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Slaughterhouse-Five; or The Children\'s Crusade, A Duty Dance With Death is surely the best achievement of Kurt Vonnegut and even one of the most acclaimed works in modern American literature. It is a very personal novel which draws upon Vonnegut\'s own experience in World War Two. Vonnegut manages to tell the reader many things and it is hard to decide, what exactly is the main theme. It is a novel about war, about the cruelty and violence done in war, about people and their nature, their selfishness, about love, humanity, regeneration, motion, and death.
The book has two narratives. One is personal and the other is impersonal. The later is the story of Billy Pilgrim who, similarly to the author, fights in World War Two, is taken prisoner by the Germans and witnesses the fire-storming of Dresden and is unsimilar to him kidnapped by the small green inhabitants of planet tralfmador. The personal narrative is Vonnegut\'s own story of writing a book about the worst experience of his life. It appears mostly in the first chapter, and describes his temptation to write a book about Dresden and his efforts to finally produce it.
Billy Pilgrim has a unique ability to become \"unstuck in time\", which means that he can uncontrollably drift from one partof his life to another \"and the trips aren\'t necessarily fun,\" The whole book is organized in the same way Billy moves in time. It consists of numerous sections and paragraphs strung together in no chronological order, seemingly at random. The whole narration is written in the past tense, so that the reader cannot identify where the author\'s starting point is. This Aspect of the book is identical with the Tralfamadorian type of books:
"There isn\'t any particular relationship between
all the messages, except that the author has chosen them
carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce
an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and
deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no
suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love
in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments
seen all at one time."
In my opinion, however, the narration is linear. One period of Billy\'s life is told in a line - Billy\'s story from the war. I admit that the line of narration is broken by many other events, but every time a war story begins, it takes up the narrative at the moment when the previous war story ended. It seems that Vonnegut, who had wanted to write a war novel, now wanted to avoid writing about it. The war seems to have been a great tempting magnet for him, and Vonnegut was trying to escape its power. He managed to do so, to some extent, but every now and then the story falls back into World War Two.
The Themes of Slaughterhouse-Five
The first theme of Slaughterhouse-Five, and perhaps the most obvious, is the war and its contrast with love, beauty, humanity, innocence etc. Slaughterhouse-Five manages to tell us that war is bad for us and that it would be better for us to love one another. To find the war\'s contrast with love is quite difficult, because the book doesn\'t talk about any couple that was cruelly torn apart by the war (Billy didn\'t seem to love his wife very much, for example.) Vonnegut expresses it very lightly, uses the word \"love\" very rarely, yet effectively. He tries to look for love and beauty in things that seemingly are neither lovely nor beautiful. For example, when Billy was captured by the group of Germans, he didn\'t see them as a cruel enemy, but as normal, innocent people. \"Billy looked up at the face that went with the clogs. It was the face of a blond angel, of a fifteen-year-old boy. The boy was as beautiful as Eve.\"
An interesting contrast in Vonnegut\'s books is the one between men and women. Male characters are often engaging infights and wars, and females try to prevent them from it.
The most often expressed theme of the book, in my opinion, is that we, people, are \"bugs in amber.\" The phrase first appears when Billy is kidnapped by the Tralfamadorian flying saucer:
"Welcome aboard, Mr. Pilgrim,\' said
the loudspeaker. \'Any questions?\'
Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired
at last: \'Why me?\'
\'That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr.
Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything?
Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs
trapped in amber?\'
\'Yes.\' Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his
office which was a blob of polished amber with three
lady-bugs embedded in it.
\'Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the
amber of this moment. There is no why."
This rather extraterrestrial opinion can be interpreted as our being physically stuck in this world, that we don\'t have any choice over what we, mankind as a whole, do and what we head for. The only thing we can do is think about everything, but we won\'t affect anything. This idea appears many times throughout the novel. For example, Billy knew the exact time when he would be killed, yet didn\'t try to do anything about it. Anyway, he couldn\'t have changed it. The death bears comparison with mankind\'s fate. The main thing Vonnegut probably wanted people to think about has something to do with wars on Earth. Vonnegut says so in the part where Billy discusses the problems about wars with the Tralfamadorians. They tell him that everything is structured the way it is and that trying to prevent war on Earth is stupid. This means that there always will be wars on Earth, that we, people, are \"designed\" that way. There might be people striving for eternal peace, but those people must be very naive and probably don\'t know humankind\'s nature. We know that wars are bad and we would like to stop them, but we are \"stuck in amber.\" This point of view also might explain why there are no villains or heroes in Vonnegut\'s books. All the characters are "Comic, pathetic pieces, juggled about by some inexplicable faith, like puppets,\" If there is no-one to take the blame for the bad happenings in the book, it can only mean that the villain is God Himself. God Almighty had to be the one who put us into the amber, who had created us the way we are.
"There are almost no characters in this story, and
almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the
people in it are so sick and so much the listless
playthings of enormous forces."
Another theme of the novel is that there is no such thing as a soldier. There is only a man, but never a soldier. A soldier is not a human being any more.
Vonnegut opposes any institution, be it scientific, religious, or political, that dehumanizes man and considers him a mere number and not a human being.
Another obvious theme of the book is that death is inevitable and that no matter who dies, life still goes on. The phrase \"So it goes\" recurs one hundred and six times: it appears everytime anybody dies in the novel, and sustains the circular quality of the book. It enables the book, and thus Vonnegut\'s narration, to go on. It must have been hard writing a book about such an experience and it probably helped the author to look upon death through the eyes of Tralfamadorians:
"When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he
thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in
the particular moment, but that the same person is just
fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear
that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the
Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is \'So it
goes,"
But does it mean tat when something awful happens, we should just say \"So it goes,\" turn our heads, and think of happier things. There is a slogan that appears twice throughout the novel:
"God grant me the sevnity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can,and wisdom always to tell the difference"
But among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.
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