For my choice novel, I chose to read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. This story is Vonnegut's somewhat auto-biographic and mostly fictional account of the 1945 firebombing in Drensen, Germany. Slaughterhouse-Five follows the life of Billy Pilgrim and his journey of becoming unstuck in time. Billy claims to have been abducted by Tralfamadorians and taken back to their planet to be studied. Billy says that while he was there, the Tralfamadorians taught him many things. One of them being the idea that, "All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist...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. 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.'"
In contrast to this expose on the horrors of war, is Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark. Her belief that the idea of Africanism is represented in all American texts and that without it literature would not be what it is. In her second short essay Romancing the Shadows, Morrison focuses on the metaphoric use of darkness to symbolize black and lightness to symbolize white. "These images of impenetrable whiteness need contextualizing to explain their extraordinary power, pattern, and consistency. Because they appear almost always in conjunction with representations of black or Africanist people who are dead, impotent, or under complete control, these images of blinding whiteness seem to function as both antidote for whiteness--a dark and abiding presence that moves the hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing." When I first read this, I found Morrison's angle of our association to light being good and dark being bad to be unique. Yet after re-reading a passage from Slaughterhouse-Five, I truly realized that the points Toni Morrison was making when she said her theory of Africanism could be related to any text, even the ones not about race.
Protagonist Billy Pilgrim is on his way to Lions Club luncheon meeting. "He was stopped by a signal in the middle of Ilium's black ghetto. The people who lived here hated it so much that they had burned down a lot of it a month before. It was all they had, and they'd wrecked it. The neighborhood reminded Billy of some of the towns he had seen in the war. The curbs and sidewalk were crushed in many places, showing where the National Guard tanks and half-tracks had been." Billy's association of this black ghetto to the destruction he witnessed in Drenson, a huge theme in Slaughterhouse-Five being how destructive war can be, reinforces Morrison's ideas of white/light symbolizing what is good and dark/black symbolizing what is not.
Although, while reading Toni Morrison and Kurt Vonnegut I believed one had absolutely no correlation to the other. Yet when I sat down to analyze Slaughterhouse-Five, I found that because it was so easy to find an example of what Morrison had been proposing in a book that had little to nothing to do with race, it only helped validate her argument.
