Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

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“Vonnegut gives a compelling account of the horrors of war using intricate, clever story-telling techniques, bringing together the extremes between truth (historical facts) and science fiction (futuristic imagination). He uses the extraordinary technique of combining the dark humor of Billy´s views of World War II with the serious message from the figment of madness of Tralfamadore to show the inexplicable occurrences of war and its repercussions. This ingenious combination leads to a unique tale that is timeless and interesting, that brings the story of Dresden, of Tralfamadore, and of Billy Pilgrim, into the public eye.”

The Vonnegut Statement, Jerome Klinkowitz & John Somer.

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death is an anti-war novel that contains elements of science fiction, written by Kurt Vonnegut and published in 1969.

The novel tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an American man who reluctantly fought in World War II as a young man. Billy was captured by the Germans and, by 1945, he was taken to Dresden. He witnessed and survived the bombing of the city, which was completely destroyed by the attack. After this, Billy was discharged and soon hospitalized with post-traumatic stress disorder.

This is the chronological order of events that one grasps once the reading has finished. In turn, the novel is told in a non-linear fashion, with the story beginning when Billy is already a grown man with adult children. Billy thinks he was abducted by an alien race, the Tralfamadorians, and placed in an alien zoo. During his captivity in Tralfamadore, he learns about the alien race’s theory of time in four dimensions: all events have already occurred and they reoccur. Through this science-fiction element, Vonnegut discusses the existence of free will.

The novel’s non-linear narrative mimics the mental disorientation that Billy experiences as a result of PTSD after the war. He thinks he is unstuck in time, traveling back and forth through a string of inevitable events that endlessly repeat themselves, because this is his only way to rationalize and make sense of the horrors he witnessed.

Since everything happens at once and has already happened, things are always the way they are and they cannot be changed, there is no reason behind them and they “do not lend themselves to warnings or explanations”. Tralfamadorians claim that when a person dies, he only appears to die because he is still alive in the past: you’re simultaneously dead and alive, meaning that the deaths Billy witnessed during the war were mere moments and not permanent. This philosophy of inevitable fate and non-death are coping mechanisms for him to acquit the unjustified slaughter he witnessed in the war.

Vonnegut integrates historical facts, which make up most of the novel, with science-fiction segments that represent the destructive effect that war has on the minds and lives of those who survive it. Billy’s war experiences have a dark-humored tone, perhaps to highlight the absurdity of war: Englishmen who befriend the Germans who took them captive and prepare musical numbers for the captured war prisoners, a German couple that is appalled at the state of the surviving soldiers’ horses while in presence of a devastated city.

In a nutshell, the novel is about a man who survives a war he did not want to participate in nor support, and how he has to make sense of the world after the things he has seen. The horrors, the death, and the massacre left him with a PTSD so strong that he finds shelter in an alien-race philosophy that validates and rationalizes all the irrational things he witnessed. If there is something visible in the novel, it is the mental devastation that war leaves on its survivors. Still, Vonnegut leaves the question of whether Billy’s experience with the Tralfamadorians was real or a mental fabrication open to the reader’s interpretation.