Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A
Duty-Dance with Death, a 1969 novel by Kurt Vonnegut about
the bombing of Dresden, written from a satirical ‘anti-war’ standpoint . This
is an inadequate way of summing up the book.
The
first chapter, told presumably from the writer’s perspective, explains how he
has tried to write about his experiences in the bombing of the German city of
Dresden, during the closing months of the Second World War. He has explained
how he has failed to do this, and promises that his next book will be better;
more fun.
He then proceeds to tell the story of
a man called Billy Pilgrim, who came unstuck in time. Billy Pilgrim, an American
soldier, becomes a German prisoner-of-war and is sent to Dresden. All the while
through the narrative he keeps finding himself at different times in his life,
experiencing events both before and after the war. He sees his childhood, his
later life as an optician/optometrist, his marriage and family, his abduction
by aliens called Tralfamadorians, his injury in a plane crash, his infatuation
with the books of a science-fiction writer named Kilgore Trout, and his
eventual attempts to tell the world about his abduction by the alien
Tralfamadorians.
It is a weird, wonderful, horrifying,
amazing, terrifying and Brilliant book. It is perhaps the best thing I have
ever read.
Vonnegut’s writing style is
completely accessible – broad, clear sentences, simple enough for anyone to
understand, possibly even children. He tells you what happens; no deception, no
complex words, no nuanced sentences. He tells you how the characters feel, and
why they feel that way, and he does this in as few words as possible. It is
therefore a nice short book, and you can read it very quickly. It took me under
forty-eight hours to finish it, and that was with just a couple of different
reading sessions, punctuated with drink and films.
In order to explain Slaughterhouse 5 I’m afraid I’m going to have to mention a
couple of pretentious theories of mine, because I consider this novel to be a
post-structuralist or postmodern book, and by that I mean that it does not
follow the established rules of how a novel should behave. The story is all
over the place, little segments written in no perceivable order, working
towards a goal that is not especially clear. In most stories, reality is
presented as concrete, established on easily comprehendible abstracts like Freedom, Truth and Justice,
and stuff, presented in an order from a beginning, through a middle, to an end,
and with clearly defined characters who have a purpose to fulfil a role and
therefore present the truth of what the writer is trying to convey.
Postmodernism, and its associated
philosophies, perceives this as bullshit.
The Truth cannot be adequately comprehended
by our limited human brains, and conventional story-telling dumbs it down and
simplifies it so that we can understand one particular prescribed version of
the truth. One way that postmodern
writers can get around this is like Italo Calvino has done in Invisible Cities, to have many isolated
little segments presenting a different story, a different reality, so that when
examined in sequence the reader might just be able to see a vague shadow of the
outline of something that might possibly be related to some kind of thing we
can, for the sake of argument, call truth.
I think Vonnegut has tried to say
something like in this in Slaughterhouse
5, however intentionally, when the Tralfamadorians try to explain to Billy
Pilgrim how their own books work:
‘Billy couldn’t read Tralfamadorian,
of course, but he could at least see how the books were laid out – in brief
clumps of symbols separated by stars. Billy commented that the clumps might be
telegrams.
“Exactly,” said the voice.
“They are telegrams?”
“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 another. 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 marvellous
moments seen all at one time”.’ (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Slaughterhouse 5. Vintage: Croydon. (2000). P.72.)
That could only put me in mind of Invisible Cities, and also of Vonnegut’s
work. It’s only a wild theory, but this demonstrates how the book actually
works – a less-often used method to convey a message, by accepting that the
message might be more complicated than people realise.
The subject-matter of course is
dark. In fact, it’s one of the darkest books I have ever read, dealing not just
with the actual horrors of total-war, but with varying attitudes to said war
when it’s finally over, and when decades have passed. Vonnegut likens it to the
Children’s Crusade, which he outlines in chapter one. But there is a definite
sense of humour in the telling, as though in the narrative there was the
occasional grim chuckle every now and then. There are moments when I wasn’t
sure whether I should laugh or cry, or maybe both, and this weird juxtaposition
kept me a little off-balance as the bite-sized prose drew me ever onwards. The
only other of Vonnegut’s works that I have read, Breakfast of Champions, which deals with consumerism and American
society, also used this method; but more often than not with Breakfast of Champions I was laughing.
It was horribly funny, whereas Slaughterhouse
5 is funnily horrible. Maybe it’s just that the topic of consumerism is
inherently less dark than large-scale massacres and war, and so the same
methods have yielded very different results.
One of the main comedic elements is
the insertion of the sci-fi pulp-fiction elements, with the abduction by the
Tralfamadorians and brief plot-synopsise of Kilgore Trout’s books, and the
reader’s constant jerking-around through time. Vonnegut mentioned at the
beginning how hard it was for him to write about his experiences in Dresden,
and this must be the weird method he used to get around that.
So this is it, then. Read this book.
Get your hands on a copy of it somewhere. Buy it. Borrow it from a friend.
Visit a library. Download it for those spangly e-book machines or whatever you
use now. There is no excuse; I’m recommending it, you can read it in a day;
it’s easy to read and understand. Read it. I’m not kidding; I never kid.
Perhaps I never was a kid. Just get those words and read them. I can also
recommend Breakfast of Champions, if
you want a follow-up or something that isn’t as bleak as hell. If it sounds
like something you don’t think you’d like, then read it anyway. You might be
surprised.
But my final words on the matter:
Read Slaughterhouse 5. People have tried
to ban it, so it must be good. Just read it, from start to finish, and I can
guarantee that you will be a better person for it.
