Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death is considered to be a modern literary masterpiece. It became an instant success and was on the New York Times best seller list for sixteen weeks. A film version appeared in 1972, directed by George Roy Hill. Based around the author's experiences in World War Two, together with a large dose of science fiction, the book is a darkly funny protest against the cruelty of war in the service of authority.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
During his 50-year career as a writer, Kurt Vonnegut became famous for his dark satire, his appreciation of the absurd and his great humanity. Slaughterhouse-Five contains all of these elements, but the inclusion of tragic facts witnessed by the author himself make it particularly moving. Vonnegut’s absurd, tragic-comic scenes make the reader laugh out loud, rather than cry.
As a young soldier, Vonnegut experienced the horrors of the air raids over Dresden (Germany). As a prisoner of war he was forced to dig countless numbers of bodies out of the cellars under the ruins of the city. In the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator, a substitute for Vonnegut himself, explains that the novel is partly autobiographical and describes his struggle in finding the words to write about his experiences in Dresden.
‘...not many words about Dresden came from my mind then – not enough of them to make a book, anyway. And not many words come now, either, when I have become an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls and his sons full grown.’
“…non mi venivano molte parole da dire su Dresda, o almeno non abbastanza da cavarne un libro. E non me ne vengono molte neanche ora, ora che sono diventato un vecchio rudere con i suoi ricordi e le sue Pall Mall e i figli grandi.”
PRISONERS OF WAR
Vonnegut considered the bombing of Dresden to be so senseless that the only way to describe it was to use a ‘senseless’ non-linear format. The book follows the experiences of the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, as a badly-trained American soldier who refuses to fight. Captured in 1944 by the Germans, Pilgrim is kept, together with one hundred other American POWs11 in an abandoned slaughterhouse called 'Slaughterhouse 5'. The climax of the novel is the point when Billy is forced to dig up bodies buried by the air raids.
However, in chapter two, we learn that Billy Pilgrim ‘has come unstuck in time’, as a result of being kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. Consequently the plot travels backwards and forwards in time together with Billy’s consciousness, allowing the reader to experience flashes from his past and future. There are no surprises. We know from the start that Billy will witness the bombing of Dresden and that he will be involved in the clearing of bodies.
At one point, while watching a film about American bombers in World War Two, Billy becomes "slightly unstuck in time" so that he views the film backwards. Ironically, a scene of death and destruction is transformed into a scene of healing:
‘[The American bombers] flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism, which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the plane.’
“Lo stormo, volando all’indietro, sorvolò una città tedesca in fiamme. I bombardieri aprirono i portelli del vano bombe, esercitarono un miracoloso magnetismo che ridusse gli incendi e li raccolse in recipienti cilindrici d’acciaio, e sollevarono questi recipienti fino a farli sparire nel ventre degli aerei.”
PERCEPTIONS OF TIME
Billy reflects that if life continued backwards, everything would be improved until humanity was reduced to two perfect human beings – Adam and Eve. The reader of course knows that the opposite is true and that humanity is heading for self-destruction. This literary device was later used by Martin Amis in his book Time’s Arrow (1991).
Although the alien kidnapping is mentioned throughout the novel, we only discover the details in chapter five. At the age of 44, Billy is kidnapped by aliens and taken to a planet called Tralfamadore, where he is kept naked on display in a zoo. The Tralfamadorians have a four-dimensional perception of time. For them all moments exist at all times. No one ever dies, there are just some moments in time when they are more alive. They even know how the universe ends and make no attempt to change this event because it has always happened in that way and always will. Billy comments on what a peaceful planet they have. The answer is a revelation:
‘Today we do. On other days we have wars as horrible as any you’ve ever seen or read about. There isn’t anything we can do about them, so we simply don’t look at them. We ignore them.’
"Oggi sì. In altri momenti abbiamo guerre terribili, le più terribili che abbiate mai visto o di cui abbiate mai letto. Non possiamo farci niente, perciò ci limitiamo a non guardarle. Le ignoriamo."
A LITERARY TRUTH
This Tralfamadorian vision of time conditions the whole book. There is a constant sense that events are inevitable. Life is just like that and the words "So it goes" are frequently repeated throughout the novel. It is only at the very end that the plot suddenly becomes terribly clear and linear when Billy digs up the bodies.
‘There were hundreds of corpse mines operating by and by. They didn’t smell bad at first, were wax museums. But then the bodies rotted and liquefied, and the stink was like roses and mustard gas. So it goes.’
"Furono aperte, qua e là, centinaia di miniere di cadaveri. In principio non puzzavano, erano musei delle cere. Ma poi i corpi cominciarono a corrompersi e a liquefarsi, e c'era un odore di iprite e di rose."
Vonnegut died in 2007. Writing his obituary in Time magazine, Lev Grossman commented: "Vonnegut's sincerity, his willingness to scoff at received wisdom, is such that reading his work for the first time gives one the sense that everything else is rank hypocrisy."