Slaughterhouse-Five | Kurt Vonnegut | The Why of Tralfalmadore

Slaughterhouse-Five | Kurt Vonnegut | "So it goes....."

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Slaughterhouse-Five

	Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut Dial Press Trade Paperback, 1999 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 702 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.

The Why of Tralfalmadore

Made In Hero: The War for Soap

Vonnegut joked that he didn't know if people read his books after high school. With that in mind, trying to get re-acquainted with SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE can bring up a vague feeling of dread. Like a lot of people who love this book, I first read it when I was an unsuspecting teenager. I loved the prospect of a planet Tralfalmadore. The creatures who live there aren't bothered by things--not bombs, not hunger, not crowds, and least of all, history--although Billy Pilgrim is plagued by them all.

That's because unlike Pilgrim (a fumbling soldier and an Earthling), the Tralfalmadoreans don't believe in free will. They don't even believe in Time. They claim it's all in our minds. To help us understand this, they compare Time to bugs trapped in amber. At any given point, "here we are, ...trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."

Upon getting sucked into the Tralfalmadoreans' flying saucer, Billy Pilgrim is compelled to relinquish his Earthling traits of free will and time stuckness. This is a mixed blessing mainly because he gets to relive the horrors of a prisoner of war train in Germany, and subsequently, the carpet bombing of Dresden. So it goes.

Beside the absurd and hilarious parts, there profound moments in this book. They tend to involve violence. In the German prison camp, a guard takes offense at a remark uttered by one of the American soldiers--and roughs him up. The prisoner is stunned, having intended no harm by what he said. Likely, though, it implied self-pity. Rising from the ground with two teeth missing, the boy asks, "Why me?" Shoving him back into the prisoner ranks, the guard replies, "Vy you? Vy anybody?"

Along with the raging humanity, Vonnegut offers self-mockery to spare. A bit turns up in the fictitious, embittered science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout. By happy coincidence, Trout lives in the same home town as Billy Pilgrim--one of his most avid fans. The problem is that the literary hero is a hack. "His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good."

SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE is still best read with a dose of innocence, at least enough to appreciate a name like Montana Wildhack (the porn star). But it's good to know I can re-read Slaughterhouse Five and still manage to laugh. It's the Tralfalmadorean spell. Time passes, and doesn't. The glob of amber is real.

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"So it goes....."

Slaughterhouse Five is the sad tale of Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany during the Second World War. The Dresden bombing caused nearly the same number of deaths as the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.

This novel is based on Kurt Vonnegut's own war experience and took him over two decades to finish it. Vonnegut is actually present as one of the characters; he was the constant cynical narrator who makes all deaths equivalent with his comment:" so it goes".
Interestingly, the novel was published during the Vietnam War, a war where technology was again used against nonmilitary targets in an unjust war.
Through the protagonist Billy Pilgrim, we are taken on a sad journey through the scarring traumatic horrors that war inflicts on both sides for generations to follow.

Sarcastically, Vonnegut used the Tralfamadorians, who are aliens shaped as toilet plungers, to demonstrate the linear progression of time as opposed to all moments existing simultaneously. Through the Tralfamadorians, free will is also presented as the ultimate illusion; Beginning with Billy's childhood, free will is a repeated theme throughout the novel.

Slaughterhouse-five, a remarkable novel that condemns war along with any bureaucratic attitudes that attempt to glorify war and its heroes, while ignoring its destructiveness and horrors.

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So it goes.

In my opinion, the greatest novel ever written. Slaughterhouse-Five examines war, free will, and time. Vonnegut had the ability to send chills down your spine. R.I.P. (So it goes.)

Crazyness

The book jumps all over the place in a captivating way. I wouldn't necessarily call it SF though.

a short book about slaughter

This is a book I'd always put off reading because of the title. I couldn't figure out what it meant, and it sounded too weird for me. In fact it is more literal than I imagined: it refers to five army personnel who survive the bombing of Dresden by taking shelter in a slaughterhouse.
It must have seemed a very clever book back when it was written, some 40 years ago now, but all the time-travel and general avant-garde story-telling is so mainstream today that it hardly registers.
In other words, the impact has lessened, and it's probably even dated a little. I don't want to be too harsh, though. This is a very powerful work, and once you know for sure that the author's own experiences were the catalyst, you can't fail to be moved as the novel moves towards its astonishing climax. It's also very witty and laugh-out-loud funny in many places.

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