Robert Pilgrim: The Only John Wayne?

            Every soldier portrayed in Slaughterhouse-Five is either incompetent or dead or both. That reinforces the messages that war is a pointless exercise where children are sent off to get randomly killed, and makes sure there’s no part for John Wayne. Or it would, if there weren’t a weird exception: Billy’s son Robert.

            The first time Robert is mentioned is in the initial telling of Billy’s life, which says that he was a bad kid in high school, but then he joined the Green Berets, fought in Vietnam, and became “a fine young man” (31). The next time is when Robert is conceived, and the narration reveals that he will be a bad kid in high school, but then join the Green Berets and “straighten out” (151). Over the next few pages, he isn’t even referred to as Robert but as “the Green Beret.” The most detailed profile comes when Robert visits Billy at the hospital, when he is wearing the Green Beret uniform and is decorated with “a Purple Heart and a Silver Star and a Bronze Star with two clusters” (242). It also dutifully mentions that he was a bad kid in high school, but he straightened out when he joined the Green Berets.

            Every time his name comes up, he is identified as a Green Beret who was a bad kid in high school but now he’s shaped up. He is the epitome of a military success story, as shown by his large collection of medals. He is a John Wayne character. What happened to there not being any of those?

            The only thing about Robert that makes him not as John Wayne is how shallow his character is. We know three things about him: He dropped out of high school, he joined the Green Berets, and that he turned out to be a great person. There are a couple of extra details, but they all fall into one of those categories. And that’s it. We don’t know what kinds of books he reads, what hobbies he has, how tall he is (although he does have short, blond hair), or anything else that would make him a person. More words go to describing what he wears than who he is.

            The most important thing about Robert is that he’s a Green Beret. That, presumably, is not how he would like to be thought of. But that’s how Americans view military veterans as a whole. Maybe that’s Vonnegut’s point: Join the military if you want, but then the only thing people will know about you is that your job is to kill other people.

Has Harold Bloom Missed the Point?

            Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo describes a fight between proponents of Jes Grew and the Atonists. The book itself is a rebellion against Atonist conventions of what novels should be, violating conventions left and right. The title page comes after chapter one. After finishing chapter 52, the reader finds another chapter 52. Typos litter the text. In some places, the placement of the letters on the page looks like it was printed badly (e.g. the word “astrologer” midway through page 16). In any traditional book, these things would be considered errors and be corrected before publication.

            It’s also a recurring theme that Jes Grew cannot be controlled by Atonism. The Talking Android plan assumes that the Atonists can find some person who can speak for Jes Grew, but that’s not how it works. Jes Grew cannot be pinned down as a single idea, preventing it from being exploited by the narrow-minded Atonists. When Safecracker Gould tries to distill Jes Grew into his poem “Harlem Tom-Toms”, he just writes bad poetry. Even more damning is that the Atonists listening in the room don’t realize it’s just bad poetry until PaPa LaBas bursts in and exposes Gould. Actual Jes Grew is incompatible with Atonist ways of thinking.

            But that whole message is undermined by a dependent clause on the back cover: “Cited by literary critic Harold Bloom as one of the five hundred most significant books in the Western canon…” The list, available online, does indeed contain five hundred works of literature and Mumbo Jumbo is one of them. But so are six works by John Milton, who is explicitly cited in Mumbo Jumbo as an Atonist apologist. Despite his best efforts, Reed’s novel has been absorbed into Atonist literary criticism.