Slaughterhouse Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
“Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”
“Billy, with all his memories of the future, knew that the city would be smashed to smithereens and then burned – in about 30 more days. He knew, too, that most of the people watching him would soon be dead.”
I have a love-hate relationship with Kurt Vonnegut books. The ones I like, I really like. The ones I dislike, I really dislike. I’m not sure why. I like his writing style and prose. It’s funny, satirical, and sharp. Yet, for me, his books land at one extreme or the other – either great or not. Fortunately, there are more in the former category than the latter. While I struggled with Timequake and Galapagos, there are others like The Sirens of Titan or Mother Night, which are not only enjoyable, fantastic reads but also touch upon philosophical questions which have no answer. And because of those questions, Vonnegut, simply put, must be part of any gentleman’s reading list. Included in that list is Slaughterhouse Five. This book keeps the reader engaged and interested…at least it kept me engaged and interested. As with his other top books, it asks questions that should engender debate. In the case of Slaughterhouse Five, we are left asking ourselves what is right, what is wrong, and what is real.
Based on Vonnegut’s time as a prisoner of war in World War II and his witnessing the horrific firebombing of Dresden, the book’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim was also a POW. Billy, however, moves nonlinearly through time. He finds himself living through his war experiences one moment and his postwar family life the next. He even experiences a bizarre alien abduction where his captors show him how all of time exists at the same moment, because everything “past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.” Trippy, right? Billy’s life is thus equally bizarre and normal. He lives as a successful optometrist with a normal family, but he is haunted by his war experiences. But as he moves back and forth through his life, ‘unstuck’ in time, he finds himself at critical moments reliving them over again. He could be living a comfortable but mundane middle-class existence while suddenly being transported back to wartime Germany, anticipating the death of those around him. The book hops back and forth and is a clear departure from the linear time we all experience.
Left to interpretation are questions of reality. Is he actually ‘unstuck in time?’ Does Billy have war induced trauma? How much of his experience is real or imagined? Is this something akin to what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? Or is his life part of an extraordinary reality few are privileged (or cursed) to realize. And as the narration moves around, we see that, to Billy, all the above is true. It’s all his reality, regardless of what reality is. No matter where he is, in time, his experience and the horror of the war are currently happening. In this sense, what he saw isn’t something in the past but something that is still happening in his “normal” life.
I usually enjoy time travel stories and even the occasional science fiction novel, but despite aliens and time travel, Slaughterhouse Five doesn’t fall into one of those genres. It isn’t a war book either. Anti-war, perhaps? It is more psychological. It feels deeper. The concept of being ‘unstuck’ in time is fascinating and provides a glimpse into what is happening within Billy’s mind as he makes sense of all he has done and what he has seen. At a minimum, Slaughterhouse Five is enough for one to question whether any experience is real, imagined, or both.
As stated above, Vonnegut is hit or miss. If you have not read Vonnegut and would like to try him out, Slaughterhouse Five is a good start. Mentally, you will be pulled in multiple dimensions. You will find yourself questioning your own reality and the nature of things previously taken as certain. Conceptually, the very nature of one’s reality becomes deterministic. And since all of time exists as one, it cannot be changed, because it is and always was. So it goes.