Slaughterhouse-Five

I don't reread many books, figuring I'd rather spend the time discovering a new book than raking over the past. But I've made an exception with some of my all-time favorite books such as Catch-22 and Portnoy's Complaint and now Slaughterhouse-Five. I first read the book back in high school, I think, and following the death of Kurt Vonnegut in April I had been thinking a lot about him so figured the time was right, and to make sure the book held up to the standards I had assigned it. It does.

Vonnegut had been wanting to write a book about Dresden for years. He was there, as a prisoner of war, when the Allies bombed the city in 1945. It was a city without military value, full of beautiful buildings. But it was reduced to cinders and over 100,000 civilians were killed. Something like that, especially to a sensitive soul like Vonnegut, doesn't go away easily, and for all those years he was grappling with it. In 1968 he finally wrote Slaughterhouse-Five, and what he did was particularly Vonnegutian: he combined the trauma of what he went through with a genre that he was familiar with, the pulp science-fiction novel.

Vonnegut's protagonist is Billy Pilgrim, a fellow prisoner of war who goes home from the war and lives a quiet little life as an optometrist. Except Billy has a curious affliction: he is unstuck in time. At any moment he can be in one time period, walk through a door, and find himself at a point twenty years earlier, or twenty years later. He has been at his birth and death many times. He knows that what happens will always happen, and there is nothing he can do to change it.

He learned all this from the Tralfamadoreans, a race of extraterrestrials who kidnap him and display him as a zoo specimen on their own planet. Tralfamadoreans see time differently than we do. They know that the past, present and future are simultaneous. Anything that ever happened is still happening. There is no death--a corpse is just a body that is in particularly bad shape at the moment. Everyone that we think of as dead still exists in time.

In this construct, Vonnegut unfurls a quiet meditation on the nature of war. In one passage, Billy watches a war film backwards. Instead of bombs being dropped, they fly up into the air, are caught by airplanes, the bombs broken down into minerals, and the minerals buried into the earth so they won't do anyone any harm. The book is also about coping with trauma. Vonnegut, in the first chapter, talks about how he likes to get drunk and call up people on the phone. With Billy, though, he has invented the world of Tralfamadore, where his hapless hero is mated with an adult film actress named Montana Wildhack. The words trauma and Tralfamadore even have a similar sound. When one wants to escape the horrors of reality, creating a world where one is frolicking with a naked starlet seems a reasonable solution.

The book features some characters from other Vonnegut books, such as Howard W. Campbell from Mother Night, Elliot Rosewater, and Kilgore Trout, the science-fiction writer who is in many Vonnegut books. It also provides us with Vonnegut's best known phrase, "So it goes," which he has inserted any time after there is mention of a death. I don't know if Vonnegut will have an epitaph, but surely "So it goes" would be an appropriate one.

If you've never read this book, do yourself a favor and read it.