Book 44: Slaughterhouse-Five

Published in 1969 and written by Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five is an interesting and at times compelling read about war, post-traumatic stress, and how it feels to always be stuck in the past, never able to fully live in the present moment.

Without further ado, let’s get to it.

Plot

Slaughterhouse-Five follows the life of Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist who serves in World War II and who becomes “unstuck in time”, causing him to constantly time travel to different parts of his life, past, present, and future. He is also abducted by an alien race called the Tralfamadorians, spending at least six months on their planet as a kind of zoo animal. The Tralfamadorians are a species also unstuck from time, having the ability to see all times at once. 

Since Billy is constantly being pulled back and forth into different times of his life, the novel doesn’t follow a linear storyline. However, it does focus a lot on Billy’s time in the army, during which he becomes a prisoner of war of the Germans (locked up in a slaughterhouse). While a POW, he survives the bombing of Dresden, which contributes to the PTSD he develops after the war.

Themes

Time

Slaughterhouse-Five is a time travel story that seeks to illustrate what it’s like to live through a war and suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder because of it. Because Billy is constantly travelling through time, involuntarily, he is very much floating through life as if on a breeze. He has no connection to the things happening around him and is constantly disoriented. He’s moving through life, moving through time, but his grasp on reality is tenuous at best since he can never really live in the present moment. And even when he is enjoying a moment, he gets taken out of it in the next one, usually back to a time during the war. He simply can’t escape it.

I believe the idea here from Vonnegut is to illustrate that even once a war is over, it’s not really over for those who lived through it, whether as soldiers or civilians. And, of course, Billy’s last name is Pilgrim, indicating his lot in life as a traveller.

“Billy closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was back in World War Two again. His head was on the wounded rabbi’s shoulder. A German was kicking his feet, telling him to wake up, that it was time to move on.”

As mentioned above, Billy is at one point abducted by an alien race called the Tralfamadorians, who are also unstuck from time. They teach Billy that time is not actually linear, the way humans conceive it to be. Rather time is everything all at once. All moments always exist. This conception of time certainly fits with Billy’s experience as a time traveller, and again is what Vonnegut is aiming to show. Trauma, stress, war, all are experiences that never really leave you.

“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.”

Trauma

Not only is Billy unable to really enjoy his life because he’s constantly slipping and sliding through time, but he also suffers from PTSD due to his time in the war and as a prisoner of war. One of the ways this manifests for Billy is sudden, uncontrollable weeping.

“He was under doctor’s orders to take a nap every day. The doctor hoped that this would relieve a complaint that Billy had: Every so often, for no apparent reason, Billy Pilgrim would find himself weeping. Nobody had ever caught Billy doing it. Only the doctor knew. It was an extremely quiet thing Billy did. And not very moist.”

“Billy Pilgrim could not sleep on his daughter’s wedding night. He was forty-four. The wedding had taken place that afternoon in a gaily striped tent in Billy’s backyard. The stripes were orange and black.”

War

Slaughterhouse-Five is heralded as a great anti-war novel with exceptional moral clarity. The plot device of time travel and Vonnegut’s writing style both do a good job of illustrating the fatalistic desolation that war leaves in its wake, both in the physical environment and in the mental/emotional environment. 

“Even though Billy’s train wasn’t moving, its boxcars were kept locked tight. Nobody was to get off until the final destination. To the guards who walked up and down outside, each car became a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators…Human beings in there were excreting into steel helmets which were passed to the people at the ventilators who dumped them. Billy was a dumper.”

Interestingly, the most compelling paragraph I came across in Slaughterhouse-Five was not written by Vonnegut, but rather by Kevin Powers, who wrote the foreward to the 50th edition version of the novel that I read. Powers is a writer and veteran of the Iraq War. He starts off his foreward by describing a situation during his tour of duty in which an innocent elderly couple is killed before his eyes. This moment, he says, will live with him forever. And it’s what he says next that I found so powerful.

“I am now thirty-eight years old. I live in a rented house in Pittsboro, North Carolina, with my wife, my two daughters, and my dog. I try to be kind. I try not to hurt people. And though I have just told you all the things I know with certainty about that day in Tal Afar, Iraq, when I was twenty-four, I’m still not sure what it means. I don’t know if my being there in that place and at that time makes me a bad person, but on most days I think it means I do not get to claim to be a good one.”

For me, this statement really captures the insanity of war. There are so many costs and they are all so great. In Powers’ example, the lives of the elderly couple are a great cost obviously, and his conception of himself was sacrificed too. He is now all twisted up inside. It’s not good.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Slaughterhouse-Five does a really good job, through the story itself and writing style, of showing how soul-destroying war can be. Vonnegut’s style of short sentences, plain language, and short scenes, combined with the descriptions of Billy’s demeanour and his being pushed and pulled through time, create this interesting, low-energy, fatalistic tone.

Vonnegut himself served in World War II and was taken as a prisoner of war, during which time he actually did survive the bombing of Dresden. So much of Billy’s story is autobiographical. I would have to look more into it, but I’m sure writing this novel also helped Vonnegut process his own experience.

Conclusion

Overall, I would recommend Slaughterhouse-Five as part of the sci-fi canon. It’s a good read and Vonnegut is quite successful at crafting the mood, tone, and message of the story.

Quotations

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. The Dial Press, 2009. Fiftieth Anniversary Kindle Edition.