Original title: Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Year of Publication: 1969
Number of pages: 215 [Trade Paperback]
Available in: Almost every language.
I read it in: English
"All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true."
Billy
Pilgrim takes us with him throughout his odyssey between time and space,
traveling in a non-linear way between the bombing of Dresden, his married life
and when he was abducted by the Tralfamadorians who teach him a really strange
way of seeing life.
In
1945, between the 13 and the 15 of February, 4 continuous attacks were made on
the unprotected city of Dresden, releasing around 4000 pounds of bombs on it
and thus killing around 135000 people. Kurt Vonnegut begins this book talking
about the necessity he has to write a book of when he witnessed the bombing,
but he spends way too much time trying to write it, without actually being able
to say anything. At the end of the first chapter he announces that he finally
wrote it and in the next chapter he tells us the story of Billy Pilgrim who
is unstuck
in time.
From here on we find Kurt Vonnegut every
once in a while, in the form of a war partner of Billy, but we mainly see how
Billy travels through time, in the least adequate moments, to other stages of
his life. Being especially relevant when the Tralfamadorians, plunger-shaped
aliens, abduct him, put him in a zoo and show him how they experience life:
with all the events of their lives happening all at once, present, past and
future are mixed all together and they see what they want of it, and that's how
Billy spends his life, in a non-linear way, jumping through the mental house,
his marriage, his job as an optometrist, when he was a prisoner of aliens and
the war.
The novel revolves around war and it's
usually described as an anti-war novel. We see throughout the story that Billy
is more of a spectator than an active participant of his own life: things
happen to him and he appears to accept them as they are, and regarding the war,
Billy remains speechless when trying to describe the horrors he lived. Because
of this and the black and satiric humor that Kurt employs all the time, the
title it's given is quite controversial.
Many point out as a flaw in the book the
detached language, the indifference to human suffering, the lack of opinion in
the face of conflict, and that this is what demonstrates the intention of the
book. We use language and words to comprehend what surround us, we designate a
name, a quality and in that way we understand it. But, when what surrounds us
is not comprehensible we find ourselves at a loss of words. That is exactly
what happens to both the narrator and Billy: the war in its totality is
indescribable because it's not rational or justifiable.
The book also talks to us about the effects of war on people. In Billy we can see as well his lack of ability to connect to the moment as a way of dealing with it. Don't we all do it? Tacitly accept to distract our attention from more painful or important matters because we don't want to or we can't deal with them. This way, Vonnegut's description of war is harsher and more realistic because… is there any proper way to react to loss? And not only loss, but pain, despair, helplessness and horror that something like that can happen before our eyes and that one way or another, we escaped this destiny. We are mere spectators. Besides, the stories of abduction can be taken as real or as a secondary effect of PTSD, in which Billy has to relive constantly what torments him and prefers to think that someone is taking from him the responsibility of his actions in the war, that he didn't choose any of it and that he can't do a thing to change it, somehow achieving peace.
A very special part of the book is in the
first chapter when the narrator tells us of reading in the Bible the story of
the destruction of the sinners and wicked that lived in Sodom and Gomorrah,
only surviving Lot, his wife and their two daughters. The narrator tells us
that when they are leaving town Lot's wife turns around to see the destruction
and she’s turned into a pillar of salt. Vonnegut mentions loving her for that,
because the act of looking back to all those people who were losing their lives
was a very humane act. Further on, before he begins Billy Pilgrim's story, he
writes that he has now finished the book but that it will be a failure because
it was written by a pillar of salt. We can notice here how he compares himself
to Lot's wife because he too looked back into the past, remembered the horrors of
war and couldn't help but feel sorrow and compassion even for his enemies.
In addition to Vonnegut being a great author,
this is a profoundly humane and even funny book that reminds us of our humanity
and the simple fact that there is nothing smart to say about a massacre. So it goes.
- Where to buy: Barnes and Noble, Amazon and The Book Depository (free shipping worldwide)
- Movie trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvlZtlBfCi0
- Interview with Kurt Vonnegut
- Videos of analysis Crash Course and Thug Notes
- Historical Context: Bombing of Dresden (what the book is about): Documentary and article, and the Vietnam War (when the book was published).
- 15 things you probably didn't know about Slaughterhouse-Five
