Slaughterhouse-Five
Or, The Children’s Crusade
Author Kurt Vonnegut (1922– )
Classification
Dark comedy
Fiction F
First Published 1969
Locale Ilium, New York; Dresden, Germany; and the planet Tralfamadore
Time of Plot 1922-1976
Principal characters: KURT VONNEGUT, the narrator, speaking in his own voice, who is a survivor of the firebombing of Dresden
BILLY PILGRIM, the protagonist, an optometrist, also a survivor of Dresden
The Novel
Slaughterhouse-Five: Or, The Children’s Crusade, A Duty-Dance with Death is a framed narrative. Kurt Vonnegut opens the novel, apparently in his own voice, telling of his long-frustrated desire to write a book about his experiences during the destruction of Dresden in World War II. He ends the novel with references to the year of its completion, 1968, such as the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the body counts of the Vietnam War. Inside this frame is the story of Billy Pilgrim, who has lived two
lives.
In one
life, Billy is an ordinary, though especially gentle American who graduates from high school in 1940, exactly in time to be drafted. As a chaplain’s assistant, he is sent overseas for the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, where he is promptly captured and transported to forced labor in Dresden. There, he expects to be safe, and he finds life rather pleasant. Dresden is an open city of no military importance, and, therefore, supposedly safe from military attack. Soon after Billy’s arrival, however, allied bombers create a fire storm that razes the city. Billy, along with others, including Vonnegut, survives because he is lucky enough to be deep underground in the meat locker of Slaughterhouse-Five during the bombing. He returns from the war to become a successful optometrist, to marry happily, to be sole survivor of a plane crash, to lose his wife in a strange auto accident, to become the prophet of a kind of stoicism, and to die of an assassin’s bullet in a baseball park in 1976, while speaking of flying saucers and the nature of time.
Billy becomes a prophet as a result of his second life. Shortly before being captured in the war, Billy began to "come unstuck in time." He found that, without warning, he might be transported both backward and forward in his own life. He might at one moment be under sedation in a prison camp and, the next, find himself in bed with the gorgeous Montana Wildhack in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore. He really began to understand the nature of his odd time travel in 1967, when he was kidnaped and taken to Tralfamadore. Because Tralfamadore is outside time and Tralfamadorians see time as a dimension, like distance, Billy is never absent from the Earth. His captivity in an alien zoo takes no time away from his Earth life because the Tralfamadorians can take him out of and put him back into the same instant in Earth time. In 1968, after his near fatal plane crash and the death of Valencia, his wife, he decides that he must tell the world what he has learned about time from the Tralfamadorians. He then becomes the prophet of a new kind of stoicism.
Billy’s life on Tralfamadore is very pleasant. He gains a new perspective on the terrors and sufferings of Earth life, he is kept comfortable, and he mates with and is loved by the kidnaped film starlet, Montana. Each of these aspects of his life on Tralfamadore is important. The aliens teach him that all time exists constantly; this is why he is able to "travel" back and forth between various moments in his two lives. This view of life illogically combines fatalism with an imperative to compassionate action. It is fatalistic in the sense that, from the Tralfamadorian point of view, all events have already happened, and one is helpless to change them. Yet this view commands compassion because, since one goes on reliving one’s life forever, it is important that that particular life be as pleasant as possible. As Vonnegut, the narrator, says inthe last chapter, "if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I’m grateful that so many of those moments are nice." Billy is doubly blessed because, without losing any of the good parts of his Earth life, he gains the fantastic pleasures of a life on Tralfamadore. These help to balance the terrors that he has suffered on Earth.
Because Billy is unstuck in time and because he has two lives, the organization of the novel is quite complex. Billy moves back and forth within his two lives almost arbitrarily, though frequently there are cues and associations which may cause the moves: colors, sounds, and other sense experiences. Sandwiched into these jumps through time to his stays on Tralfamadore and in a mental hospital, to his wedding night, his daughter’s wedding night, his son’s troubled youth, and many other events, is a fairly straightforward chronological account of the events from his capture in Germany to the central event in Dresden. This event is the summary execution of Edgar Derby, one of the book’s heroes, for looting during the clean-up after the fire storm. This event strikes Vonnegut as ironic for many reasons, one of which is that Derby should survive such a disaster only to die for a petty theft of which he could hardly be considered guilty. Yet one could say much the same about all the victims of Dresden.