The Writer's Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five (Books About Books)

by Tom Roston

“But I’ve tried to lower the status of PTSD as the only bad thing that can happen to a person in war. I’ve introduced another kind of injury: moral injury.”

What Shay wants to emphasize is that the betrayal of “what’s right” can have a deeply existential, damaging effect on a soldier’s mind.

“All these facts were simply incomprehensible and had to be forgotten. That, he had decided, was the final truth of the war, and he had greeted it with relief, greeted it eagerly, the simple fact that it was incomprehensible and had to be forgotten. Things just happen, he had decided; they happen and they happen again, and anybody who tries to make sense out of it goes out of his mind.”

“The fact that he can come up with thoughts about the absence of moral clarity means he’s got some moral clarity,”

Morris notes that Civil War veterans tended to describe their involuntary episodes of mental images, of “seeing things,” as phantasmic visitations. Those were the days when people attempted to speak to the dead through seances. Now we settle with looking at a deceased person’s Twitter feed.

He saw too much. And he felt too much.”

Vonnegut would have it: “Do you realize that all great literature,” he wrote, “are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being?”