Slaughterhouse Five or The Children’s Crusade
By: Kurt Vonnegut
Plot: Billy Pilgrim is an optometrist from Ilium, New York who has come “unstuck in time”. He randomly visits events in his life from his birth in 1922, to his murder in 1976, with no control as to when he travels or what part of his life he will revisit. During his travels, Billy spends time in his unexciting marriage, on the planet Tralfamadore (the home of the extraterrestrials who kidnap him), and goes back to his stint as a prisoner of war in WWII, where he was one of few survivors in the bombing of Dresden.
I love this book. I don’t really know why, but I do. I generally hate anything that remotely deals with aliens or science fiction and war is never my favorite subject, but I stuck with this one and was rewarded. It has an unconventional, non-linear time frame that really keeps things interesting. (On a side note, Vonnegut must have had some serious organizational skills to pull off a book that has you flying all over the place between earth and space and war and everyday life and past and present and future, all without feeling the slightest bit lost or confused.) The ending is somewhat abrupt and uneventful. So when I finished, I didn’t feel any closure on any specific storyline. But I realized that the ending is fitting to the theme of the book. Everything is out of order. It’s written like a Tralfamadorian book.
It is said to be an anti-war book but to me, that aspect of the book is secondary. What I take away from it is a different view of our own lives. The Tralfamadorians have the ability to see their entire life start to finish. They cannot change anything about their lives, but they can choose to focus on certain parts. One of my favorite quotes in regards to this idea is when a Tralfamadorian is explaining the nature of their books to Billy: “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 at one time.” I love this because I think it would be wonderful to see our own lives as one large, beautiful image. So many people, myself included, tend to focus so much on their current situation, be it good or bad, and they forget that their past and their future are pieces to a larger puzzle. People seem to look at life day by day rather than choosing to look at it as an entire story. There is also a philosophical point to this view. Seeing life this way requires conceding to fatalism, believing that each person’s life is predetermined and there is nothing to be changed about it. (I won’t go into this much but I tend to both believe this theory and fight it all at the same time. I believe that my future is already out there, but I work like mad to become what it is I think I should be, which happens to be a well traveled advertising woman, should anyone be curious. ) I’m not sure if Vonnegut subscribed to this belief himself but I do enjoy an author who puts a little philosophy in his work.
I struggle in regards to the anti-war theme of the book, because I personally never got an “anti” vibe. Maybe it isn’t even supposed to be an anti-war book, but other critiques I’ve read refer to it as such and from what I’ve read about Vonnegut, he doesn’t seem like he was the kind of guy to rally in support of war. So I feel like there is something that I’m missing, but the only word that keeps coming to mind is apathy. I think that, as Billy’s life exemplifies, after war it is hard to care about anything. War is terrible. But as a soldier, you know it’s not going anywhere. It is senseless but will continue on forever. You’re living in terrible circumstances and doing things that man was not created to do. You probably don’t care if you live or die. You just keep waking up each morning and do what you are told. Then, in Billy’s case, there is a huge bombing that very few people survive. A bombing that, by specific design, was made to wipe out an entire population. And then after a few days, the war is over and you go home and live life. To me, apathy makes complete sense. In the introduction to the book, Vonnegut says, “…there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” So I don’t know that in this book he is actually trying to say anything prolific about war. I think he just wants to tell of his experience and that it was bad. Really bad.
My favorite passage of the book is something that was probably not intended to be a major point, but, living in the bible-belt south, I think it speaks volumes. It comes in chapter 5 and is an excerpt from one of the science fiction books Billy was reading where a character was trying to figure out why Christians found it so easy to be cruel when the intent of Christianity is to be merciful to everyone. It discusses bible readers’ reaction to the crucifixion story and is rather long so I butchered it to get the point across: “The flaw of the Christ stories…was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually The Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe…so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought…’oh boy-they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!’ And that thought had a brother: ‘There are right people to lynch.” This thought is easily connected to proponents of war but appeals to me because it can also be easily connected to the religion-obsessed people of the south. Most people do feel that there are those who, for whatever reason, deserve to die, or to be treated as inferior and disposable. Some of these people, unfortunately, do so in the name of religion. Or in the name of war.
Favorite Quotes:
“I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone”
“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”
“Goodness me, the clock has struck- alackaday and fuck my luck”
“That’s the attractive thing about war” said Rosewater. “Absolutely everybody gets a little something.”
“It was a ridiculous store, all about love and babies.”
