Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, was published on March 30th, 1969, almost 50 years ago, to the very day, of this review. Or was it yesterday? Or right now? Or tomorrow? All three. Possibly.
Published at the height of the Vietnam War, his novel is the result of what Vonnegut describes as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about the firebombing of Dresden, Germany which he witnessed as an American POW incarcerated in a former slaughterhouse (Schlachthof-fünf). The destruction of this non-military city so late in the war is still very controversial, and that controversy is central to Vonnegut’s book.
Here are the bare bones of the story: Billy Pilgrim, “tall and weak, and shaped like a bottle of Coca-Cola,” was born in Ilium, N.Y., the only child of a barber there. After graduating from Ilium High School, he attended night sessions at the Ilium School of Optometry for one semester before being drafted for military service in World War II. He served with the infantry in Europe and was taken prisoner by the Germans. He was in Dresden when it was firebombed.
After the war, he went back to Ilium and became a wealthy optometrist married to a huge wife named Valencia. They had two children, a daughter named Barbara who married an optometrist, and a son named Robert who became a Green Beret in Vietnam. In 1968, Billy was the sole survivor of a plane crash on top of Sugarbush Mountain in Vermont. While he was recovering in the hospital, Valencia was killed in a carbon- monoxide accident. On Feb. 13, 1976, Billy was assassinated by a nut with a high- powered laser gun.
Probably the absurd violence and social satire combined with the writing skills of Vonnegut would have made this a very worthy addition to post-war American fiction but there are two things I haven’t yet mentioned that catapults this book into the pantheon of great American novels. It is undoubtedly because of the novel’s science fiction content and in particular the thought-provoking travels in time that Billy and the reader experience together.
First Billy is ‘‘unstuck in time’’ and ‘‘has no control over where he is going next.’’ The second thing is that Billy says that on his daughter’s wedding night he was kidnapped by a flying saucer from the planet Tralfamadore, flown there through a time warp, and exhibited with a movie star named Montana Wildhack. The Tralfamadorians are two feet high, green, and shaped like plumber’s friends, with suctions caps on the ground and little green hands with eyes on their palms at the top of their shafts. They are wise, and they teach Billy Pilgrim many things. They teach him that humans cannot see time, which is really like ‘‘a stretch of the rocky Mountains,’’ with all moments in the past, the present and the future, always existing.
‘‘The Tralfamadorians…can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them.’’ They teach Billy that death is just an unpleasant moment. Because Billy can go back and forth in time, he knew this lesson when he was in Dresden. In 1976, when he was assassinated, Billy Pilgrim was trying to bring this message to the world. He knew he would die, but he did not mind. “Farewell, hello, farewell, hello,” he said. So it goes.
The method of time travel used by Kurt Vonnegut to transport Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five is memory. It is remarkably similar to the method utilised by the captured enemy (‘The Man’) in Chris Markers cinematic short La Jetee in 1962. Yet that similarity is only in the method, for the content and cause of this memory and memories is completely different and it is this that is the key to both the book and the film (1972) of Slaughterhouse-Five.
La Jetee is infused and haunted with WW2 and the Holocaust but it is about neither. It is concerned more about an impending nuclear confrontation, a fictional nuclear war and the end of humanity. Vonnegut’s novel is very much a child of its time. The threat of direct confrontation had receded somewhat but the power struggle between USSR and the US had moved into the ‘by proxy’ phase where hundreds of thousands of US soldiers were fighting in Vietnam against the forces of the Vietcong, also known as the National Liberation Front, who were indisputably Communist but fighting to unite the country under Ho Chi Minh.
In Slaughterhouse-Five Vonnegut shows us the tragi-comic experiences of Billy Pilgrim in WW2 and they are not dissimilar from the shared experience of soldiers in any conflict. The scenes in WW2 are based upon Vonnegut’s own experiences as a captured POW in Dresden when the allied bombing of the city took place. His book is infused with lived experience and the experience of almost unbearable horror. Although the death toll has been revised downwards in the nearly 75 years since it took place, to about 25,000, the horror of the night for those in Dresden is incalculable. Vonnegut was an eye witness to this and his book long in the making is his attempt to come to terms with the evil that humanity can inflict upon itself. It is these traumatic memories which causes our protagonist Billy Pilgrim to shift in and out of time.
In Slaughterhouse-Five we are shown Billy Pilgrim ‘‘unstuck in time’’ as he moves backwards and forwards in time not in a linear way but in a new way that preserves simultaneity and coherence, which in the book, is the alien race, known as Tralfamadorians, understanding of time. They see time as something that is always in the present. If someone is dead at a certain point in time, they do not mind, considering the fact that that person is perfectly alive in another point in his or her life. They view time as we humans would view a mountain ridge. This is the fourth concept of time. In modern human literature, time had become a very important theme. There are three distinct concepts of time used and explored. The Tralfamadorians, no doubt, would find this very amusing.
The first is cyclic time, or time based upon the forces of nature such as giving birth, the Seasons, life and death and the healing power of nature itself. However, this perception of cyclic time changed into something far less benign and more horrific, the cyclic nature of tyranny and war. This view on the cyclic nature of time gives an extra dimension to Slaughterhouse-Five as Billy keeps returning to the horror of Dresden unleashed by his own countrymen. Billy’s return to this horror is an obvious reference to humanity’s consistent cyclic return and repetition of such horrors. It is epitomised in the novel by the phrase ‘‘So it goes’’ which occurs every time something or someone dies.
The second type of time is historical time which is clearly a linear continuum and is found throughout the novel in the many historical references Vonnegut makes. The last type of time is psychological time and is best described as the individual concept of time. Time here is not a constant but can be manipulated by an individual who through memory or imagination can move through time. Billy Pilgrim uses his imagination to ‘‘travel’’ back and forth in time to deal with the trauma of having survived the bombing of Dresden. (This can also be applied on a meta-level to our author). However, Billy Pilgrim declares that he is ‘‘Unstuck in time’’ and if we accept his view then the fourth concept of time that the Tralfamadorians exult in must apply.
But can we accept Billy Pilgrim’s interpretation of his experiences of time travel? Kurt Vonnegut described the narrative structure of his novel as telegraphic schizophrenic. Vonnegut seems to be alluding to some form of mental illness both in the novel and in the writing of it. Vonnegut had fought in World War Two and had been in Dresden when it was bombed between 13th and 15th February 1945. It had traumatised him to the extent that he had tried to write about it ever since the bombing but had been unable to accurately portray the inhuman scenes he had witnessed. Eventually he succeeded in 1969. But it is not schizophrenia that Billy Pilgrim is suffering from, but, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Billy’s condition is clearly linked to his war time experiences and he has no problem in living a normal conventional life. The symptoms of PTSD are reliving these extreme episodes, vividly, time and time again. People who have PTSD are triggered in reliving the traumatic past by external circumstances. This describes Billy Pilgrim to a tee. He is living in a continual present. The Tralfamadorians know all about that.
In 1969, when the novel was published, PTSD was a concept as alien as the four-dimensional beings who kidnap Pilgrim to the planet Tralfamadore. While the condition is widely known today, the term only entered medical doctrine after 1980. Whether he knew it or not, Vonnegut was improvising a self-help manual for psychic pain at a time when many young Americans needed it most. This was Vietnam of course. Since then there has been Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and we know, don’t we, that future conflict is inevitable. Vonnegut as a war veteran and as an author was right. So it goes.
Marc Barham
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