The stories so far...

Vonnegut’s and O’Brian’s narrative style are similar by nature of their apparent lack of organization. The styles share the characteristic of jumping around chronologically, speaking of the wartime and post wartime experience side by side, and finally by seemingly avoiding making any kind of concrete point. While clearly this slightly confusing, it is also the nature of the combat experience. Actual war is not measured in chronological order. There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, the actual war experience is more in tune to a start without an end. The effect of war on the human being is something that is endless. A soldier goes to war, but he may never come back. I don’t mean that in a literal way (although it may certainly be so), I mean it in the terms that soldiers come back missing limbs, suffer the symptoms of what is currently known as PTSD, or any other host of issues. This makes telling the story difficult. The classic story arc does not translate well into the war story. Therefore they tend to jump around, it’s only natural.

Secondly, combat does not have a climax. There is never any final battle or last mission. Combat is a series of events that encompass their own individual story. A group goes out on a patrol, nothing happens, they return to base. The next day the same group goes out on patrol and several soldiers are killed in action. The next day they go on patrol again and nothing happens. This perpetual loop of action and inaction builds a sense of irrelevance in the soldier and tinges the memory of the events with a surrealness that is hard to articulate. It’s hard to tell a story when the end happens without any sense of closure. This creates a genre that tends to be a collection of vignettes that usually tie in to an overarching theme, but there is rarely a long enough single war story to fill the space between the covers of a book.

In Slaughterhouse there is the scene where the German soldiers find Billy and Roland. If they told their story how would it end? It would be entertaining at first, "We found two Americans fighting themselves!" But then what? The entertaining part is over. If they told the truth the rest would sound like this, "Then we stole all their valuables and took them to an assembly area." That’s not entertaining. A story teller, no matter how amateur, wants to tell an entertaining story, so why not change the end? What does it matter? "We found two American fighting themselves! So what did we do? We started laying down bets on who would win. We stood watching for several minutes until one beat the other and then took them to the assembly area. On the way we asked why they were fighting and guess what? Neither one knew! Americans right? What a bunch of idiots!" Now that’s a story that could get some laughs. It’s a story that has a conclusion, it wraps up fairly nicely, and best of all, its all true, more or less.