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Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else is dead machinery.1
Critics have increasingly acknowledged that satire's goal is not to reform readers but to amuse and provoke them - to challenge them to think, to become aware.2 Similarly, Kurt Vonnegut argues that the purpose of all artists "is to make mankind aware of itself, in all its complexity. . . ."3 Moreover, in an interview with David Standish, Vonnegut declares that all "artists should be treasured as alarm systems."4 Of course, alarms may cause alarm; nevertheless, they are useful because they wake us up. They make us pay attention. More importantly, they direct our attention to facts we might otherwise forget, facts we might prefer to forget. For instance, when Standish asks Vonnegut what he believes the Vietnam War has done to Americans, he replies: "It's broken our hearts. It prolonged something we started to do to ourselves at Hiroshima: it's simply a continuation of that: an awareness of how ruthless we are."5
Clearly, humankind's ruthless disregard for life - especially human life - is the central subject of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Lawrence Broer's observations underscore this point: "If one counts deaths that are predicted or imagined as well as those that occur, there may be a greater proliferation of corpses in Slaughterhouse-Five than in any other twentieth-century novel:
We encounter death by starvation, rotting, incineration, squashing, gassing, shooting, poisoning, bombing, torturing, hanging, and relatively routine death by disease. We get the deaths of dogs, horses, pigs, Vietnamese soldiers, crusaders, hunters, priests, officers, hobos, actresses, prison guards, a slave laborer, a suffragette, Jesus Christ, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Billy Pilgrim's mother and father, his wife, Edgar Derby, Roland Weary, the regimental chaplain's assistant, Paul Lazzaro, Colonel Wild Bob; we get the deaths of a bottle of champagne, billions of body lice, bacteria, and fleas; the novel; entire towns, and finally the universe.
Vonnegut would undoubtedly approve of such a list, for it captures the spirit of the grotesque - wherein there exists a "clash" between "the gruesome or horrifying content and the comic manner in which it is presented" - that permeates Slaughterhouse-Five. Moreover, in a brilliant reductio ad absurdum, Vonnegut uses the same phrase...