Slaughterhouse 5 - An Analysis

One thing I have to get right out of the way: this book was, in many ways, not exactly what I had expected. But then again, perhaps that’s because I didn’t exactly have a clear idea of what to expect. Until a short while ago, the most I knew about this book was that it was an anti-war novel, and that it was something of a classic. That was literally it.

Then a couple of months ago, over drinks down a pub (where many great stories begin), I was talking to one of my oldest friends which, along with other important matters like Doctor Who, awesome presents, and what titles we could come up with for porn movie titles of classic movies, we also discussed reading and writing, including my own science fiction novel that I had been working on-and-off for some time, with one key idea being the main protagonist finding himself travelling mentally backwards and forwards in time. This, to my surprise, brought up the main plot of Slaughterhouse 5, in which main protagonist Billy Pilgrim finds himself doing the exact same thing, going backwards and forwards in time, mainly from travelling from two key periods in his life: his time as a prisoner of war and his eventful life afterwards, which included getting married, getting a job as an optometrist, and living on the planet Tralfamadore.

As you can imagine, this wasn’t what I had expected from an ‘anti-war classic’.

Of course, it was only a week or so later, after my friend had actually bought me a copy of the novel for me to read, that I discovered just how completely unusual it is, not just in terms of war stories, but in literature overall.

The first thing that leaped out was how much author Kurt Vonnegut was himself a part of the story and its telling, including an opening and closing chapter on some of his personal experiences and even how he came to write the story and why he wanted/needed to write it. This actually threw me off at first because I was just expecting the novel to simply leap into the story of Billy Pilgrim, but after finishing the novel, I think it’s one of those key things that I’ll appreciate more on a second reading. Because it establishes that the writer of this story and his experiences are as important as the story he’s telling. Considering that, in my experience, writers themselves when it comes to fiction at least tend to be essentially invisible when telling their stories, the fact that Vonnegut not only does this but does it in such a way that he doesn’t come across as a massively pretentious wanker is already incredibly fascinating.

The second thing that leaped out about the novel was how funny and blackly satirical it was at times. Vonnegut’s writing is packed with brilliantly deadpan wit, especially when telling things that were at the same time absolutely ridiculous and perfectly everyday. This is never more clear than how he presents death in the book, something that is not only commonplace but is always punctuated with the words, ‘So it goes’. His continual use of these three words at the end of every single death described, even if those deaths were completely horrific – no, especially if those deaths were completely horrific – was something that I always found blackly hysterical. This is mostly due to the deliberate detachment Vonnegut has to most of the characters, as the writer himself admits at one point that in this book there are no characters, at least not in times of war, with everyone growing essentially detached from both their own lives and from life itself.

Even in Pilgrim’s life both before and after the war, there are many characters – including those in Billy’s own family, especially his daughter – that don’t come across as human beings as such. Not to call them flat or one-dimensional, but more that they have a detachment and lack of human empathy or sympathy at times that reminds me a great deal of the works of Roman Polanski. Another great friend of mine, Jean, who has written some brilliant analytical reviews of Polanski’s work, has noted that a common theme amongst his films is that a great deal of them involve protagonists who are sympathetic victims that are surrounded by ‘monsters’, in his terms – men and women who generally seem to lack empathy or sympathy or even humanity, even if it’s in the mundane way possible. This is, to me, the perfect way to describe a great deal of the characters in Vonnegut’s novel. The one time a character is even described as such is someone who we’ve always been told is essentially a doomed man, a victim that’s heading for, like many other people in war, a meaningless death.

Now, for the time travel. I’m a man who loves his time travel in stories – whether comedic or dramatic, some of my favourite stories have involved brilliant uses of this storytelling device. In fact, when it comes to many stories, there are times when I take it too seriously – Looper’s use of it was great throughout its first half, with a protagonist facing himself in both his past and his future, and neither viewpoint particularly likes the other, but then the completely non-sensical ending partially ruined it for me (the rest of it was ruined by a second half that just did not seem to fit the brilliantly nourish and character based first half) – so I was worried whether my obsession over things like cause and effect, what can and can’t be changed and any ‘rules’ of time travel that are presented in a story that are or are not adhered to, might ruin my enjoyment of a novel, even a greatly loved classic. But Slaughterhouse 5 is a story that has used it in a way that I’ve never really seen used before, and it’s one that I adore.

Firstly, whenever Billy Pilgrim travels, he always seems to know exactly where he is in his life. If he arrives in 1945, he knows he’s a prisoner of war in Germany. If he arrives in 1968, he knows he is a widower with a daughter. He even knows the exact date he’s going to die and how. And he never really attempts to change or prevent a single moment – once again, there’s a key detachment that’s focused on, and the detachment that Billy has is to time itself. He still finds degrees of happiness and sadness in his life, but overall, he has a unique perspective of time that no one else has. It’s almost like an experience of life that has been edited for Billy in the wrong order, and he just allows himself to go wherever time takes him, whether it’s as something as blissful as his honeymoon or whether it’s something as terrible as seeing the ruins of a bombed city and digging out rotting bodies out of ‘corpse mines’ afterwards.

The way Vonnegut has used time travel here is unlike anything I’ve seen in other time travel stories, mostly because it just works on so many layers. Looking at how the narrative and Billy constantly switch from the war to afterwards, I can’t help but think of the perfect metaphor here of how everything about war never truly leaves you. Afterwards, you can get married, you can have kids, you could even get abducted by aliens and fuck Hollywood stars on an alien world, in Billy’s case, and you can even experience things as terrible as grief. But as much as you can try to focus on the good things afterwards, war never truly leaves you. The things a man sees, the things a man lives through. The soldiers and the innocents who die in such conflicts. The sheer soullessness of it all. Vonnegut has written a war novel unlike any other by doing what all the greatest science fiction writers have done: using a key science fiction idea to put across something important – perhaps something even deeply important and personal to the writer himself – to allow a reader an easier understanding of something that perhaps is almost impossible to understand unless it’s something they’ve been through.

But I think Vonnegut’s novel is a lot more than just about war. It’s about life and death – these two extremes especially – and everything in between. It’s about how broken and fractured life is in general, about those moments that we always come back to, the best and the worst. It’s about all the things I’ve mentioned and, I strongly suspect, so much more that I’ve missed, and therefore make it a story that I will inevitably come back to. It is literally quite unlike any other novel I’ve ever read, and one I am so grateful to have read.