Slaughterhouse 5, by Kurt Vonnegut

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.