The Psychiatrists Were Right: Anomic Alienation in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

When critics are not discussing the antiwar message of Slaughterhouse-Five, they usually analyze Billy Pilgrim's (and sometimes, by extension, Kurt Vonnegut's) mental health. Leonard Mustazza, Lawrence Broer, and Peter Freese have all done so, at least in passing in their work on Vonnegut, but one of the most recent and most thorough analyses has come in Susanne Vees-Gulani's article "Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: A Psychiatric Approach to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five." Vees-Gulani reads Pilgrim through the lens of PTSD, arguing that he matches with the description of the disorder extremely well. Without attempting to argue with how well Pilgrim does match that description (where I think she has done an excellent job), I would like to argue that she does misread at least part of the novel and thus omit another problem that Vonnegut is struggling with in this novel.

When Vees-Gulani discusses the lack of treatment Billy receives in the psychiatric hospital, she writes, "Yet just as mainstream American society does not provide an atmosphere conducive to recovery from the horrors of war, the psychiatric establishment also fails Billy," later adding, "Billy thus falls victim to the previous tendency in psychiatry to underestimate the role of an 'external factor, something outside the person' in causing trauma and to focus instead only on 'individual vulnerability as the reason for people's suffering.'"¹ However, even Vonnegut allows that the psychiatrists might be at least partially correct in their interpretation of Billy and Rosewater's mental struggles.

Vonnegut tells the reader that "they [Pilgrim and Rosewater] had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in the war" (emphasis mine).² The distinction that begins with "partly" is an important one. As Thomas Hoffman writes concerning Player Piano, "In short, Vonnegut is dealing with the failure of the human ego in crisis with society … and the man versus machine thing is his means of explaining individual loneliness. The complex 'machine' here is more than a mechanical system, [sic] it is the intricate complexity of American society."³ In the same way that it is more than the machines in Player Piano that cause Paul Proteus' isolation, Billy and Rosewater's lives are not meaningless only because of what they had both seen during the war, as horrible as those events were for each of them, not caused wholly by PTSD, as Vees-Gulani argues; instead, there is more behind their psychological trouble. The psychiatrists in the veterans' hospital, in fact, do not believe that Billy is there because of the war at all: "They didn't think it had anything to do with the war. They were sure Billy was going to pieces because his father had thrown him into the deep end of the Y.M.C.A. swimming pool when he was a little boy, and had then taken him to the rim of the Grand Canyon."⁴ While Vonnegut may be attacking the psychiatric community of the time that attributed all of one's problems to one's childhood or that was unable to attribute problems to external factors, however, he is also criticizing a breakdown in society, which leads Billy (and Rosewater) to suffer from what Emile Durkheim refers to as anomie.⁵

In The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim defines abnormal forms of the division of labor in society, and anomie is the first one he discusses. He points out that "the state of anomy is impossible wherever solidary organs are sufficiently in contact or sufficiently prolonged. In effect, being contiguous, they are quickly warned, in each circumstance, of the need which they have of one another, and, consequently, they have a lively and continuous sentiment of their mutual dependence."⁶ It is this breakdown of dependence, then, that leads to anomie, and it is clear that Billy suffers from a breakdown of mutual dependence, as he has no one to depend upon, and no one depends upon him.

Previous critics, however, have ignored this idea in Slaughterhouse-Five, focusing instead on Slapstick, its subtitle of "Lonesome...