Slaughterhouse-Five, the Serenity Prayer, and Abstract Writing
God,
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom always to tell the difference
I find it interesting when an author includes words in a novel that aren’t theirs. When I ask myself why Kurt Vonnegut would quote this prayer, my guess is it’s his way of describing why he made the novel a combination of fiction and nonfiction.
The problem I had with creating this narrative was I believed what I wrote was an absolute truth because everything in it was true. I never considered how ill equipped I was at deciding which moments were and weren’t relevant.
The issue wasn’t that I left out major moments of my life. The flaw was excluding the small moments that defined the way I reacted to the big ones. The true story I created became a justification for unhealthy decisions. I told myself anyone who went through the same major events would react the same way.
Instead of creating a memoir, the author turned his literal war stories into a science fiction novel that contains aliens, time travel, and nonlinear experiences.
Instead of viewing myself as powerless over alcohol, I view myself as powerless over being human. When I say the Serenity Prayer, the inherent flaws of being human are what I request the serenity to accept.
If I couldn’t create an etiological narrative of my life, I can imagine the challenge of trying to turn personal war experiences into a series of events with causal links. My life has relatively few characters, but wars involve millions of people and multiple nations.
What makes a “four-dimensional story” theoretical is it’s read all at once while humans can only read one word at a time. Although this type of story isn’t possible, the novel describes characteristics of it a human being can understand: “There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.”
At one point, two characters are in a psychiatric hospital working though post-war issues. The novel says, “they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help.”
When I read this book, I hear someone structuring a novel as a “four-dimensional story” to help conceptualize their real-life experiences in a healthy manner. Although truth is sacrificed by adopting fictional elements, the story maintains authenticity.
Because the novel is a “four-dimensional story”, the telegrams are individual moments, and separating them allows the story to jump back and forth in time.
I believe the reason for separating moments is to remove causal connection between them. If the narrative moves from 1968 to 1944, and then from 1944 to 1957, it becomes impossible to draw a direct line between the three events.
Instead of moments, I use telegrams to try to represent individual ideas. Presenting my thoughts as a loose collection of ideas instead of a structured argument helps me conceptualize my experiences, as it’s closer to the way I experience my thoughts.
The fear with intentionally leaving ideas out of an essay is that it affects how true what I’m writing is. This essay has focused entirely on Slaughterhouse-Five, but I’m confident it wouldn’t be the same if I hadn’t read The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. Leaving this out feels wrong.
Instead of trying to include every relevant idea, I add the infinity symbol between telegrams to remind myself how much I’m leaving out in comparison to what I include. This is my attempt at creating an authentic story.
Authenticity is also rewarding. If I intentionally hide part of who I am from people, I’m indirectly saying there’s something wrong with that part of me. If I’m open about myself, I’m accepting every piece of me I choose to share.
The novel discusses the story of Lot’s wife from the Bible. She turns into a pillar a salt when she looks back after being told not to. The author acknowledges that humans can only look back at the past instead of reliving it. The opening chapter closes with a confession, “This [book] is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.”
The line between self-conscious and self-aware is too thin for me to see sometimes. I believe this is because I’m trying to treat my ideas as if they’re independent from me, and what makes my writing unique is the way I combine the ideas together.
I believe this is like considering a definition independent from its dictionary. While this is the simplest way to treat a definition, the reality is the words used in the definition are defined by the same dictionary.
If Slaughterhouse-Five was a failure because the author was a pillar of salt, my writings are failures because I’m a reference that can only refer to itself.
When I wrote the nonfiction account of my life, the problem wasn’t its inaccuracy. It was the amount of trust I placed in my ability to retell the past. I was concerned with making sense of the past because I was focused on improving my future. Now, I believe there’s more value in using writing to observe the moment I’m in.
I opened this essay by guessing the author explicitly quoted the Serenity Prayer twice to indirectly explain his combination of fiction and nonfiction.
When I read Slaughterhouse-Five, I hear someone requesting the serenity to accept their inability to rationalize the past, the courage to tell an honest story about the moment they’re in, and the wisdom to tell when they’re trying to write a true story instead of an authentic one.
I tend to overapply my life experiences to other people. I believe I hear these things in the novel because they’re all things I indirectly request when I say the Serenity Prayer.
Bonus video: