You’re born, you live, you die; so what? That’s Kurt Vonnegut’s view on life – at least, as far as anyone reading his 1969 groundbreaker, Slaughterhouse-Five can tell. Told by an omniscient narrator, Slaughterhouse-Five is a true-to-life story about the bombing of Dresden during WWII. Vonnegut’s tone is evident throughout the novel, and many believe the narrator is Vonnegut himself.
Slaughterhouse-Five takes place during WWII, following Billy Pilgrim, a rather flat and distant character as he enters the war and is taken prisoner by enemy forces. As Pilgrim experiences stressful and dangerous situations, he “time travels” to his future and distant planets. Events culminate in the Dresden bombing at the end of the book, and we see Pilgrim towards the end of his life, his madness fully developed at this point. Pilgrim is the only major character in this story. While others are fleshed out, they are mainly stock characters that lack development through the story. Even Pilgrim himself does not grow in any way, a great example of Vonnegut’s irony.
Kurt Vonnegut has a very distinctive tone. His point of view could in fact be best described as “You’re born, you live, you die; so what?” – an expression that fits in very distinctively with his atheism. After every mention of death, dying and destruction, he uses the phrase “so it goes” – as if the death of a character is only as tragic as a bottle of flat champagne. “Major” characters die in ignoble and unexpected ways, representing the eventuality and irony of death – unlike most war novels, in which major characters often die heroically. Sometimes ironic, sometimes satirical and sometimes just sad, Vonnegut’s style evokes a fatalistic version of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Vonnegut experienced a lot of suffering in his life – from his mother’s suicide while he was away during WWII to the schizophrenia and war trauma that plagued him all his life, he was a broken individual. Many modern scholars claim that Vonnegut had post-traumatic stress disorder, another explanation for his use of Billy Pilgrim as a distant projection of himself.
One may question the book’s success as an anti-war novel. Published in 1969, during the height of Vietnam and pacifistic protests, Vonnegut’s novel was explosive almost immediately. Except for the first chapter (told from Vonnegut’s point of view), and the inclusion of a book excerpt lamenting the bombing, Vonnegut never explicitly expresses any anti-war sentiments. Slaughterhouse-Five has enjoyed its success for that very reason. Many scholars have suggested that Billy Pilgrim is, in fact, Kurt Vonnegut – that Pilgrim himself is not a character, but instead is a version of Vonnegut, used so he wouldn’t have to deal with the trauma he suffered during the war. Both show clear symptoms of schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder – Pilgrim’s “time travels” are just hallucinations, brought on by stress and anxiety, and Vonnegut was known to suffer from schizophrenia. Many things he encounters in reality show up later in his delusions (such as the dirty picture of the woman and horse).
This novel can definitely be considered quasi-autobiographical – Pilgrim is only aware of his own thoughts and feelings (of which there are few – a distant relationship between events and emotions is another characteristic of schizophrenics and trauma victims). He not only exhibits the qualities of the same mental illness Vonnegut himself had, but also shares experiences with Vonnegut – after being taken prisoners of war during WWII, both were held captive in a converted slaughterhouse called Slaughterhouse-Five. With Vietnam (and its protestors) raging and the discovery of PTSD, it’s no wonder Slaughterhouse-Five fueled the anger surrounding the war and the mental health of veterans.
Slaughterhouse-Five was a roaring success, and continues to enjoy fame as a modern classic. Depicting horrifying wartime events with his trademark black humor, satire and irony, Vonnegut’s 1969 novel is masterfully subtle, speaking louder than any anti-war diatribe ever did.
