Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
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Description
Billy Pilgrim returns home from the Second World War only to be kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who teach him that time is an eternal present.Tags
Recommendations
Member Recommendations
esswedl Both of these Vonnegut novels involve the question of free will (and both are great).
80
anonymous user Slightly absurdist satire that includes an anti-war message
andomck Both books, besides having science fiction/magical realism elements, discuss bloody episodes of WWII from the point of view of everyday people.
43
PghDragonMan War is not glorious and even survivors are not unscathed.
11
1968 by Joe Haldeman
by snat
by hvg
anonymous user Elliot Rosewater, the main character of God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, appears in Slaughterhouse-Five. Also, they both feature books from fictional author Kilgore Trout.
Member Reviews
Slaughterhouse-Five is a book forged deep in the soul. Perhaps it’s not a book so much as it is a memory: a love-letter to a tragedy, a break-up letter with happiness. It is death, regretful but expectant. So it goes.
Every sentence of this memory-love-breakup-death makes me want to cry. Some did. Some do. It's the story of Billy Pilgrim, a man who survives, and in some ways does not survive, the military action known as the fire-bombing of Dresden. Along with this he becomes unstuck in time, and jumps between moments of his life from birth to final death. Death is white noise. So it goes.
When he's painfully washed by the Germans after becoming a prisoner of war, he is suddenly a baby, being washed by his mother. It's as involuntary show more as a human may experience a memory. Once Billy is returned to America, he is captured several years later by an alien race that lives in four dimensions. The race, the Tralfamadorians, experience time not as a continuum but all moments at once. Birth is not a starting point, it’s only a point. All things continue to exist somewhere, not even death is the end, because there is no end. So it goes.
I read this book around 2008 and gave it three stars because I hadn’t lived enough. I haven’t seen death up close and personal, perhaps this will affect me even more when I do. As is befitting the idea of time, it’s rare for anything to be told in older, but this is how humans operate. We live in order, but we don’t think in order. We’re impossibly bad at remembering orders of details: we become Tralfamadorians in our minds. But our memories allow life beyond death. So it goes. We exist as nine, or as twenty-one, we exist at times when our fathers are aliveC or that girl still loves us. Slaughter-house Five is anti-war, yes, but also, and more so, it’s about memory, and it’s about death. So it goes.
So it goes, so it goes, so it goes —
- "We'll meet again... If the accident will" [the concept of meeting someone in the future if God allows it]
- He never got mad at anything. He was wonderful that way.
- "How did I get so old?"
- Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past , the present, and the future.
- 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.
- "What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."
- He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov by Feodor Dostoevsky. "But that isn't enough anymore."
- “I look at you sometimes and I get a funny feeling that you’re just full of secrets.” “I’m not,” said Billy. This was a lie, of course.
- Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.
- They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.
- Now he closes his speech as he closes every speech—with these words: “Farewell, hello, farewell, hello.”
- They covered themselves with their hands and turned their backs and so on, and made themselves utterly beautiful.
- Later on in life, the Tralfamadorians would advise Billy to concentrate on the happy moments of life, and to ignore the unhappy ones—to stare only at pretty things as eternity failed to go by.
- The woman was softly beautiful, transparent... show less
Every sentence of this memory-love-breakup-death makes me want to cry. Some did. Some do. It's the story of Billy Pilgrim, a man who survives, and in some ways does not survive, the military action known as the fire-bombing of Dresden. Along with this he becomes unstuck in time, and jumps between moments of his life from birth to final death. Death is white noise. So it goes.
When he's painfully washed by the Germans after becoming a prisoner of war, he is suddenly a baby, being washed by his mother. It's as involuntary show more as a human may experience a memory. Once Billy is returned to America, he is captured several years later by an alien race that lives in four dimensions. The race, the Tralfamadorians, experience time not as a continuum but all moments at once. Birth is not a starting point, it’s only a point. All things continue to exist somewhere, not even death is the end, because there is no end. So it goes.
I read this book around 2008 and gave it three stars because I hadn’t lived enough. I haven’t seen death up close and personal, perhaps this will affect me even more when I do. As is befitting the idea of time, it’s rare for anything to be told in older, but this is how humans operate. We live in order, but we don’t think in order. We’re impossibly bad at remembering orders of details: we become Tralfamadorians in our minds. But our memories allow life beyond death. So it goes. We exist as nine, or as twenty-one, we exist at times when our fathers are aliveC or that girl still loves us. Slaughter-house Five is anti-war, yes, but also, and more so, it’s about memory, and it’s about death. So it goes.
So it goes, so it goes, so it goes —
- "We'll meet again... If the accident will" [the concept of meeting someone in the future if God allows it]
- He never got mad at anything. He was wonderful that way.
- "How did I get so old?"
- Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past , the present, and the future.
- 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.
- "What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."
- He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov by Feodor Dostoevsky. "But that isn't enough anymore."
- “I look at you sometimes and I get a funny feeling that you’re just full of secrets.” “I’m not,” said Billy. This was a lie, of course.
- Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.
- They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.
- Now he closes his speech as he closes every speech—with these words: “Farewell, hello, farewell, hello.”
- They covered themselves with their hands and turned their backs and so on, and made themselves utterly beautiful.
- Later on in life, the Tralfamadorians would advise Billy to concentrate on the happy moments of life, and to ignore the unhappy ones—to stare only at pretty things as eternity failed to go by.
- The woman was softly beautiful, transparent... show less
It's been said that young people don't read novels for their plots or their themes, they read them so that they might inhabit a universe they find comfortable and sympathetic. I read a whole lot of Kurt Vonnegut in my younger days, though I haven't revisited him since I was seventeen or so. Rereading "Slaughterhouse-Five," I'm a little mystefied as to why I liked him so much, though there is something in his dry, detached humor that still strikes a chord with me, however faint. Time passes: I think I understand Vonnegut much better now than I did then, but I think I like him much less. So it goes.
These days, I'd call "Slaughterhouse-Five" a fine, accessible example of a postmodern novel: in this literary universe, both sequential time show more and grand narrative have more or less been disposed of. In true Transfalmadorian style, everything happens simultaneously and one's experience depends more or less on one's position: you're either inside the slaughterhouse, and, paradoxically, safe, or outside of it, and dead. You're either in the prisoners' railcar and starving to death or in the guards' car and living it up. Things are, those little green beings might say, structured that way. "Slaughterhouse-Five" is, of course, the author's best attempt to process his experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden and explain why he survived an inferno in which more than a hundred thousand others perished. In true postmodernist fashion, he's pretty much unable to come up with any good reason why he made it through and other, nobler people he knew did not. Vonnegut seems to posit that in Dresden, and, by extension, in most places, life and death are the products for random chance and unforseeable, capricious fate. I get the feeling that some readers, particulalrly those attached to more traditional concepts of heroism, might have found this sort of war story shocking and discomfiting when it was published, and Vonnegut makes it clear in the book's first chapter that he's writing a both an anti-war book and an anti-epic, but that doesn't make "Slaughterhouse-Five" particularly enjoyable, or, some might say, particularly insightful. Vonnegut seems to struggle with Dresden's very barbarity and meaninglessness, and both of these elements seem to overwhelm the text. Still, when one considers the horrors that "Slaughterhouse-Five" describes, it's possible that the sort of gallows humor that the author displays is the only really honest human reaction one can have. I did not, I admit, find this a particularly enjoyable read, and I found Vonnegut's aformentioned dry detachment less than charming this time around, but I also have to concede that it might be impossible to write about surviving tragedies of this magnitude in any other way. Sometimes life presents us with circumstances that makes the mind boggle and the soul quail, and traditional literatury structures, adaptable as they are, struggle to fill the gap. "Slaugherhouse-Five" might be, for good or ill, the best novel that a survivor of the Dresden firebombing could possibly produce. Some might say that it's the only sort of novel a survivor of such an event could produce. show less
These days, I'd call "Slaughterhouse-Five" a fine, accessible example of a postmodern novel: in this literary universe, both sequential time show more and grand narrative have more or less been disposed of. In true Transfalmadorian style, everything happens simultaneously and one's experience depends more or less on one's position: you're either inside the slaughterhouse, and, paradoxically, safe, or outside of it, and dead. You're either in the prisoners' railcar and starving to death or in the guards' car and living it up. Things are, those little green beings might say, structured that way. "Slaughterhouse-Five" is, of course, the author's best attempt to process his experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden and explain why he survived an inferno in which more than a hundred thousand others perished. In true postmodernist fashion, he's pretty much unable to come up with any good reason why he made it through and other, nobler people he knew did not. Vonnegut seems to posit that in Dresden, and, by extension, in most places, life and death are the products for random chance and unforseeable, capricious fate. I get the feeling that some readers, particulalrly those attached to more traditional concepts of heroism, might have found this sort of war story shocking and discomfiting when it was published, and Vonnegut makes it clear in the book's first chapter that he's writing a both an anti-war book and an anti-epic, but that doesn't make "Slaughterhouse-Five" particularly enjoyable, or, some might say, particularly insightful. Vonnegut seems to struggle with Dresden's very barbarity and meaninglessness, and both of these elements seem to overwhelm the text. Still, when one considers the horrors that "Slaughterhouse-Five" describes, it's possible that the sort of gallows humor that the author displays is the only really honest human reaction one can have. I did not, I admit, find this a particularly enjoyable read, and I found Vonnegut's aformentioned dry detachment less than charming this time around, but I also have to concede that it might be impossible to write about surviving tragedies of this magnitude in any other way. Sometimes life presents us with circumstances that makes the mind boggle and the soul quail, and traditional literatury structures, adaptable as they are, struggle to fill the gap. "Slaugherhouse-Five" might be, for good or ill, the best novel that a survivor of the Dresden firebombing could possibly produce. Some might say that it's the only sort of novel a survivor of such an event could produce. show less
Glad I read Cat's Cradle first because it was a completely different animal from Slaughterhouse and, if anything, clarified the author's range for me. Having read them in this order makes me realize that, for Kurt Vonnegut, this is a completely appropriate and characteristic response to having been captured in WWII and being one of the few to survive the fire-bombing of Dresden. It would be an interesting project to compare this account of WWII to O'Brien's accounts of Vietnam. Both authors experienced these respective wars firsthand and write about them in very successful novels that have elements of metafiction. However, unlike Vonnegut, O'Brien attempts to present his work with the utmost verisimilitude. I know a few people who were show more devastated to find out that The Things They Carried is partially fictional, and that some characters like his daughter do not exist at all. Vonnegut's novel, which I've seen listed as sci-fi but I think would more appropriately be categorized as satire, deals with such weighty issues in a way so irreverent that it has been banned from some schools and libraries. I feel that Vonnegut is here being more sincere than O'Brien, and is in this way the more profound of the two. His book challenges the possibility of their being only one right way to deal with a disastrous historical event. show less
This is the story of Billy, a man who witnesses the fire-bombing of Dresden in 1945. It is also the story of its author Kurt Vonnegut, who witnessed the firebombing himself, and who had no more accurate means of conveying the dissociation it made him feel than by introducing aliens and time travel into his story. Descriptive words alone are merely birds squawking.
Throughout the novel he repeats the phrase 'So it goes' whenever a reference is made to death. It is a statement of acceptance, an emotionless, empty fact. It draws attention to the frequency with which death must be confronted, something I otherwise might have missed. It is a bracing for the novel's climax: the firebombing itself, a big empty nothing that Vonnegut gradually show more circles in towards. He can only show us the outline of that hole, sharing the sense of absence where something used to be.
American fighters pass over the city the next morning, surveying the aftermath of the bombing, firing at survivors clambering over its ruins. This is the proof of the bombing's intention, that no euphemism can brush away. It can only be unspoken of, like the carefully phrased quote from Truman's speech about Hiroshima into which Vonnegut never has to insert, 'So it goes'. show less
Throughout the novel he repeats the phrase 'So it goes' whenever a reference is made to death. It is a statement of acceptance, an emotionless, empty fact. It draws attention to the frequency with which death must be confronted, something I otherwise might have missed. It is a bracing for the novel's climax: the firebombing itself, a big empty nothing that Vonnegut gradually show more circles in towards. He can only show us the outline of that hole, sharing the sense of absence where something used to be.
American fighters pass over the city the next morning, surveying the aftermath of the bombing, firing at survivors clambering over its ruins. This is the proof of the bombing's intention, that no euphemism can brush away. It can only be unspoken of, like the carefully phrased quote from Truman's speech about Hiroshima into which Vonnegut never has to insert, 'So it goes'. show less
I miss Kurt Vonnegut. When he died, it really meant something to me. He was a famously amusing and humane person.
When I was a freshman in high school, my step-father kindly agreed to drive me to the Bookland in Lewiston so that I could find a book to read. (I'd pretty much read all the decent titles at the Bookland in Brunswick...or so it seemed to me at the time.) The novel I found, a paperback with a bleak cover, was Slaughterhouse-Five. I didn't know a thing about it, or about Kurt Vonnegut. I thanked my step-father for driving me around -- we didn't do many things together, he was probably pleased that I'd asked -- and started to read. By the time I finished the book in a study hall the very next day, my brain was blown. I wanted to show more cry -- the book was so sad. I wanted to laugh -- it was so funny. And I felt less alone in the world because Vonnegut was in it, writing books that spoke to me (not down at me) and did big things without making a big deal about them.
Reading Slaughterhouse-Five two decades later, I began by noticing (with my English-major chops) the way Vonnegut structures it, subverts the war-novel conventions, adopts a shrugging matter-of-fact tone about unspeakable horrors, et cetera. But after the first hundred pages I stopped that nonsense and just fell into the book all over again. Thanks, Kurt. If the Tralfamadorians are right, then I am always reading your books for the first time. show less
When I was a freshman in high school, my step-father kindly agreed to drive me to the Bookland in Lewiston so that I could find a book to read. (I'd pretty much read all the decent titles at the Bookland in Brunswick...or so it seemed to me at the time.) The novel I found, a paperback with a bleak cover, was Slaughterhouse-Five. I didn't know a thing about it, or about Kurt Vonnegut. I thanked my step-father for driving me around -- we didn't do many things together, he was probably pleased that I'd asked -- and started to read. By the time I finished the book in a study hall the very next day, my brain was blown. I wanted to show more cry -- the book was so sad. I wanted to laugh -- it was so funny. And I felt less alone in the world because Vonnegut was in it, writing books that spoke to me (not down at me) and did big things without making a big deal about them.
Reading Slaughterhouse-Five two decades later, I began by noticing (with my English-major chops) the way Vonnegut structures it, subverts the war-novel conventions, adopts a shrugging matter-of-fact tone about unspeakable horrors, et cetera. But after the first hundred pages I stopped that nonsense and just fell into the book all over again. Thanks, Kurt. If the Tralfamadorians are right, then I am always reading your books for the first time. show less
The Everyday Frauds of War and Peace
The life of Billy Pilgrim, an American soldier during World War II, who is captured by the German army and taken to Dresden, where he witnesses the Allies' bombing in February 1945, and is later abducted by aliens who see all of time simultaneously and take him to their home planet to be put on display in a human zoo.
A central point to the novel which contemporary reviewers often misconstrue is it's not, as is so often claimed, a depiction of post-traumatic stress disorder. Author Kurt Vonnegut was himself a World War II veteran and POW witness, and both he and his war buddy Bernard V. O'Hare are background characters in this, his best known and most lauded novel. The first sentence is, "All this show more happened, more or less." This could certainly refer solely to the historically documented bombing and Vonnegut's first-hand experiences. That reading is substantiated both by the next sentence, "The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true," and by how often Billy's unsticking in time happens around markers which might trigger flashbacks: The orange and black stripes decorating his daughter Barbara's wedding tent resemble the same-colored stripes on the POW transport trains to protect them from Allied bombings. Or his wife Valencia asking about Edgar Derby, an American who was killed by an American firing squad after the POW camp's post-bombing liberation for stealing a teapot, transports him back to the camp where he slept next to Derby. Valencia and other characters eat Three Musketeers bars, which is reminiscent of the boyish hero fantasies of Roland Weary, a brutish antitank gunner Billy encounters shortly after his regiment in Luxembourg is destroyed. And so on.
But that reading is undermined by two more sentences in the novel, roughly two-thirds of the way through:
This is but one piece of evidence which suggests Billy's time-viewing experiences are meant to be read as actual, rather than as a PTSD-induced hallucination. The appearance of characters from Vonnegut's earlier novels - including Winston Niles Rumfoord of the fantastical The Sirens of Titan (1959), and Howard W. Campbell, Jr. and Eliot Rosewater, protagonists of the more realistic Mother Night (1961) and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), respectively - grounds this firmly in the "Vonnegut-verse," as it were. To be sure, it's a fictional universe subject to the whims of its creator. The time-traveling aliens who abduct Billy, the Tralfamadorians, also appear in earlier Vonnegut novels, but those depictions are very different from the passive observers they are here. In The Sirens of Titan, they are intelligent machines who take an active role in Earth's history for their own petty purpose. In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the planet Trafalmadore is a fictional world imagined by author Kilgore Trout, another character from this novel who makes frequent appearances throughout Vonnegut's canon and whose biographical details and physical descriptions vary across the oeuvre.
What remains more or less consistent of the Trafalmadorians and Trout in all appearances is their philosophical and intellectual detachment from the crudities and banality of traditional desires for higher social status or material wealth or even vengeance. In every novel, they have what could be called, for lack of a better term, a "higher understanding." In this case, both of them can see in the fourth dimension of time, whether always, as in the case of the Trafalmadorians, or only occasionally, as with Trout. As a result, the literal reality of, say, a history book is a separate reality from the reality of carefully crafted fiction. Trout calls attention to this fuzzy line between truth and fiction when he has a conversation with an optometrist's wife at a party, after he has told her an utterly fabricated, outrageous story of a funeral for a celebrity chef:
In the plot of the novel, this conversation comes shortly after the second of two incidents of a particularly insidious form of advertising, i.e.: wartime propaganda, in this case, the lies of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American who has become a propagandist for Nazi Germany, where he spreads Nazi lies of Allied weakness and white supremacy. (In his own novel, Campbell is a double agent, posing as a Nazi to gather intelligence for the Americans, thereby making him a fraud of a fraud. Billy is unaware of this, and Vonnegut never mentions it here, so it's unclear but irrelevant if it's "true" in this novel's half-independent, half-shared reality.) Campbell mixes his outright lies with just enough truth as to confuse the question of what is true and what is not. It is very hard to present a counter-argument when he says, for instance:
Similarly, when Campbell describes the symbolism of the colors of the American flag, in a reverse game of Two Truths and a Lie, he says:
[Note: Red is the true one.]
Conversely, when Edgar Derby challenges Campbell in what Vonnegut calls one of the few moments where the story has a character, as Derby argues for freedom and justice, he says there isn't "a man there who wouldn't gladly die for those ideals," although he knows this to be untrue, or anyway, he ought to know it to be. The Chicagolander small-time crook and sadistic malcontent Paul Lazzaro has already said, or at least made clear, he doesn't care about any ideals or allegiances, and he exacts vengeance only in exchange for his own personal petty grudges and grievances. Or perhaps Derby isn't lying, because perhaps he doesn't believe Lazzaro could possibly be sincere in this pure expression of id, a concept beyond Derby the Indianapolis English teacher's ken in its sheer vulgar simplicity. To the extent Derby is a fraud, he is defrauding himself as much as he is defrauding anyone else, because he can't see what is in front of him.
Seeing is a motif throughout the novel. The Trafalmadorians compare human understanding of time to looking at the Rocky Mountains and seeing just a tiny detail rather than the mountain range as a whole. During the war, when Billy and his fellow captured Allied prisoners, mostly from the Battle of the Bulge, are being marched to a railroad yard to be transported to their camps, they pass a German film crew there to record German victories for a propaganda film, but the camera is not running, because they are out of film, and so they can only watch the battle from a distance as gray clouds on the horizon. Before the war, when Billy and his parents go to Carlsbad Caverns, and the ranger shuts off the lights, Billy is plunged into complete darkness until he sees the "ghostly" radium face of a timepiece, his father's watch. After the war, Billy becomes an optometrist, an occupation which is not only a nod to the Great American Novel The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but one which involves him helping people to see, but that's not how Billy makes the bulk of his fortune. As Vonnegut says, "Frames are where the money is." In other words, Billy's eyeglasses are more prized by their wearers not for their ability to improve or protect vision, but in how they appear to others and indicate status and fashion. They are like the exiled children of Israel whom the prophet Jeremiah calls in the Nevi'im "foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not." (5:21).
Billy sees, although his seeing is limited. As Vonnegut sometimes reminds us, there are parts of the story which Billy never knows, such as that he and his Dresden guard Werner Gluck are distant cousins. There may also be a hidden play on the names. Billy's surname "Pilgrim" is no doubt an illusion to the classic 1678 allegorical novel The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan, in which the protagonist travels from Earth and specifically his hometown (called the "City of Destruction") through Hell, and at last into Heaven. Along the way, he is only ever an observer, not a participant, and he is powerless to change or affect any of it, much as Billy is powerless to change his circumstances. On his optometry office wall, Billy has a framed copy of the Serenity Prayer, which begins, "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change," to which Vonnegut adds, "Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future." The name "Billy" is likely inspired by the legendary Western outlaw William Henry McCarty Jr., aka Billy the Kid, who died at age 21, which recalls the subtitle of the novel, The Children's Crusade, a peace offering to his war buddy O'Hare's wife Mary, who objects to the idea of the novel by saying of her husband and Vonnegut, "You were just babies then!" If Gluck's name is similarly referential, the surname "Gluck" translates to "[good] luck" or "happiness," while the name "Werner" could very well be after St. Werner of Oberwesel, a 16-year-old Rheinlander boy in the 13th century whose mysterious death was blamed on the local Jewish populace, resulting in numerous pogroms in the following decades.
It is within the scaffolding of what is seen, then, whether directly through Billy's eyes or from the eyes of Vonnegut the omniscient narrator, that the novel is often mistaken for an anti-war novel, or a war novel at all. Even the back cover of this edition says it's "one of the world's great antiwar books." It may have been conceived as such, but once fully realized, it is not. The first chapter outlines the history of Vonnegut's writing what he initially assumed to be, in his words, "a book about Dresden." Over the course of nearly a quarter-century, as he struggles with how to convey an ever-fading memory, it transforms. When he conceived it, he could no more see what it would be than it is clear to Valencia, on the night she and Billy conceive their son Robert, her body is assembling a future high school troublemaker-cum-Green Beret Vietnam War veteran. Billy sees this future, of course, having already seen/soon to be seeing the vast expanse of universal time, but as with everything else, he is helpless to change it if he were to want to, which he doesn't. The same can be said of Vonnegut and his novel. The turning point seems to come from an oft-cited conversation between Vonnegut and his friend, the Hollywood film producer Harrison Starr:
Slaughterhouse-Five is not about war, nor is it about glaciers. It is about "plain old death." The famous recurring refrain, "So it goes," is used not after every anecdote or insightful comment, nor is it intended to be profound. It is used whenever someone or something dies or is said to have died. It is the same whether the person dies in a war or in an accident, violently or from old age. The simplicity of the epitaph is a rejection of the profundity typically afforded death in novels and poetry, a deference to its ultimate inexorability, which inevitably comes as readily to a glass of water or lice in clothing as to Jews in death camps or POWs who contract gangrene. Yet the repetition of the phrase simultaneously belittles death, reduces it signficance to that of a punctuation mark. Just as the story continues after each comma, in fact after every period, so it continues after each, "So it goes," until the final punctuation mark, which in this novel is a question mark followed by closing quotation marks. In that sense, then, the novel is about life just as much - if not all the more so - as it is about death. The only lesson the Tralfamadorians ever attempt to impart upon Billy is:
More than a few contemporary readers note the retrospective irony of Harrison Starr's analogy. More than a half-century later, the glaciers have been stopped and made to recede. The forces which have caused this dramatic shift have been manmade, but not any one man's, and eventually all mankind is nearly impotent at reversing the consequences of decades to centuries of its own actions. At several points in the wartime chronicles, hundreds or thousands of people at once are merged into a unified, hapless mass, which Vonnegut sometimes describes as flowing liquid, sometimes as stacks like firewood. The same kind be said of 21st-century humans, who watch as the factories formerly manufacturing the machinery of war, the vehicles formerly transporting casualties and fresh recruits, food and ammunition, have set off a chain reaction which cannot be entirely halted in any of our lifetimes, one which causes the formerly unstoppable glaciers to disappear, perhaps forever, or at least longer than any of us will be alive to notice.
So it goes. show less
The life of Billy Pilgrim, an American soldier during World War II, who is captured by the German army and taken to Dresden, where he witnesses the Allies' bombing in February 1945, and is later abducted by aliens who see all of time simultaneously and take him to their home planet to be put on display in a human zoo.
A central point to the novel which contemporary reviewers often misconstrue is it's not, as is so often claimed, a depiction of post-traumatic stress disorder. Author Kurt Vonnegut was himself a World War II veteran and POW witness, and both he and his war buddy Bernard V. O'Hare are background characters in this, his best known and most lauded novel. The first sentence is, "All this show more happened, more or less." This could certainly refer solely to the historically documented bombing and Vonnegut's first-hand experiences. That reading is substantiated both by the next sentence, "The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true," and by how often Billy's unsticking in time happens around markers which might trigger flashbacks: The orange and black stripes decorating his daughter Barbara's wedding tent resemble the same-colored stripes on the POW transport trains to protect them from Allied bombings. Or his wife Valencia asking about Edgar Derby, an American who was killed by an American firing squad after the POW camp's post-bombing liberation for stealing a teapot, transports him back to the camp where he slept next to Derby. Valencia and other characters eat Three Musketeers bars, which is reminiscent of the boyish hero fantasies of Roland Weary, a brutish antitank gunner Billy encounters shortly after his regiment in Luxembourg is destroyed. And so on.
But that reading is undermined by two more sentences in the novel, roughly two-thirds of the way through:
Billy was unconscious for two days after that, and he dreamed millions of things, some of them true. The true things were time-travel. [emphasis added]
This is but one piece of evidence which suggests Billy's time-viewing experiences are meant to be read as actual, rather than as a PTSD-induced hallucination. The appearance of characters from Vonnegut's earlier novels - including Winston Niles Rumfoord of the fantastical The Sirens of Titan (1959), and Howard W. Campbell, Jr. and Eliot Rosewater, protagonists of the more realistic Mother Night (1961) and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), respectively - grounds this firmly in the "Vonnegut-verse," as it were. To be sure, it's a fictional universe subject to the whims of its creator. The time-traveling aliens who abduct Billy, the Tralfamadorians, also appear in earlier Vonnegut novels, but those depictions are very different from the passive observers they are here. In The Sirens of Titan, they are intelligent machines who take an active role in Earth's history for their own petty purpose. In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the planet Trafalmadore is a fictional world imagined by author Kilgore Trout, another character from this novel who makes frequent appearances throughout Vonnegut's canon and whose biographical details and physical descriptions vary across the oeuvre.
What remains more or less consistent of the Trafalmadorians and Trout in all appearances is their philosophical and intellectual detachment from the crudities and banality of traditional desires for higher social status or material wealth or even vengeance. In every novel, they have what could be called, for lack of a better term, a "higher understanding." In this case, both of them can see in the fourth dimension of time, whether always, as in the case of the Trafalmadorians, or only occasionally, as with Trout. As a result, the literal reality of, say, a history book is a separate reality from the reality of carefully crafted fiction. Trout calls attention to this fuzzy line between truth and fiction when he has a conversation with an optometrist's wife at a party, after he has told her an utterly fabricated, outrageous story of a funeral for a celebrity chef:
"Did that really happen?" said Maggie White. ...
"Of course it happened," Trout told her. "If I wrote something that hadn't really happened, and I tried to sell it, I could go to jail. That's fraud."
Maggie believed him. ... "It's like advertising. You have to tell the truth in advertising, or you get in trouble."
"Exactly. The same body of law applies."
In the plot of the novel, this conversation comes shortly after the second of two incidents of a particularly insidious form of advertising, i.e.: wartime propaganda, in this case, the lies of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American who has become a propagandist for Nazi Germany, where he spreads Nazi lies of Allied weakness and white supremacy. (In his own novel, Campbell is a double agent, posing as a Nazi to gather intelligence for the Americans, thereby making him a fraud of a fraud. Billy is unaware of this, and Vonnegut never mentions it here, so it's unclear but irrelevant if it's "true" in this novel's half-independent, half-shared reality.) Campbell mixes his outright lies with just enough truth as to confuse the question of what is true and what is not. It is very hard to present a counter-argument when he says, for instance:
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. ... The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?" There will also be an American flag no larger than a child's hand‒glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.
Similarly, when Campbell describes the symbolism of the colors of the American flag, in a reverse game of Two Truths and a Lie, he says:
Blue is for the American sky. ... White is for the race that pioneered the continent, drained the swamps and cleared the forests and built the roads and bridges. Red is for the blood of American patriots which was shed so gladly in years gone by.
[Note: Red is the true one.]
Conversely, when Edgar Derby challenges Campbell in what Vonnegut calls one of the few moments where the story has a character, as Derby argues for freedom and justice, he says there isn't "a man there who wouldn't gladly die for those ideals," although he knows this to be untrue, or anyway, he ought to know it to be. The Chicagolander small-time crook and sadistic malcontent Paul Lazzaro has already said, or at least made clear, he doesn't care about any ideals or allegiances, and he exacts vengeance only in exchange for his own personal petty grudges and grievances. Or perhaps Derby isn't lying, because perhaps he doesn't believe Lazzaro could possibly be sincere in this pure expression of id, a concept beyond Derby the Indianapolis English teacher's ken in its sheer vulgar simplicity. To the extent Derby is a fraud, he is defrauding himself as much as he is defrauding anyone else, because he can't see what is in front of him.
Seeing is a motif throughout the novel. The Trafalmadorians compare human understanding of time to looking at the Rocky Mountains and seeing just a tiny detail rather than the mountain range as a whole. During the war, when Billy and his fellow captured Allied prisoners, mostly from the Battle of the Bulge, are being marched to a railroad yard to be transported to their camps, they pass a German film crew there to record German victories for a propaganda film, but the camera is not running, because they are out of film, and so they can only watch the battle from a distance as gray clouds on the horizon. Before the war, when Billy and his parents go to Carlsbad Caverns, and the ranger shuts off the lights, Billy is plunged into complete darkness until he sees the "ghostly" radium face of a timepiece, his father's watch. After the war, Billy becomes an optometrist, an occupation which is not only a nod to the Great American Novel The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but one which involves him helping people to see, but that's not how Billy makes the bulk of his fortune. As Vonnegut says, "Frames are where the money is." In other words, Billy's eyeglasses are more prized by their wearers not for their ability to improve or protect vision, but in how they appear to others and indicate status and fashion. They are like the exiled children of Israel whom the prophet Jeremiah calls in the Nevi'im "foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not." (5:21).
Billy sees, although his seeing is limited. As Vonnegut sometimes reminds us, there are parts of the story which Billy never knows, such as that he and his Dresden guard Werner Gluck are distant cousins. There may also be a hidden play on the names. Billy's surname "Pilgrim" is no doubt an illusion to the classic 1678 allegorical novel The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan, in which the protagonist travels from Earth and specifically his hometown (called the "City of Destruction") through Hell, and at last into Heaven. Along the way, he is only ever an observer, not a participant, and he is powerless to change or affect any of it, much as Billy is powerless to change his circumstances. On his optometry office wall, Billy has a framed copy of the Serenity Prayer, which begins, "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change," to which Vonnegut adds, "Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future." The name "Billy" is likely inspired by the legendary Western outlaw William Henry McCarty Jr., aka Billy the Kid, who died at age 21, which recalls the subtitle of the novel, The Children's Crusade, a peace offering to his war buddy O'Hare's wife Mary, who objects to the idea of the novel by saying of her husband and Vonnegut, "You were just babies then!" If Gluck's name is similarly referential, the surname "Gluck" translates to "[good] luck" or "happiness," while the name "Werner" could very well be after St. Werner of Oberwesel, a 16-year-old Rheinlander boy in the 13th century whose mysterious death was blamed on the local Jewish populace, resulting in numerous pogroms in the following decades.
It is within the scaffolding of what is seen, then, whether directly through Billy's eyes or from the eyes of Vonnegut the omniscient narrator, that the novel is often mistaken for an anti-war novel, or a war novel at all. Even the back cover of this edition says it's "one of the world's great antiwar books." It may have been conceived as such, but once fully realized, it is not. The first chapter outlines the history of Vonnegut's writing what he initially assumed to be, in his words, "a book about Dresden." Over the course of nearly a quarter-century, as he struggles with how to convey an ever-fading memory, it transforms. When he conceived it, he could no more see what it would be than it is clear to Valencia, on the night she and Billy conceive their son Robert, her body is assembling a future high school troublemaker-cum-Green Beret Vietnam War veteran. Billy sees this future, of course, having already seen/soon to be seeing the vast expanse of universal time, but as with everything else, he is helpless to change it if he were to want to, which he doesn't. The same can be said of Vonnegut and his novel. The turning point seems to come from an oft-cited conversation between Vonnegut and his friend, the Hollywood film producer Harrison Starr:
He raised his eyebrows and inquired, "Is it an anti-war book?"
"Yes," I said. "I guess."
"You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books? ... I say, 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book, instead?'"
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.
And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.
Slaughterhouse-Five is not about war, nor is it about glaciers. It is about "plain old death." The famous recurring refrain, "So it goes," is used not after every anecdote or insightful comment, nor is it intended to be profound. It is used whenever someone or something dies or is said to have died. It is the same whether the person dies in a war or in an accident, violently or from old age. The simplicity of the epitaph is a rejection of the profundity typically afforded death in novels and poetry, a deference to its ultimate inexorability, which inevitably comes as readily to a glass of water or lice in clothing as to Jews in death camps or POWs who contract gangrene. Yet the repetition of the phrase simultaneously belittles death, reduces it signficance to that of a punctuation mark. Just as the story continues after each comma, in fact after every period, so it continues after each, "So it goes," until the final punctuation mark, which in this novel is a question mark followed by closing quotation marks. In that sense, then, the novel is about life just as much - if not all the more so - as it is about death. The only lesson the Tralfamadorians ever attempt to impart upon Billy is:
That's one things Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.
More than a few contemporary readers note the retrospective irony of Harrison Starr's analogy. More than a half-century later, the glaciers have been stopped and made to recede. The forces which have caused this dramatic shift have been manmade, but not any one man's, and eventually all mankind is nearly impotent at reversing the consequences of decades to centuries of its own actions. At several points in the wartime chronicles, hundreds or thousands of people at once are merged into a unified, hapless mass, which Vonnegut sometimes describes as flowing liquid, sometimes as stacks like firewood. The same kind be said of 21st-century humans, who watch as the factories formerly manufacturing the machinery of war, the vehicles formerly transporting casualties and fresh recruits, food and ammunition, have set off a chain reaction which cannot be entirely halted in any of our lifetimes, one which causes the formerly unstoppable glaciers to disappear, perhaps forever, or at least longer than any of us will be alive to notice.
So it goes. show less
Yet another book on my quest to be well read in American Literature. As someone who wants to be a lit teacher at some point, knew this was one I would need to read. Also it was assigned in a class so I kind of had to.
Vonnegut earned his status as an American Lit legend with this book, and I can see why. It is the easiest to read book I have ever read. It is quick but consumed me whole for the duration of time I was reading it. The blend of sci-fi and a wartime book by using time travel is an interesting concept that I have not seen done anywhere else, but the book is fantastic with it. Somehow gritty and hilarious at the same time, it feels wrong to laugh at some parts that Vonnegut approaches with satire. Fantastic book.
Vonnegut earned his status as an American Lit legend with this book, and I can see why. It is the easiest to read book I have ever read. It is quick but consumed me whole for the duration of time I was reading it. The blend of sci-fi and a wartime book by using time travel is an interesting concept that I have not seen done anywhere else, but the book is fantastic with it. Somehow gritty and hilarious at the same time, it feels wrong to laugh at some parts that Vonnegut approaches with satire. Fantastic book.
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Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut [Hamilton Press 2001] in Fine Press Forum (October 2022)
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Author Information
The appeal of Kurt Vonnegut, especially to bright younger readers of the past few decades, may be attributed partly to the fact that he is one of the few writers who have successfully straddled the imaginary line between science-fiction/fantasy and "real literature." He was born in Indianapolis and attended Cornell University, but his college show more education was interrupted by World War II. Captured during the Battle of the Bulge and imprisoned in Dresden, he received a Purple Heart for what he calls a "ludicrously negligible wound." After the war he returned to Cornell and then earned his M.A. at the University of Chicago.He worked as a police reporter and in public relations before placing several short stories in the popular magazines and beginning his career as a novelist. His first novel, Player Piano (1952), is a highly credible account of a future mechanistic society in which people count for little and machines for much. The Sirens of Titan (1959), is the story of a playboy whisked off to Mars and outer space in order to learn some humbling lessons about Earth's modest function in the total scheme of things. Mother Night (1962) satirizes the Nazi mentality in its narrative about an American writer who broadcasts propaganda in Germany during the war as an Allied agent. Cat's Cradle (1963) makes use of some of Vonnegut's experiences in General Electric laboratories in its story about the discovery of a special kind of ice that destroys the world. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) satirizes a benevolent foundation set up to foster the salvation of the world through love, an endeavor with, of course, disastrous results. Slaughterhouse-Five; or The Children's Crusade (1969) is the book that marked a turning point in Vonnegut's career. Based on his experiences in Dresden, it is the story of another Vonnegut surrogate named Billy Pilgrim who travels back and forth in time and becomes a kind of modern-day Everyman. The novel was something of a cult book during the Vietnam era for its antiwar sentiments. Breakfast of Champions (1973), the story of a Pontiac dealer who goes crazy after reading a science fiction novel by "Kilgore Trout," received generally unfavorable reviews but was a commercial success. Slapstick (1976), dedicated to the memory of Laurel and Hardy, is the somewhat wacky memoir of a 100-year-old ex-president who thinks he can solve society's problems by giving everyone a new middle name. In addition to his fiction, Vonnegut has published nonfiction on social problems and other topics, some of which is collected in Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974). He died from head injuries sustained in a fall on April 11, 2007. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Is contained in
The Sirens of Titan • Mother Night • Cat's Cradle • God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater • Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Novels & Stories, 1963-1973: Cat's Cradle / God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater / Slaughterhouse-Five / Breakfast of Champions / Stories by Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-Five • The Sirens of Titan • Player Piano • Cat's Cradle • Breakfast of Champions • Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
Cat's Cradle • The Sirens of Titan • God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater • Welcome to the Monkey House • Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Has the adaptation
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Mattatoio n. 5
- Original title
- Slaughterhouse-Five
- Alternate titles
- Slaughterhouse-Five: Or, The Children’s Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death
- Original publication date
- 1969-03-31
- People/Characters
- Billy Pilgrim; Montana Wildhack; Eliot Rosewater; Howard W. Campbell, Jr.; Kilgore Trout; Kurt Vonnegut (show all 26); Roland Weary; Paul Lazzaro; Tralfamadorians; Edgar Derby; Valencia Pilgrim (née Merble); Robert Pilgrim; Barbara Pilgrim; Colonel Wild Bob; Bertram Copeland Rumfoord; Lionel Merble; Bernard V. O'Hare; Gerhard Muller; Mary O'Hare; The Hobo; Lance Rumfoord; Cynthia Rumfoord; Werner Gluck; Blue Fairy Godmother; Maggie White; Lily Rumfoord
- Important places
- Dresden, Saxony, Germany; Schenectady, New York, USA; Tralfamadore (Planet); Ilium, New York, USA; Chicago, Illinois, USA; Boston, Massachusetts, USA (show all 14); Vermont, USA; New York, New York, USA; South Carolina, USA; Bright Angel Trail, Arizona, USA; Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico, USA; Cape Ann, Massachusetts, USA; France; Luxembourg
- Important events
- World War II (1939 | 1945); Bombing of Dresden; Battle of the Bulge (1944-12-16 | 1945-01-25)
- Related movies
- Slaughterhouse-Five (1972 | IMDb)
- Epigraph
- The cattle are lowing,
The Baby awakes.
But the little Lord Jesus
No crying He makes. - Dedication
- For Mary O'Hare
and Gerhard Müller - First words
- All this happened, more or less.
- Quotations
- Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
There was a a soft drink bottle on the windowsill. Its label boasted that it contained no nourishment whatsoever.
I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.
So it goes.
Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
You know — we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shoc... (show all)k. "'My God, my God — ' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade.'"
All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.
'We don't ever have to talk about it,' said Billy. 'I just want you to know: I was there.'
How nice--to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.
Billy covered his head with his blanket again. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward — always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn't that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a ... (show all)bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high-school education.
She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.
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 a... (show all)ll, is that people are discouraged from being characters.
There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. Ther... (show all)e is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of the many marvelous moments seen all at once time.
The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, "To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls." Another one said, "To desc... (show all)ribe blow-jobs artistically."
Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots an... (show all)d made very good fertilizer.
So it goes.
There was a big number over the door of the building. The number was five. Before the Americans could go inside, their only English-speaking guard told them to memorize their simple address, in case they got lost in th... (show all)e big city. Their address was this: 'Schlachthof-funf'. Schlachthof meant Slaughterhouse. Funf was good old five.
The most important thing i learned on Tralfamadore that when a person dies he [sic] only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly of people to cry at his funeral.
The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, "Poo-tee-weet?"
- Blurbers
- Heller, Joseph; Greene, Graham; Lessing, Doris
- Original language
- English
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 813.087621
- Canonical LCC
- PS3572.O5
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
Classifications
- Genres
- Science Fiction, Fiction and Literature, General Fiction, Historical Fiction
- DDC/MDS
- 813.087621 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American fiction in English By type Genre fiction Adventure fiction Speculative fiction Science fiction Time travel
- LCC
- PS3572 .O5 — Language and Literature American literature American literature Individual authors 1961-
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 49,199
- Popularity
- 42
- Reviews
- 776
- Rating
- (4.10)
- Languages
- 34 — Albanian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Norwegian, Farsi/Persian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Portuguese (Brazil)
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 220
- UPCs
- 2
- ASINs
- 186