Slaughterhouse-Five

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All this happened, more or less. Billy Pilgrim is captured as a prisoner of war and is sent to Dresden with fellow American POWs to live in Schlachthof-fünf (Slaughterhouse-Five), which as the name suggests used to be a storehouse for meat. There they serve as contracted laborers and survive the Allied bombing of Dresden that kills tens of thousands and reduces the city into rubble. Pilgrim and company are saved by the underground bunker in their make-shift residence but only a few of them make it back to America alive. He rebuilds his life and finds wealth in optometry in his hometown of Ilium, marrying the daughter of the owner of the school he attends and having two children with her. And then he is abducted by extraterrestrials and taken to the planet Tralfamadore where he is housed in a zoo for observation and given another human being as his mate, a porn star named Montana Wildhack with whom he sires another child. Later on in life he claims to be capable of time travel, jumping to different moments of his life at will. So it goes.

I didn’t know what to expect when I added Slaughterhouse-Five to my reading list. All I knew was that it involved time travel. Billy Pilgrim’s claim of having such an ability is subject to debate but is beyond the point. Its interpretation relies heavily on the reader. Two of the prevalent themes explored here and linked to time travel as a plot device are: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder brought about by the protagonist’s experiences during World War II; and a more existentialist take on our concept of time and our interpretation of it as supposedly linear in nature where everything follows a chronological order.

The theme of PTSD is not new to us in this generation but lest we forget, this book was published in 1969, when studies of such concepts about mental health were not that popular yet. That we are finally acknowledging mental issues as legit societal problems is a good step forward for our kind, but this hasn’t always been the case given how such topics were considered taboo or rather niche back then. Given these observations, we can say that Slaughterhouse-Five was way ahead of its time in showing its reader what PTSD felt like, even though Vonnegut had to hide it under the guise of time travel to make it more palatable.

As for the theme of time, the Tralfamadorians consider the concept as four dimensional. Life is not linear but rather a set of events plotted to be accessible simultaneously, with moments in time allowed to be revisited without limit anytime they choose. This is why they do not mourn death, because they can always just access another point in life where this is not the case. Stripped of its fantasy elements, what the author wants us to do is to be “unstuck in time” by seeing life as a rich collection of moments that should be enjoyed by virtue of their own individual merits instead of preoccupying ourselves with the search for meaning and purpose.

Vonnegut’s exposition is humorous and simple. He does not aspire for elegant prose or verbosity. Instead, he gives you simple sentences that serve as simple declarations, most of the time laced with sarcasm and wit that they come across as unserious at times. In effect, this is where the charm of Slaughterhouse-Five really lies. This is an anti-war novel that tries to find some levity in narrating the atrocities happening in the frontlines without attempting to sugarcoat them, leaving its readers shocked yet entertained at the same time without diminishing the seriousness of its message which is the nonsensical nature of war.

I enjoyed the novel but I found the writing style rather incohesive. While I was entertained, there was something lacking that I just couldn’t put a finger on. In any case, I acknowledge the appeal of Slaughterhouse-Five and I understand how it reached the esteemed place in literature that it occupies nowadays. It is that kind of novel that invites discussion and you, the reader, to peel off its layers one by one, analyzing its importance and relevance in an era dominated by war and the eventual wave of disgust that followed coming from humans who are just sick and tired of it despite it being a constant feature of our existence on this planet.