Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five

Original Cover First edition cover
Author	Kurt Vonnegut
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Philosophical, War novel, Dark comedy
Publisher	Delacorte Press
Publication date	1969
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	186 pp (first edition, hardback), 215 pp (Laurel/Dell Books paperback)
ISBN	ISBN 0-385-31208-3 (first edition, hardback)

For the film adaptation, see Slaughterhouse-Five (film).

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death (1969), by Kurt Vonnegut, is a post-modern anti-war science-fiction novel dealing with a soldier's experiences during WWII.

Plot summary

Chaplain's Assistant Billy Pilgrim, a disoriented, ill-trained American soldier, is captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. He arrived in France just as the Germans defeated his unit; they had no time to issue him combat kit and a weapon. The Germans then imprison him and other PoWs in a disused slaughterhouse in Dresden. During Allied air raids, PoWs and guards alike hide in a deep cellar; because of their safe hiding place, they are some of the few survivors of the city-destroying firestorm.

For unexplained reasons, Billy has become "unstuck in time." He meets, and is kidnapped by, extraterrestrial aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who exhibit him in a zoo, with movie star Montana Wildhack as his mate. The Tralfamadorians, who can see in four dimensions, have already seen every instant of their lives. They believe they cannot choose to change anything about their fates, but can choose to concentrate upon any moment in their lives, and Billy becomes convinced of the correctness of their theories.

Billy travels forward and back in time, reliving occasions of his life, real and fantastic. He spends time on Tralfamadore; in Dresden; in the War, walking in deep snow before his German capture; in his post-war married life in the U.S.A. of the 1950s; and in the moment of his murder.

Billy's death is the consequence of a string of events. Before the Germans capture Billy, he meets Roland Weary. At their capture, the Germans confiscate everything Weary has, including his boots, giving him clogs to wear; Weary eventually dies of gangrene caused by the clogs. Weary's friend, Paul Lazzaro, vows to avenge Weary's death by killing Billy, because revenge is "the sweetest thing in life". Time-traveler Billy, already knows where, when, and how he will be killed: Paul Lazzaro shoots him after a speech in a balkanized United States on February 13, 1976.

Characters

• Narrator — intrusive and anonymous, recurring as a minor character, and as Eric Navarro, himself, when the narrator says: "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book". The narrator begins the story describing his connection to the fire-bombing of Dresden, and his reasons for writing Slaughter House Five.

• Billy Gram — An optometrist ensconced in a dull, safe marriage, and living in Ilium, New York. He randomly travels in time and is abducted by the "four-dimensional" aliens from planet Tralfamadore. In WWII, he was a PoW in Dresden, which has a lasting effect on his post-war life. His time travel occurs among disparate times of his life, re-living events past and future, and, so, becomes fatalistic, because he has seen when, how, and why he will die.

• Roland Weary — A weak man dreaming of grandeur, he "saves" Billy several times (despite Billy's protests) in hopes of military glory, leading to their capture, and the loss of their winter uniforms and boots. In the event, Weary dies of gangrene in the train en route to the PoW camp; he blames Billy in his dying words.

• Paul Lazzaro — Another PoW. A sickly, ill-tempered car thief from Cicero, Illinois, who takes Weary's dying words as a revenge commission to kill Billy. He keeps a mental enemies list, claiming he can have anyone "killed for a thousand dollars plus traveling expenses".

• Kilgore Trout - A failed science fiction writer who manages newspaper delivery boys, and has received only one fan letter. After Billy meets him in a back alley in Ilium, New York, he invites Trout to his wedding anniversary celebration. There, Kilgore follows Billy, thinking he has seen a time window. That incident is triggered, not by Billy's time travelling, but by a repressed war memory.

• Edgar Derby — A middle-aged man who pulled strings to be able to fight in the war. He is a fellow PoW to Billy and Paul Lazzaro. The Nazis summarily execute him for stealing a teapot from a Dresden corpse.

• Howard W. Campbell, Jr. — An American Nazi; before the War, he lived in Germany as a successful, famous, German-language playwright, and became a Nazi propagandist. In an essay, he connects the misery of American poverty to the disheveled appearance and behaviour of the American PoWs. Edgar Derby confronts and challenges him when he tries recruiting American PoWs into the Free America Corps to fight the Communist Russians in behalf of the Nazis. He is the protagonist of Mother Night, an earlier Vonnegut novel.

• Valencia Merble — Billy's obese wife, and mother of their two children, Robert and Barbara; he is emotionally distant from her. She dies from carbon monoxide poisoning after an automobile accident en route to the hospital attending Billy after his aeroplane crash.

• Robert Pilgrim — Son of Billy and Valencia; a troubled, middle-class boy, and disappointing son, who so absorbs the whitebread culture's anti-Communist world view, he metamorphoses from pampered, suburban adolescent rebel to hardcore Green Beret soldier.

• Barbara Pilgrim — Daughter of Billy and Valencia. She is a "bitchy flibbertigibbet", from having had to assume the family's leadership at the age of twenty. She has "legs like an Edwardian grand piano", marries an optometrist, and treats her widower father as a childish invalid.

• Tralfamadorians — The extraterrestrial race who appear (to humans) like upright toilet plungers with a hand atop, in which is set a single, green eye. They abduct Billy and teach him about time's relation to the world as a fourth dimension, fate, and death's indiscriminate nature.

• Montana Wildhack — A pornographic film actress whom the Tralfamadorians kidnap to be Billy's mate.

• "Wild Bob" - A superannuated Army officer Billy met him in the war; he is crazy and dies. He tells the PoWs to call him "Wild Bob"; he thinks them his command, the 451st Infantry Regiment; "if you're ever in Cody, Wyoming, ask for Wild Bob", is an inspirational phrase of his that Billy repeats to himself.

Major themes

Slaughterhouse-Five explores Fate and Free Will and the illogical nature of human beings. Protagonist Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time, randomly experiencing the events of his life, with no idea of what part he next will visit (re-live) — so, his life does not end with death; he re-lives his death, before its time, an experience often mingled with his other experiences.

Billy Gram says there is no free will; an assertion confirmed by a Tralfamadorian, who says, "I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe . . . Only on Earth is there any talk of free will". The story's central conceit: most of humanity is inconsequential; they do what they do, because they must.

To the Tralfamadorians, everything simultaneously exists, therefore, everyone is always alive. They, too, have wars and suffer tragedies (they destroy the universe whilst testing spaceship fuels), but, when Billy asks what they do about wars, they reply that they simply ignore them. The Tralfamadorians counter Vonnegut's true theme: life, as a human being, only is enjoyable with unknowns. Tralfamadorians do not make choices about what they do, but have power only over what they think (the subject of Timequake). As the Narrator, Mr Vonnegut believes this theory, exposited in chapter one, "that writing an anti-war book is like writing an anti-glacier book", since both will always exist, and are both equally difficult to stop. This concept is difficult for Billy to accept, at first.

Author Vonnegut's other novels, e.g. The Sirens of Titan, suggest that the Tralfamadorians, in Slaughterhouse-Five, satirize Fatalism. The Tralfamadorians represent the belief in war as inevitable. In their hapless destruction of the universe, Vonnegut does not sympathize with their philosophy. To human beings, Vonnegut says, ignoring a war is unacceptable when we have free will.

This human illogicality appears in the climax that occurs, not with the Dresden fire bombing, but with the summary execution of a man who committed a petty theft. Amid all that horror, death, and destruction, time is taken to punish one man. Yet, the time is taken, and Vonnegut takes the outside opinion of the bird asking, "Poo-tee-weet?" The same birdsong ends the novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, as the protagonist gives away his fortune to the plaintiffs of hundreds of false paternity suits brought against him — a Dada observation of human absurdity.

Slaughterhouse-Five is framed with chapters in the author's voice, about his experience of war, indicating the novel is intimately connected with his life and convictions. That established, Vonnegut withdraws from the unfolding of Billy Pilgrim's story, despite continual appearances as a minor character: in the PoW camp latrine, the corpse mines of Dresden, when he mistakenly dials Billy’s telephone number. These authorial appearances anchor Billy Pilgrim’s life to reality, highlighting his existential struggle to fit in the human world.

Literary significance and reception

The reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five have been mixed since the 31 March 1969 review in New York Times newspaper that glowingly concedes: "you'll either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner". In its publication year, Slaughterhouse-Five was nominated for a best-novel Nebula Award and for a best-novel Hugo Award, 1970. It lost both to The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin. It appeared in the Time magazine list, 100 all-time best English-language novels written since 1923.

Literary techniques

The story continually employs the refrain So it goes . . . when death, dying, and mortality occur, as a narrative transition to another subject, as a memento mori, as comic relief, and to explain the unexplained. It appears one hundred six (106) times.

As a postmodern, metafictional novel, the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five is an author's preface about how he came to write Slaughterhouse-Five, apologizing, because the novel is "so short and jumbled and jangled", because "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre". Like in Mother Night, but more extensively, Vonnegut manipulates fiction and reality. The first sentence says: "All this happened, more or less", then appears in Billy Pilgrim's WWII, then followed by the narrator's note: That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.

The story repeatedly refers to real and fictional novels and fiction; Billy reads The Valley of the Dolls (1966), and skims a Tralfamadorian novel, and participates in a radio talk show, part of a literary expert panel discussing "The Death of the Novel".

Form

The Narrator introduces Slaughterhouse-Five with the novel's genesis and ends discussing the beginning and the end of the Novel. The story proper begins in chapter two, although there is no reason to presume that the first chapter is not fictional. This is a technique common to postmodern meta-fiction. The story purports to be a disjointed, discontinuous narrative, of Billy Pilgrim's point of view, of being unstuck in time. Vonnegut's writing usually contains such disorder.

The Narrator reports that Billy Pilgrim experiences his life discontinuously, wherein he randomly experiences (re-lives) his birth, youth, old age, and death, not in (normal) linear order. There are two narrative threads, Billy's experience of War (itself interrupted with experiences from elsewhere in his life) is mostly linear; and his discontinuous pre-war and post-war lives. Billy's existential perspective was compromised in witnessing Dresden's destruction, although he had come unstuck in time before arriving to Dresden. Slaughterhouse-Five is told in short, declarative sentences that impress the sense of reading a report of facts.

Point of view and setting

The Narrator begins the novel telling his connection to the Dresden bombing, why he is recording it, a self-description (of self and book), and of the fact that he believes it is a desperate attempt at scholarly work. He then segues to the story of Billy Pilgrim: "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time", thus, the transition from the writer's perspective to that of the third-person, omniscient Narrator.

Kilgore Trout (whom Billy Pilgrim meets operating a newspaper delivery business) is an authorial alter ego; ego and alter ego have little in common. Unlike Vonnegut's Science Fiction novelist Kilgore Trout's career is checquered with thieving publishers, and he is unaware he has a readership.

Slaughterhouse-Five is structured like a Tralfamadorian novel, the literature Billy Pilgrim encounters on Tralfamadore. The only Earth reading available to Billy is a popular novel, Valley of the Dolls (1966); asking his captors what they read, he is handed thin booklets with symbols. The Tralfamadorians tell him the symbols represent pleasing thoughts and events. When they are all simultaneously read, as do the Tralfamadorians, it creates an emotion in the reader's mind. Billy's time-tripping juxtaposes his life's events — war, wedding night, travel to father's funeral — mixing black humor, tragedy, and happiness in few paragraphs.

Censorship controversy

Slaughterhouse-Five is a commonly-censored book because it is realistic — American soldiers behave as soldiers, they talk and swear and curse like men; its language is irreverent (The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty); and it depicts people copulating. It is frequently banned from American literature classes, removed from provincial school libraries, and struck from literary curricula; conversely, it is in the curricula of some schools. The U.S. Supreme Court judged the novel's suitability — as adolescent reading in a school — in the case of Island Trees School District v. Pico, [[[List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 457|457]] U.S. 853 (1982)] as one of several books banned. Slaughterhouse-Five is the sixty-ninth entry to the American Library Association's list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000.

The fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II is the central event mentally affecting Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist. Within, Vonnegut says the firebombing killed 135,000 German civilians; he cites The Destruction of Dresden, by David Irving. Critics have accused Slaughterhouse-Five of being a quietist work, because Billy Pilgrim believes that the notion of free will is a quaint Earthling illusion. The problem, according to Robert Merrill and Peter A. Scholl, is that:

Vonnegut's critics seem to think that he is saying the same thing [as the Tralfamadorians]. For Anthony Burgess, “Slaughterhouse is a kind of evasion — in a sense, like J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan — in which we’re being told to carry the horror of the Dresden bombing, and everything it implies, up to a level of fantasy. . . . ” For Charles Harris [see excerpt above], “The main idea emerging from Slaughterhouse-Five seems to be that the proper response to life is one of resigned acceptance”. For Alfred Kazin, “Vonnegut deprecates any attempt to see tragedy, that day, in Dresden. . . . He likes to say, with arch fatalism, citing one horror after another, ‘So it goes’ ”. For Tanner, “Vonnegut has . . . total sympathy with such quietistic impulses”. And the same notion is found throughout The Vonnegut Statement, a book of original essays written and collected by Vonnegut’s most loyal academic “fans”.

Allusions and references

Allusions to other works

As in other novels, certain characters cross over from other stories, making cameo appearances, connecting the discrete novels as a greater opus. Science Fiction novelist Kilgore Trout, often is an important character in other novels, in Slaughterhouse-Five he is friend to Billy Pilgrim and social commentator. In one case, he is the only non-optometrist at a party, therefore, he is the odd-man-out. He ridicules everything the Ideal American Family hold true, such as Heaven, Hell, and Sin. In Trout's opinion, people do not know if the things they do turn out to be good or bad, and if they turn out to be bad, they go to Hell, where "the burning never stops hurting".

Other crossover characters are Eliot Rosewater, from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and Howard W. Campbell, Jr., from Mother Night, and Bertram Copeland Rumfoord, relative of Winston Niles Rumfoord, from The Sirens of Titan; the Rumfoord family appear in Vonnegut's works. Mr Rosewater says that Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel, The Brothers Karamazov, contains "everything there was to know about life".

In the Twayne's United States Authors series volume on Kurt Vonnegut, about the protagonist's name, Stanley Schatt says:

By naming the unheroic hero Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut contrasts John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress with Billy's story. As Wilfrid Sheed has pointed out, Billy's solution to the problems of the modern world is to "invent a heaven, out of 20th century materials, where Good Technology triumphs over Bad Technology. His scripture is Science Fiction, Man's last, good fantasy".

Allusions — historic, geographic, scientific

Slaughterhouse-Five speaks of the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II, and refers to the Battle of the Bulge, the Vietnam War, and the Black anti-poverty racial riots in American cities during the 1960s. Billy's wife, Valencia, wears a Reagan for President! bumper sticker on her car, referring to Reagan's failed 1968 Republican-presidential-nomination campaign.

Film, TV, musical and theatrical adaptations/references

A film adaptation of the book, also called Slaughterhouse-Five, was made in 1972. Although critically praised, the film was a box office flop. It won the Prix du Jury at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, as well as a Hugo Award, and Saturn Award. Vonnegut commended the film greatly.

In 2003 a section of the book, read by the author, was set to music in a piece called "Tock Tick."

In 1996, a theatrical adaptation of the novel was premiered at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, IL. The adaptation was written and directed by Eric Simonson and included actors Rick Snyder, Robert Breuler, and Deanna Dunagan. The play has been performed in several other theaters including a January 2008 New York premiere production at the Godlight Theatre Company.

A different adaptation by Simonson was specially written for the Risk Theatre Initiative in Dallas, Texas, and opened in February 2008, directed by Marianne Galloway.

Director Guillermo del Toro has signed a contract with Universal Studios to direct a new feature of Slaughterhouse Five some time within the next 10 years.

See also

Four dimensionalism

External links

• Vonnegut.com:
• Kilgore Trout Collection
• The Vonnegut Web
• Photos of the first edition of Slaughterhouse-Five