Kurt Vonnegut, the author and narrator, begins by stating that the story he is about to tell is true, “more or less.” On a Guggenheim grant in 1967, Vonnegut traveled back to
Kurt Vonnegut, the author and narrator, begins by stating that the story he is about to tell is true, “more or less.” On a Guggenheim grant in 1967, Vonnegut traveled back to Dresden with a wartime friend, Bernard O’Hare, and asked a cab driver how the city has fared since the firebombing of 1944. The cab driver says the city is in good shape, mostly, and conditions under Communism have improved. The cab driver later mails O’Hare a letter expressing a desire to meet Vonnegut and O’Hare again “in a world of peace and freedom.”
The novel’s “frame story,” or story that introduces another story, involves Vonnegut trying to recollect, with O’Hare, exactly what happened in Dresden during the war. This opening section also introduces in important element in the novel: its irony, or the distance between what the characters desire and what actually takes place. Here, the cab driver’s wish for peace is undercut by the Vietnam War, which rages even as Vonnegut writes the book.
Since returning from Europe in 1945, Vonnegut has spent 23 years attempting to write a book about the firebombing of Dresden, which he witnessed as a prisoner of war (POW). When people ask what he is writing, he replies, often, that it is a book about Dresden. One friend says that he ought to write an anti-glacier book, instead of an anti-war book, since glaciers and wars are equally unstoppable.
This comparison of war and glaciers—that both are unstoppable—is a first instance of “fate” in the novel. One cannot stop something that