Slaughterhouse 5
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 is at once startlingly gritty and wildly sci-fi. Somehow it is both a critical response to the wartime atrocity of Dresden’s bombing, and also a trippy, ironic, even disturbing thought-experiment about the nature of nonlinear time. Originally published in 1969, Slaughterhouse 5 looks back at the end of WWII’s European conflict from the perspective of a handful of American prisoners of war held in Dresden (in slaughterhouse building 5 or, in German, Sclachthof-funf). The novel opens with the self-conscious, unnamed narrator/writer, who shares biographical details with Vonnegut, but whose identity is ambiguous (this is fiction, albeit fiction rooted in Vonnegut’s experience). The writer/narrator will interrupt the story line a few times before the novel’s completion, but for the most part he fades behind the clickety-clack of his typewriter after the first chapter. This is really the story of Billy Pilgrim, a gangly, awkward boy who is anything but a model soldier yet finds himself a German prisoner of war before ever firing a shot. Billy’s story is a wild ride, through space and time but the culmination of Dresden’s fire-bombing keeps it anchored, and the reader returns to Billy’s (and the narrator’s) wartime experience time and time again.
The novel’s first chapter serves as an introduction of sorts; it explains the book’s dedication and introduces the autobiographical narrator/author. Vonnegut was, himself, a prisoner of war housed in Dresden’s Slaughterhouse five in 1945, and he did witness the atrocity of its fire-bombing. He describes winning Guggenheim funding in 1967 to return to Dresden (also autobiographical fact) and it leaves the reader wondering: is this first-person narrator Vonnegut himself, or is it a fictionalized version? As the novel enters chapter two, reading the narrator as Vonnegut gets tricky. Like so much in Slaughterhouse Five, the reader just has to go with it, suspend disbelief, and let the story wash over her.
The tale really begins with the incredible first line of the second chapter: “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time” (17). Vonnegut’s prose continue in this vein. Rambling, descriptive, and succinct, this slender novel packs a serious punch for the reader. There are even some strange (again, trippy is the word that comes to mind) illustrations included. Billy Pilgrim’s story within the novel reminds me a bit of works like The Princess Bride, in which the author creates a fictional author as character, but his drama and conflict is secondary to that of the fictional characters. But then, like so much of Vonnegut’s prose, that reading seems to unravel itself, because, wasn’t Vonnegut himself in Dresden; isn’t this real? And that blurring of lines between fantasy and fact, between fiction and memoir seems to be part of the point.
Vonnegut goes further by creating a second fictional author—his famous science fiction author, Kilgore Trout, arguably also autobiographical in nature—and layering space-and-time travel into a book ostensibly about WWII. This is a part of Vonnegut’s brilliance. He takes the fire-bombing of Dresden, that wildly violent, under-discussed, often-ignored punctuation mark of the American military might on the European front of the Second World War, and layers in strange science fiction about alien abduction and space-time travel. Billy’s experience is bizarre: from his entry into Dresden, unintentionally costumed as a clown, to his time travel, his married life, his time spent with the alien Traflamadorian race (with their wildly different ways of looking at time and experience) and his porn star earthling mate, and even the nature of his death. But Billy Pilgrim, the ophthalmologist, helps us clarify our vision of reality and time and war, through both his wartime experiences and his post-war alien abduction/post-traumatic delusion. He is at once a comic character and a tragic one. Vonnegut’s writing, like Tom Robbins’ or Joseph Heller’s, is wildly funny at times, but his message about war is certainly not light-hearted. Vonnegut provides disturbing, gut-wrenching details about life as a prisoner of war and the brutality of civilian death in war (as seen in Dresden), that are anything but humorous. Even Billy’s senility isn’t funny, even if it is zany in its outward expression. Slaughterhouse Five reminds the reader of the horror of war and its ability to haunt surviving combatants and civilian bystanders for life, even when it does so in fantastic, difficult to understand terms.
Arguably, the most famous—and most often repeated—line in Slaughterhouse Five is “So it goes,” and it is, as Rushdie points out in a New Yorker article from last year (which I strongly encourage anyone who reads Slaughterhouse 5 to read too, although do so after reading the book as it abounds with spoilers), used only with regard to death . And it is used a lot; there is plenty of death that Vonnegut describes in Slaughterhouse 5. But, because time is nonlinear in Vonnegut’s book, the astute reader knows many of the things that will happen before they do (Vonnegut even gives the reader the final word of the story in the first chapter). This vantage gives the reader a comfortable vista from which to witness death and destruction, from which to nod along, “So it goes.” We, the readers, know, for example that Edgar Derby, the middle-aged, high school teacher turned father-figure soldier to all the other (much younger) fellow prisoners of war, will die by firing squad in Dresden. We know that from the beginning, and yet, we watch his life as a prisoner of war unfold and we love his for his generosity of spirit and the comfort he provides characters like Billy Pilgrim. And that irony, that toying with free will and destiny and death, is precisely Vonnegut’s project.
Likewise, we, the readers, know that Dresden and nearly all its inhabitants will be destroyed by the Allied firestorm of February 13-15, 1945. Vonnegut quotes from David Irving’s The Destruction of Dresden (1964) in which the book’s foreword by a USAF Lt. Gen. Eaker, as quoted, claims “that British and American bombers killed 135,000 people in the attack on Dresden” (137, italics Vonnegut’s). The city of Dresden, however, issued a 2010 report in which the number of causalities topped out at 25,000. Regardless, be it twenty-five or one hundred and twenty-five thousand, the number of civilian dead in Dresden was obscene, especially when one considers it came so near the war’s end; was it necessary? Historians continue to debate that fact, but to readers of Slaughterhouse 5 can easily answer the query.
In Slaughterhouse 5 Vonnegut spotlights the Dresden firestorm and forces his reader to sit with the terrors of war. This antiwar tone, it’s worth noting, no doubt resonated at the time of its publication, as the nation faced another war in Vietnam and the many moral dilemmas that conflict aroused on the home front. Until reading this novel, I was certainly aware of the bombing of Dresden (having read at least a sentence or two about it in high school social studies), but I had never really dug into its how and why questions. Vonnegut’s novel, however, made it impossible to skim over the destruction of Dresden (just as Sharma Shield’s, previously reviewed, The Cassandra makes ignoring the nuclear fallout in Japan hopeless). Thus, this novel is wildly successful, even brilliant, in creating in the reader an unsettled feeling (in the awkward, peculiar, and bizarre life of Billy Pilgrim) and anchoring it to the horror of Dresden, of war, of death. And “so it goes,” Vonnegut would say, which is true, I suppose. Death comes for us all, and yet, if Billy Pilgrim (and the Traflamadorians) are correct, every moment exists all at once; and I would add, every moment exists for the reader as the writer has skill and inspiration to present it, nonlinear, synchronous, concurrent.
A Few Great Passages:
“‘You were just babies in the war—like the ones upstairs!’
I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.
’But you’re not going to write it that way, are you.’ This wasn’t a question. It was an accusation. [ . . .] ‘Well, I know,’ she [Mary O’Hare to whom the book is dedicated] said. ‘You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have lots more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs’” (11).
“Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death any times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between” (17).
“All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber” (62).
“We Traflamadorians read them [the words in their books] all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, expect that the author has chosen them carefully, so that when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at once” (64).
“Traflamadorians, of course, say that every creature and plant in the Universe is a machine. It amuses them that so many Earthlings are offended by the idea of being machines” (112).
“Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on Tralfamadore” (145).
Bibliography:
“The Bombing of Dresden.” History.com, originally published 11/9/09, updated 2/14/20, viewed 6/10/20.
Rushdie, Salman. “What Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five Tells Us Now,” The New Yorker: June 13, 2019.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse 5. Vintage: New York, 2000.
