Slaughterhouse 5

The full review is available at The Gray Planet.

I suspect most readers either love or hate Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. They either think he is silly or profound, a doddering fool or a wizard. The same is true of his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

His style is at times simplistic, even childish. His prose is sparse, his paragraphs and chapters short. He skitters from scene to scene with abandon, like a child exploring the world. He uses varieties of humor to make tolerable the horror of his subject.

And yet, the effect of this simplicity, childishness and funny stuff is a novel that is profoundly dark, filled with portent and laced by lessons the world and the people in it must learn or forever be doomed. Vonnegut is a trickster, a clever wordsmith who distracts you with a smile and then hits you with a hammer.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, the Vonnegut's topic is war, and particularly the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II, which resulted in the deaths of 25,000 civilians (although Vonnegut, writing in the 1960s, references then contemporary estimates in the hundreds of thousands–an exaggeration which emphasizes his point). Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut's main character, is a POW in Dresden at the time of the bombing. Vonnegut himself was a POW in Dresden and he speaks, through Billy Pilgrim, with authority about the horrors, injustices, and terrible consequences of war.

For Vonnegut, there is no making sense of this war, nor of this bombing, nor, by extension, of the human condition. And so, Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time and flits back and forth throughout his life, visiting moments here and there, now and then, reflecting on the absurdity of war, the inevitability of death, the chronic sadness of life and the futility of any attempts to make sense of it all.

To add to the absurdity, Pilgrim is abducted by aliens, the Tralfamadorians. The Tralfamadorians are strange-looking creatures with their eyes in the palm of their hands so they have to hold up their open hands to view the world, as if they were saluting, or waving.

The Tralfamadorians have solved all the problems Billy sees–they simply ignore them and remember the good times. But even though Billy may want to do this, it doesn't work for him. He cannot control his skipping through time and this results in reliving moments where he is witness to horror and death because that is what happened. There is no escape for Billy. In the unreality that Vonnegut creates where Billy moves spontaneously from one time to another and where he is a specimen in a Tralfamadorian zoo, he cannot escape the reality of his own experiences and of his own world. He is unstuck in time, but stuck in his own life and his own world as he experienced it. He cannot change it, as much as he might desire to.

That Vonnegut can create such complexity and depth of meaning with simple prose and absurd action is wizardry. We read breezily through the asynchronous events of Billy's life, flying along through short chapters and brief paragraphs, but long before we arrive at the end, we realize that this is a tragic story, and it is our story, everyone's story. So it goes.

Is this science fiction? Yes, but not really. There are certainly science fiction tropes here: time travel; aliens with a unique culture; even virtual space travel. But none of these are the focus of the novel as they are in real science fiction. The science fiction elements of Slaughterhouse-Five are simply plot devices, tools which Vonnegut uses to expand and elaborate his themes.

LeGuin, in The Left Hand of Darkness creates an alien culture and uses it as a means of exploring human sexuality. For LeGuin, the story follows from the world she has created, and the story cannot exist without the science fiction element. Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five tells a mundane story of a man devastated by the experience of war and the manifestations of his trauma include experiences that he describes in science fiction terms. This enhances the unreality of Billy's experience, and allows Vonnegut to point out how absurd his reality is–that World War II and the Dresden bombing have caused him to become unstuck in his own mind and to retreat to a fantasy of alien abduction to save his sanity. This juxtaposition of fantasy and reality and the ill-defined border between the two for Billy provides Vonnegut with a means of framing his anti-war polemic. How can it be, Vonnegut asks, that human beings can treat each other so? Do we not see the unreality and absurdity of it? Do we, like the Trafalmadorians, simply ignore it and therefore trivialize it? So it goes.

In this sense, time travel is not important to the story, it is a plot device used by Vonnegut to illustrate the profound effect that Billy Pilgrim's war experiences have on his psyche–Billy Pilgrim is not really unstuck in time, this is just a manifestation of trauma he has experienced–his center cannot hold and his mind flits randomly from memory to memory.

Nor is the story built upon the existence of the Tralfamadorians, they are a foil to provide Billy Pilgrim with simple but effective answers to the question of how to live with his trauma–remember the good times, ignore the bad. Similarly, Billy's kidnapping by the Tralfamadorians and his time in the Tralfamadorian zoo with Montana Wildhack are Vonnegut's method of providing Billy with some relief from his despair and confusion. On Tralfamadore, with Montana, Billy is content in a way he is not in his own world. He treats Montana with respect and is rewarded. In the zoo on Tralfamadore with Montana is the only time that Billy is content. But this contentment comes with a price–Billy is unable to change anything, because, as the Tralfamadorians explain, everything has already happened.

The result of all of this is a novel that stays in one's mind long after reading it. Where other novels, as compelling as they may be, fade away after a few months, Slaughterhouse-Five blazes like the afterimage of actinic light on your retinas even after fifty years.