It’s good that I didn’t expect anything when I first opened Slaughterhouse-Five. It’s not that I thought it’d be bad. I just happened to know absolutely nothing about either the book or its author. Sure, I’d heard the name Kurt Vonnegut before, but thinking it was a remarkably German name for an American author was where my judgements began and ended.
I’m glad I went blank into Slaughterhouse-Five because whatever expectations I might have had would have been subverted immediately. It’s one of those books you can never quite put your finger on, yet even though its parts seem disorganized, those parts don’t just add up to a whole, that whole makes you feel and reflect on many things.
For example, you could say Slaughterhouse-Five is about the bombing of Dresden in World War II. Technically, that’s correct. And even though the city and its destruction are mentioned all the time, the supposed main event ultimately takes place on less than a handful of pages. It is anticlimactic not only in its presence but also its description. Bombs fell. Our hero stayed in his shelter. He came out, everyone was dead. So it goes.
Despite this, the book’s climax perfectly represents what it’s meant to do: By making war sound like a humdrum, everyday experience, it reveals both the unbelievable nature of humans killing each other en masse and the numbness soldiers develop in order to cope with this unbelievable reality.
A field of bodies burnt to coal, the sound of a man having his eyes squeezed out with two fingers, or the smell of a basement full of rotten corpses: These are not experiences meant for the human mind, and when the senses pass them along anyway, the brain’s only hope of not breaking is to shield itself with a shrug. So it goes.
That’s why these three words, “so it goes,” also mark the through line of the book. If you pay attention, you’ll notice they appear literally every time someone takes their last breath, be it in our protagonist Billy Pilgrim’s past, present, future, or in one of his stories. It’s a lot of times, by the way. 106 to be exact. That’s at least one death on every other page of my paperback edition. Sometimes, it’s an individual. Often, it’s a group. Every now and then, it’s a collection of tens of thousands of people. Dead, dead, dead. So it goes.
If alienation as a survival mechanism is a core theme of the book, there is no one better than our hero to embody it: For one, Billy Pilgrim felt estranged from the world the moment he was born, and for another, he is literally abducted by aliens. Or was that just in his head? He also time-travels, by the way. Yet another convenient way of getting out of reality.
As a narrator loosely based on Vonnegut himself tells us Billy’s story, we never find out whether his trip to Tralfamadore or his jumps through time and space are real or just imagined. The book strongly hints at the latter, but it is never confirmed. The ambiguity only makes Vonnegut’s points around escapism more compelling.
It also allows him to relay Billy’s tale in many short, anachronous episodes, switching seamlessly from Billy’s war years to his time in a mental ward, from his 18th wedding anniversary to his first swim, and from a plane crash he was in to his work as a well-off optometrist. This, in turn, makes the book paradoxically entertaining. You’re certain the next chapter will play out in black-and-white and slow-motion—but you never know where Billy Pilgrim will end up next.
There are bright spots, too. Billy’s wife Valencia, for example, who, despite not being the prettiest, loves him dearly—and comes with a wealthy father who hands Billy his entire, very successful post-war career. There’s Billy’s son, a troublemaker in high school, but who later straightens out and joins the Green Berets. And of course all the amenities a rich man can afford in the American 1960s and 70s, like Billy’s “Magic Fingers” massage bed.
“Try as you might to ignore us,” these little sparks of joy seem to say, “but every now and then, life will tickle your fancy, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Vonnegut wanted us to feel the weight of a superficially stale story, but he sure didn’t forget the salt.
It’s strange read, this book. And we, as ever, live in strange times. There’s more I could say about it, but it’d always be less than what you could learn from reading it, holding it up, and looking at your world, your life, your time through the special lens that is Slaughterhouse-Five—as long as you go in without expectations.
Highlights
Here are my highlights from the book, in order of appearance. Emphasis mine.
There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
GOD GRANT ME
THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT
THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE,
COURAGE
TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN,
AND WISDOM ALWAYS
TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE.
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.
[…]
Billy turned on the Magic Fingers, and he was jiggled as he wept.
There was a crippled man down there, as spastic in space as Billy Pilgrim was in time.
The locomotive and the last car of each train were marked with a striped banner of orange and black, indicating that the train was not fair game for airplanes-that it was carrying prisoners of war.
[…]
The wedding had taken place that afternoon in a gaily striped tent in Billy’s backyard. The stripes were orange and black.
It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who few them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfeld in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals.
Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, be came high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.
The guards peeked inside Billy’s car owlishly, cooed calmingly. They had never dealt with Americans before, but they surely understood this general sort of freight. They knew that it was essentially a liquid which could be induced to flow slowly toward cooing and light. It was nighttime.
The only light outside came from a single bulb which hung from a pole-high and far away. All was quiet outside, except for the guards, who cooed like doves. And the liquid began to flow. Gobs of it built up in the doorway, plopped to the ground.
Billy was the next-to-last human being to reach the door. The hobo was last. The hobo could not flow, could not plop. He wasn’t liquid anymore. He was stone. So it goes.
Derby’s son would survive the war. Derby wouldn’t. That good body of his would be filled with holes by a firing squad in Dresden in sixty-eight days. So it goes.
“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.”
“I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.”
“There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you’re right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. 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. There 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 many marvelous moments seen all at one time.“
Out went the lights. Billy didn’t even know whether he was still alive or not.
And they came to a shed where a corporal with only one arm and one eye wrote the name and serial number of each prisoner in a big, red ledger. Everybody was legally alive now. Before they got their names and numbers in that book, they were missing in action and probably dead. So it goes.
They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were exactly what Englishmen ought to be. They made war look stylish and reasonable, and fun.
So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help.
He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoevsky.
Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, “I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren’t going to want to go on living.”
His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.
The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were looking across a desert at a mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clear. They could look at a peak or a bird or a cloud, at a stone right in front of them, or even down into a canyon behind them. But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole through which he could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe.
This was only the beginning of Billy’s miseries in the metaphor. He was also strapped to a steel lattice which was bolted to a flatcar on rails, and there was no way he could turn his head or touch the pipe. The far end of the pipe rested on a bi-pod which was also bolted to the flatcar. All Billy could see was the little dot at the end of the pipe. He didn’t know he was on a flatcar, didn’t even know there was anything peculiar about his situation.
The flatcar sometimes crept, sometimes went extremely fast, often stopped-went uphill, downhill, around curves, along straightaways. Whatever poor Billy saw through the pipe, he had no choice but to say to himself, “That’s life.”
“How-how does the Universe end?” said Billy. “We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers. A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears.” So it goes.
The honeymoon was taking place in the bittersweet mysteries of Indian Summer in New England.
EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL, AND NOTHING HURT
An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, “There they go, there they go.” He meant his brains.
That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.
While he examined the boy’s eyes, Billy told him matter-of-factly about his adventures on Tralfamadore, assured the fatherless boy that his father was very much alive still in moments the boy would see again and again.
Poor old Derby, the doomed high school teacher, lumbered to his feet for what was probably the finest moment in his life. 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 all, is that people are discouraged from being characters. But old Derby was a character now.
Nobody talked much as the expedition crossed the moon. There was nothing appropriate to say. One thing was clear: Absolutely everybody in the city was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were, and that anybody that moved in it represented a flaw in the design. There were to be no moon men at all.
