You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.
"If I hadn't spent so much time studying Earthlings," said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn't have any idea what was meant by ‘free will.’ I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will."
Before I started reading Slaughterhouse-Five, I assumed that Kurt Vonnegut was primarily a fantasy writer. My misconception was probably from conflating Vonnegut with Brandon Sanderson, the extremely popular fantasy writer who is all the rage today, given that both these authors have resources on writing available for free online. But while I have continued to hear high praise for Vonnegut, Sanderson’s work seems to be more polarizing. Naturally, I attempted to read Vonnegut first.
Slaughterhouse-Five could be categorized as a fantasy novel. It incorporates concepts such as alien abduction and time-travel without attempting to dive into “scienc-y” explanations. However, it is mainly a brutally honest and darkly humorous anti-war novel that also doubles down as a cultural critic. The fact that Vonnegut achieves all this in 200-odd pages that read crisply is a testament to his abilities as a writer.
Classified as a postmodern novel, Slaughterhouse-Five's first lines are “All these happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.” The novel begins with a first person narrator who resembles the author so much that we are not sure what’s real and what’s not. Kurt Vonnegut was a Second World War veteran who was a prisoner of war in Dresden when the allied forces bombed the city, razing it to the ground and killing about 25000 people. The narrator describes his meandering attempt to write a book. After all, “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre”. He ultimately pens something down, thereby shifting the perspective to the third person and tracking his protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. Billy is successful in his personal life, but a misfit in war. At some point during the war, Billy is captured by “Tralfamadorians”, an alien race that see time as a fourth dimension, meaning that they can see the past, present and the future simultaneously. Billy acquires this ability as well. He is “unstuck in time”. This accounts for the criss-crossing non-linear narrative.
All American army men are portrayed unsympathetically--most of them are either bumbling fools or psychopaths. Even today, such an unsentimental portrayal of a country’s armed forces would attract controversy. In fact, Wilson County in Tennessee banned 400 books just two months back, including Slaughterhouse-Five. In 1972, a circuit judge in Michigan called the book “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar, and anti-Christian.” The author's biggest achievement is his compelling first-hand account of this dreary side of war. But he also has things to say about the traditional American lifestyle. As a character in this book remarks, “Americans are urged to hate themselves.. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor.”
Slaughterhouse-Five has a litany of characters, but none of the characters undergo a transformational arc. As the narrator remarks, “There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because just of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.” Even so, we meet a lot of characters, many of them recurring from Vonnegut’s other novels. The narrator breaks the third-person narrative at times as well, with lines such as “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.” This reminded me of the Indian epic Mahabharata, which has the author Vyasa making appearances through the story - though Vonnegut is a cog in the machinery and not an all-knowing and powerful sage.
The underlying theme of Slaughterhouse-Five is fatalism and denial of causality. The phrase “So it goes” recurs multiple times through the novel (apparently 106 times), signifying a resigned acceptance of the vicissitudes of fate. A dialogue between Billy and a Tralfamadorians goes like this when Billy asks why he was the person singled out to be abducted by them:
"Have you seen bugs trapped in amber?"
"Yes.” Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.
"Well, here we are, Mr.Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this minute. There is no why.”
I look forward to reading more by Kurt Vonnegut. Despite being based on the second World War, which seems to be an eternity away now, Vonnegut’s deglamorization of war and his social critique remain relevant. And his humor and wit make it all the more palatable.
