Slaughterhouse 5

Image credit: BookerWorm

There will come a time in many of your lives when you read a book or watch a movie that’s in the canon: literarily or cinematically groundbreaking and significant, a real stellar piece of work, and you’ll read it or watch it and come away at the end annoyed and angry because –for the life of Brian- you could not understand what all the fuss was about! We’ve all been there and we’ll all revisit that place again and again over the course of our lives. So it goes.

For me so far, it has been Blade Runner (and to a lesser extent Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and now Slaughterhouse 5.

Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war novel tells the fractured story of Billy Pilgrim, an American soldier in WW2 who became a prisoner of war and was present at the terrible bombing of Dresden. When he’s not being a POW, he’s a wealthy middle-aged optometrist, and when he’s not doing that, he’s being abducted by aliens and on display at a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore. Coming unstuck in time and travelling between these three lives, Billy starts to see the true workings of the world, time, life and death, and he watches as the rest of humanity scramble through their lives trying to make sense of everything.

A weird fusion of genres, Slaughterhouse 5 is witty, satirical, and (I guess) enjoyably weird. Joseph Heller, the genius who gave us Catch 22, has described it as, “a work of keen literary artistry.”

While I can totally get behind the mixture of war novel and science-fiction adventure, the humour reflected by the contrast of the two is actually quite funny and delightfully weird, it’s the simple and frank tone of the book that I struggled with. Vonnegut writes with a flat, almost matter-of-fact voice that does highlight the absurdity of the book, but at the same time really confused me because it simultaneously conflicts with the fun and weird scenarios that fill the pages. There are very few –if any- indicators of metaphor or allegory and that made the tone (for me at least) really hard to grapple with because I couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not. The prose itself is also, grammatically, very easy to read and while this makes the book accessible to a wider readership, it also confused the sense of fun and absurdity with sincereness and fact:

‘Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day’ (page 19).

Image credit: Geist

Where the novel does shine is in its central explorations of innocence staring squarely into the face of apocalypse. A lot of the humour and absurdity comes from these strange images that are stark against their background e.g. Billy dressed in silver boots, blue toga, and fur-collared coat that’s so small he wears it as a muff, trudging through Dresden with the other POWs. Moments like these throw the mind back to scenes in Catch 22 where Hossian accepts his medal and salutes his commanding officer naked, which is always enjoyable.

At the end of the day Slaughterhouse 5 is considered a classic for fairly obvious reasons, however my experience reading it turned quickly from novelty to confusion and an unsettled feeling because I couldn’t appreciate it in the same way that other people apparently can.

Slaughterhouse 5 is an anti-war novel written by Kurt Vonnegut in 1969 and was first published in New York by Delacourtre Press. It’s otherwise known as The Children’s Crusade: a Duty-dance With Death.