Book #107: Slaughterhouse-Five

Book #107: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

August 13, 2014

I started this book during my workout at the gym. When I saw how far I was able to get in just an hour (the electronic version on my phone doesn’t give me page numbers), I was like, fuck it, I’ll finish it today. Considering that I outlined the curriculum for three of my sections this morning as well, I don’t think it was time wasted.

The only Vonnegut I’d read previously was the short story “Harrison Bergeron.” That’s a story that I’ve used in language arts classes since my first year, and it always goes over well. I had high expectations going into Vonnegut’s best known and most influential novel, and I was not in the least disappointed.

The story of Billy Pilgrim is told by a fictitious narrator, who is probably based on Vonnegut himself. This unnamed narrator describes how he spent years deciding how to write a book about what happened in Dresden, Germany at the end of World War II. During the Allies last attacks on a weakened Germany, the city of Dresden, previously untouched in the war, was fire-bombed, leaving thousands dead and the city in ruins. A group of about 100 American soldiers (according to the book, which is probably accurate considering that Vonnegut himself was really there, just as he has his narrator there, too) survived the bombings in their shelter, beneath a slaughterhouse. They were kept imprisoned in Slaughterhouse #5…hence, the name of the book.

But the whole thing isn’t set in the war or in Dresden. It jumps back and forth in time frequently. This could be due to many things, but it seems that Billy Pilgrim is dealing with serious mental illness. Young Billy, in the war, is a character that I could relate to. He was polite to an irritating degree, kind of clueless about his situation (just kind of following orders), and kind of just acting on his instincts. The trauma of the war, it seems, triggered a sensation of jumping back and forth in his life. However, the problem with my theory is that the events that he could foresee (marrying and having a life with Valencia, getting into and surviving the plane crash, etc) all came true. So it’s an intriguing question that Vonnegut leaves unanswered: what’s really going on here?

In addition to the time-traveling, Billy also believes that he was abducted by aliens and kept in a zoo for several years, that a young actress was put in there with him, and that they had a child together. His return to Earth is never explained, whatever that’s meant to indicate. In their prison on a far away planet, the two of them do not despair, but seem to live a normal, happyish life…just like any average American might have anyway, except their being naked all the time.

His ideas about the alien abducting seemed to have been fueled by his reading of science fiction novels by Kilgore Trout, who is apparently a character in other Vonnegut works (in fact, a number of characters from his other works make appearances in this one…interesting). Still, the accuracy of his “time traveling” or his visions or whatever leaves some things open to the reader.

Most of the details of the book seem realistic, besides all the alien stuff happening in Billy’s own head, but Vonnegut also presented a futuristic (it would have been the 1970s) America, which had been divided up into many different countries…probably to strip it of power as punishment for the Vietnam War, which is mentioned a bit in this text (which was published in 1969). Yes, it seemed like things were pretty bad at that point, just like they’ve been seeming pretty bad lately. The constant refrain of “so it goes” after any mention of death might have gotten irritating at times, but I felt like, while it might be seen as being flippant toward death, I think it has rather the opposite effect.

There’s a seemingly-random scene that involves an asshole of an elderly millionaire, who was in the hospital room with Billy when he was recovering from the plane crash, having his very young wife, who had learning disabilities, read the transcript of a statement that President Truman made after the bombing of Hiroshima. The way that the president was so flip when giving out big numbers was disturbing, and he was talking on about using more bombs, destroying more Japanese cities and taking more lives, all in the name of over-retribution for Pearl Harbor. I can say today that our past few presidents have not approached any war or armed conflict with the intent of taking as many lives as possible…at least not publicly.

There is a section at the end of the book where Vonnegut’s narrator gives a prediction about the world population reaching 7 billion before the year 2000. We made it, I think, or came really really close, and have exceeded that number now. One character was flip about it, saying that so many lives…not everyone can be significant. Which comes off as being really inhumane. But while it’s true that death happens, and sometimes that is just how it goes, human life is always significant. I feel like Vonnegut felt that way and approached this story with that in mind. It was interesting to see that the Nazis depicted in this book were, if not friendly and accommodating to all, at least not overly cruel to the American and British prisoners. I feel like I read that Vonnegut was not treated so well in the same slaughterhouse that he was a POW in, but he didn’t show any of that in this book. They all treat each other as human beings, which is obviously not the way that all POWs and other Nazi prisoners were treated in the war. The Holocaust is only mentioned a little bit, but I guess that wasn’t Vonnegut’s experience in the war. It does describe the conditions of Russian POWs, much worse than the Americans and British, as Russia and Germany were bitter enemies and Russians were Communists. The characters themselves don’t express much pity towards the Russians, though they do refuse to join a turncoat American Nazi in fighting Russia on that front. Plus, there’s the scene that shows a poor starving Russian POW helping Billy, who is strung out on morphine after a nervous episode at dinner, when he gets caught in the fence separating their camps. There are these bright shimmers of humanity in this book, and I almost felt like, as I kept reading “so it goes” after the mention of death, that it was almost a tribute to those who had died. “So it goes,” that’s true, but with a tip of the hat, to acknowledge the person or people, to acknowledge that they had lived and been human, and were significant for that reason alone.