world literature

Vonnegut's writing has always defied traditional classification and Slaughterhouse-Five is a prime example of this as it combines a mix of social satire, science fiction, anti-war sentiment as well as great deal of autobiographical detail. The full title-page of Slaughterhouse Five is perhaps the most revealing and apt description of the book in addition to giving us some insight into the author's mind-set behind its creation.

Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade - A Duty-Dance with Death By Kurt Vonnegut
A fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod [and smoking too much], who, as an American Infantry Scout Hors De Combat, As a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, "The Florence of the Elbe," a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale. This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from.

Billy Pilgrim's "telegraphic schizophrenic" shifts from one period of his life to another is his own defence mechanism in dealing with (or avoiding dealing with) the traumatic experiences in his life. Vonnegut has acknowledged that the only way in which he could tell his story of surviving the fire-bombing of Dresden was in this fragmented manner and that it refused to come out as a linear story when he attempted to tell it as such.

What is amazing to me about Slaughterhouse Five is that Vonnegut manages to fit so much into one story. While writing a brilliant satire on the absurdity of war on par with Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Vonnegut also manages to put a human face on the tragedy at Dresden and expose one of World War II's darker moments to the general public in an accessible form.

While the fragmented nature of time in the novel is largely a thematic device used by Vonnegut to contrast the different events in Billy Pilgrim's life, Vonnegut also contemplates the nature of time and fate in the book.

After Billy meets with the Tralfamadorian's and they explain the nature of time from their own perception, Billy is able to accept his wanderings in time. Having visited his own death on numerous times he is no longer frightened by it and has come to accept it. With regard to fate, Vonnegut seems to argue that life is easier to live if we, like Billy Pilgrim accept that what will happen has already happened and that we are not in control of our own destiny. This absence of responsibility for our actions could in itself spark an entirely separate philosophical and religious debate that I don't intend to entertain in the space provided here. Suffice it to say that it's an interesting proposition and one that can be seen as a recurring theme in time travel literature.

With regard to time travel and the nature of time my argument of late has been that if the past is immutable and cannot be changed by the time traveller, then it tends to suggest that fate exists. My logic being that assuming time is linear (which it may not be), our present is the future's past so if we can't change our past the future cannot change its own past (our present). Confused yet? Anyhow, its just an aside that I thought I would mention in light of the themes raised in Slaughterhouse Five.

Slaughterhouse Five has been my frist experience reading Kurt Vonnegut and fortunently it was a pleasent one. I chose to read Slaughterhouse Five for an assignment in my English III AP class and was not looking foward to it. However, I decided to give the book a chance so I read some of its reviews (another positive experience), after the reviews I read a summary of the book (this was a somewhat less positive experience). The summary told of a soldier who comes back from World War Two and is abducted by space aliens. Upon reading this I had to laugh, as my teacher expressly told us that this book was one of the best ever written. Again to be fair, I bought the book and began reading (I allowed myself ample time - I wasn't planning on enjoying it) andc finished four hours later. I was expecting to take at least a few days, but once I started, I couldn't stop! Vonnegut's writing style and structure is very similar to another fantastic sci-fi writer, Douglas Adams. Slaughterhouse Five reminded me very much of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Both Vonnegut and Adams use similar humor and have habits of repeating phrases (So it goes). An overall great book, I highly reccomend that everybody read it.

I know this novel fairly well having read it several times (once aloud to my students). It is about all time being always present if only we knew, or could realize it, or had a sense about time in the same way we have senses for light and sound.

It is also about the Allied fire bombings of Dresden which killed more people than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. (And so it goes.) Kurt Vonnegut begins as though writing a memoir and advises us that "All of this happened, more or less..." Of course it did not, and yet, as with all real fiction, it is psychologically true. His protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, an unlikely hero, somewhat in the manner of unlikely heroes to come like Forest Gump and the hero of Jerzy Kosinski's Being There, transcends time and space as he bumbles along. This is a comédie noire--a "black comedy"--not to be confused with "film noir," a cinematic genre in which the bad guys may win or at least they are made sympathetic. In comédie noire the events are horrific but the style is light-hearted. What the genres have in common is a non-heroic protagonist.

This is also a totally original work written in a most relaxing style that fuses the elements of science fiction with realism. It is easy to read (which is one of the reasons it can be found on the high school curriculum in our public schools). It is sharply satirical, lampooning not only our moral superiority, our egocentricity, but our limited understanding of time and space. And of course it is an anti-war novel in the tradition of All Quiet on the Western Front and Johnny Got His Gun.

Vonnegut's view of time in this novel is like the stratification of an upcropping of rock: time past and time present are there for us to see, but also there is time future. Billy Pilgrim learns from the Tralfamadorians (who kidnapped him in 1967) that we are actually timeless beings who experience what we call the past, present and future again and again. And so Billy goes back to the war and forward to his marriage, and to Tralfamadore again and again. He learns that the Tralfamadorians see the stars not as bright spots of light but as "rarefied, luminous spaghetti" and human beings as "great millepedes with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other." So time is not a river, nor is it a snake with its tail in its mouth. It is omnipresent, yet some things occur before and some after, but always they occur again.

And so it goes.

What I admire most about this most admirable novel is how easily and naturally Vonnegut controls the narrative and how effortlessly seems its construction. It is almost as if Vonnegut sat down one day and let his thoughts wander, and when he was through, here is this novel.

In a sense, Vonnegut invented a new novelistic genre, combining fantasy with realism, touched by fictionalized memoir, penned in a comedic mode as horror is overtaken by a kind of fatalistic yet humorous view of life. Note here the appearance of Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut's alter-ego, the science fiction writer who is said to have invented Tralfamadore.

Bottom line: read this without preconceptions and read it without regard to the usual constraints. Just let it flow and accept it for what it is, a juxtaposition of several genres, a tale of fiction, that--as fiction should--transcends time and space.