Travis' Review of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Over the weekend I completed Vonnegut's most famous work, Slaughterhouse-Five, also known as Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, a Fourth-Generation German-American Now Living in Easy Circumstances on Cape Cod [and Smoking Too Much], Who, as an American Infantry Scout Hors de Combat, as a Prisoner of War, Witnessed the Fire Bombing of Dresden, Germany, ‘The Florence of the Elbe,’ a Long Time Ago, and Survived to Tell the Tale. This Is a Novel Somewhat in the Telegraphic Schizophrenic Manner of Tales of the Planet Tralfamadore, Where the Flying Saucers Come From. Peace.

As can be inferred from the second humorous title, Slaughterhouse-Five is not meant to be taken completely seriously. The main event of the novel is the horrible fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany in WWII, in which 25,000 were made casualties. The protagonist Billy Pilgrim survives the leveling of the city by fortune of being in a meat locker at the time of the bombing. However, Vonnegut balances this tragedy with quirky science fiction: Billy is abducted by a race of aliens known as the Tralfamadorians who see in 4 dimensions and consider life as a whole rather than an instantaneous snapshot of the present. Billy also becomes "unstuck in time" and time travels to different moments in his life and lives them out accordingly.

Mrs. Elliott told me she had never read SH-5 because she was nervous about what she heard of Vonnegut's stream-of-consciousness like approach and sporadic, timeline defying delivery. However, I found that Vonnegut was charmingly simple to read and I powered through the novel without getting snagged on any stylistic quarks. Vonnegut uses many line breaks throughout the text to separate his nonlinear thoughts which allows the reader's eye to reset.

For me, SH-5 has its most revealing messages on the topic of the inevitability of death, and treats it with a very stoic nonchalance. Every death in the novel is followed by the line "So it goes.", blunting death's effect. It's hard not to find the book funny at times, despite its gravity. Billy is put at peace by the Tralfamadorian view of never-ending life, and even predicts and accepts his own demise. The Tralfamadorians, in their 4th dimensional wisdom, also advocate returning to the best moments of life and seeing them as eternal fixtures in a chain of events.

Admittedly, I first treated the book as science fiction, accepting that Billy was abducted by aliens from Tralfamadore and had really become unstuck in time. However, as I finished the book, it dawned on me that Billy had gone insane from what he had seen in the war, and his time travel was merely a delusion of a PTSD-stricken mind. The book became much more powerful to me after this realization.

I would recommend SH-5 to anyone, as it has been unlike any book I've read before. It is of the post-modern style, so it should be a new experience to anyone whose literary journey has been predominantly limited to the high school canon like my experience was. SH-5 was very refreshing to read and I hope to explore Vonnegut's other works in the near future.

-Travis S.