The Story of the Man with Three Braids

Ben Webster was fascinated by the idea of fate. He considered it fortuitous that he should complete his Ph.D. at the same university where Kurt Vonnegut was a student sixty-one years before him. As for his 2007 dissertation, it was almost entirely focused on the connections between Vonnegut’s fiction and his personal life. Vonnegut’s masters research, for example, on the Ghost Dance suggested an analogy between the violence suffered by indigenous tribes in the nineteenth century mid-west and Vonnegut’s travails as an infantryman in World War Two. Captured during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, he survived the strafing and bombing of his prison camp, a stint as a slave laborer in Dresden, and the allied fire-bombing of the city in February 1945, only to bear witness to its ghastly aftermath. When his master’s thesis on the elementary forms of storytelling was rejected as overly simplistic, Vonnegut would have accepted this verdict—or so Ben liked to believe. How could the problem of good and evil be resolved by the stroke of a pen? Even when Vonnegut directly addresses the problem, in Slaughterhouse 5, his fantasies of traveling across time and place to where everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt cannot eradicate his traumatic memories.