POW's about how awful it was. Or you could interpret it as maybe he put it on the page in that book and said, "I've put it there; you can interpret it in this sort of lyrical, beautifully fictional way, but I'm going to keep the raw awfulness of what I experienced to myself."
Read the full interview here: Talking Vonnegut: Centennial Interviews and Essays
Breakfast of Champions is a sad, funny, furious novel, “a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.” It’s the follow-up to Slaughterhouse-Five, the book that made Vonnegut famous and gave him a platform for his beliefs. It’s telling that in the opening pages of the first book Vonnegut wrote knowing it would be widely read, his first thoughts are about Armistice Day.
During the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour this November 11th, human beings will not stop butchering each other. There won’t be silence, and the people suffering in war zones across the planet will not hear the voice of God.
The last page on Breakfast of Champions is Vonnegut’s caricature of himself with a tear in his eye. Kurt Vonnegut was right. Armistice Day is sacred. The Children’s Crusade, the Duty Dance with Death, continues with no peace in sight.
Talking Vonnegut: Centennial Interviews and Essays
This is fantastic.