Enjoying Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is easy; trying to
make complete sense of it, however, is a much more arduous task. Laden with
idiosyncratic humor, supernatural occurrences, and many intentionally
incoherent plot devices, the novel is very ambiguous in nature, and Vonnegut
has made it clear that his writing style isn’t limited by logic. There’s
underlying significance to nearly every sentence that Vonnegut has crafted, who
also strongly gives the impression that he’s not only writing this to entertain
reader with compelling narrative and prose, but is also trying to illustrate a
point about humanity and war.
The novel is a strange mix of both fiction and
fact, and is told from the prospective of two different protagonists—Billy
Pilgrim, allegedly based off of Vonnegut’s real life comrade-in-arms Edward
Crone, and an omniscient being that we’re led to believe is Vonnegut himself.
The story is predominantly told from an omniscient third-person view, following
the plight of Billy Pilgrim, who is, as described by the author, “stuck in
time”. Billy is not bound by the natural, linear order of time; his life is
experienced in an inconsistent order, where he jumps seamlessly through random
periods in his life. This structure one of many devices that make Slaughterhouse-Five such a distinct and
unconventional novel, but is also one of many devices that make Slaughterhouse-Five a difficult novel to
clearly and easily follow.
If one were to compile every event
in Billy’s life that is detailed in the novel and organize it into an orderly
timeline, the first event to be listed would be his birth, which occurs on the
fourth of July. Billy’s childhood is seldom discussed; we’re given only one
scene, where a young Billy is dragged against his will to a body of water and
forced to swim. This is Billy’s first recorded traumatic incident, which
concludes with a terse note detailing the emotions of resentment Billy began to
feel towards all things with a pulse.
Fast-forward a few years, and Billy
is drafted into World War II. Billy’s experiences in World War II are regarded
by many as the “focal point” of the novel for many reasons. Billy Pilgrim is a
peculiar case; he walks with a strange gait, he is thin and consists solely of
bone and sinew, he does not carry a weapon, he’s a “Joe College” as described
by a fellow soldier, and he was assigned to be the assistant of a chaplain;
“All the real soldiers are dead,” one woman comments to him. This is where,
more or less, the story of Billy Pilgrim begins.
Billy is separated from the rest of
the Allies, stuck behind enemy lines with three fellow soldiers. We’re
introduced to who Billy is at this
point in his life, as well as a bit of the reasoning behind his odd mannerisms.
We’re told that this laconic and apathetic individual, who staggered a warzone
looking for some mercifully jagged edge to fall on; who insisted time and time
again to go on without him, will eventually learn the meaning of life.
These
chapters are clearly the most emotional and powerful sections of the entire
novel. Slaughterhouse-Five is marketed as a book that protests
war; and while plenty of the book may take place outside of this kind of
conflict, these chapters, which are spread unevenly throughout the entire
course of the book, relate significantly to many of the later events in Billy’s
life. This is also where some of Vonnegut’s first-hand experiences with war
come into play; to reiterate, Billy Pilgrim is based off of one of Vonnegut’s
former comrade in arms, who he shared time as a POW with.
Majority of the World War II scenes in Slaughterhouse-Five take
place in various sites of captivity, which is where Vonnegut’s personal
experience comes in. The POW scenes never feel contrived or
stilted, because Vonnegut is fraught with first-hand knowledge of the events
surrounding the bombing of Dresden, as well as living in a POW camp; scenes
flow incredibly smoothly during these portions of the book because of this.
The fire-bombing of Dresden is where the WWII portion of Billy’s
life officially culminates, which is arguably the most significant event in the
entire novel, contested only by Billy’s interactions with the aliens who
abducted him. Throughout Billy’s life, he was subject to being caught in numerous
grim events, but none were more devastating than the bombing of Dresden, which
Vonnegut was also caught in. Billy’s initial apathy towards this catastrophe
and his response afterward serve to solidify much of the earlier
characterization that Vonnegut has established for Billy.
The war ends shortly afterward, and Billy returns home to finish
optometry school. The events afterward aren’t so much about Billy as they are
about humanity in general. Vonnegut has a tendency to use Billy as a figurative
object to illustrate his logic about many topics, which makes it hard to label Slaughterhouse-Five as a traditional
narrative. Billy gets married, has children, grows a penchant for science
fiction, creates his own optometry firm, and meets his favorite author amongst
other things; however, these events aren’t written to tell the story of Billy
Pilgrim, they instead act as underlying metaphors that entertain readers with
their unique delivery and message.
Eventually, Billy becomes the victim of another disaster. He’s
the sole survivor of a plane crash, and is transported to a hospital where his
wife dies while speeding to visit him. It is shortly after this that Billy
decides he was abducted by aliens, an event which is presented as though it
clearly had occurred, but Billy has
kept quiet until after he suffers powerful head trauma during a plane crash.
The novel begins to part ways with realism in favor of mixing elements of
sci-fi with abstract poetry, in the form of how vividly the culture of the
aliens is described.
Billy runs to New York to tell the world about the message that
the aliens have given him, about what it means to exist and the true nature of
time. Despite his daughter and several others disapproving of these actions,
the world begins to eventually acknowledge that Billy has figured out the
meaning of life. Billy goes on to become a very successful public speaker who
speaks of the things he’s learned from the aliens who abducted him, and is then
assassinated by a hitman working for a soldier that he earned the scorn of when
they were imprisoned together. Billy is aware that he is about to be killed,
and urges his listeners not to be sad about his passing either; if they were sad because of this, then they
would not have understood anything he was preaching.
None of this really matters. Slaughterhouse-Five isn’t meant to be viewed from a chronological
point of view, because it isn’t a novel that tells the story of only one
protagonist. It blends elements of both prose and free-verse poetry, in that we
witness the clear development of a character, but we’re urged to contemplate
the message that Vonnegut is outlining with every scene revolving around Billy.
These messages range from topics like mortality to the meaning of life, and are
often intentionally confusing; Vonnegut states that “there’s nothing
intelligent about a massacre.” It’s difficult to place Slaughterhouse-Five into a single genre because of this, but I’ve
grown to acknowledge it as a very uniquely written essay or an extended piece
of poetry.
We’re meant to discern Vonnegut’s
logic from every mention of Edgar Derby’s impending doom, every “so it goes”
statement, and every piece of figurative language; this is the point of Slaughterhouse-Five’s existence. This is mostly reminiscent of what
an essay or a poem will aim to do, and the same amount of scrutiny is meant to
be applied to this novel as well. For these reasons, I’ve drawn the conclusion
that Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five,
despite the timeline that I’ve just laid out, despite the progression of Billy
Pilgrim’s physical being, and despite what it is labeled by the publishing
company as, is a poem.
