Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five is the story of Billy Pilgrim, a man who has become unstuck in time. Unstuck in time, you ask? Allow me to explain. Billy Pilgrim is a time traveller; he somehow developed the ability to randomly be transported between different periods of his life, from his birth to his death and through everything in between. He is also kidnapped by a flying saucer, and transported by an alien race – the Trafalmadorians – back to their home planet, to be exhibited in a zoo.

Through the Trafalmadorians, Billy comes to understand what is happening to him. This alien race can see in four dimensions (the fourth being time, of course), and so they understand that linearity is an illusion – every moment of a person’s life is happening at the same time, always. Because of this, they do not mourn anyone who dies, because they know they are still alive in all the other moments of their lives. All they say is, so it goes.

This is a rotten plot summary – trying to explain the plot of this book is no easy task. Like Billy Pilgrim, we are transported back and forth through the story, moving between the past, the present and the future. And although aliens and time travel play an important role in the story, they are not what this book is about. What this book primarily is about is WW2, and, like any book about war, it is about people.

Slaughterhouse-Five is the name of the place where Billy Pilgrim was held prisoner in Dresden – where he was when the city was destroyed. I’ve come across several different descriptions of the bombing of Dresden in fiction. There’s Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, for example, or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I find them horrifying, and this was no exception. It’s not so much what they say, but what is left unsaid. It’s all the suffering and despair and death and destructions that are hinted at, left between the lines. Because there are things so horrible that mere words will never fully encompass them.

Slaughterhouse-Five is a humorous book. I know that seems incompatible with the above paragraph, but it isn’t. The book is funny and poignant, wise and sad. It mirrors our frailty, our fear, our irrationality, and it does a great job at demonstrating the absurdity of war, and how, with so much death involved, nobody wins.

When I was reading the book, I kept thinking that the writing style reminded me of something or someone – something I really liked. It took me a while to realize that what it reminded me of was (duh) Kurt Vonnegut. I read Cat’s Cradle some three years ago and I hadn’t realized how much it had stuck with me. I think that if I get to know his work better, Vonnegut could become one of my favourite authors. I definitely will get to know his work better.

I love his writing. I love how, in the middle of a seemingly light text, we can find little islands of wisdom and insight, or little images that are all the more moving because they are sudden. Allow me to share a few of my favourite passages:

Her voice was nearly gone, so, in order to hear her, Billy had to put his ear right next to her papery lips. She evidently had something very important to say.
"How..?" she began, and she stopped. She was too tired. She hoped that she wouldn't have to say the rest of the sentence, that Billy would finish it for her.
But Billy had no idea what was on her mind. "How what, Mother?" he prompted.
She swallowed hard, shed some tears. Then she gathered energy from all over her ruined body, even from her toes and fingertips. At last she had accumulated enough to whisper this complete sentence:
"How did I get so old?"

And this, which describes Billy watching a War movie in reverse:

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

And finally:

There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

Reviewed at:
Just a (Reading) Fool
Bold. Blue. Adventure.