July 2020 Classic of the Month: 'Slaughterhouse-Five'

How Kurt Vonnegut's famous war book is much more personal than you think.

'Slaughterhouse-Five' by Kurt Vonnegut, 215 pages - Instagram @c_reads_books

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The classic of the month for July 2020 is Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I hold this book in high regard as the second book I read by my now favorite author just a year and a half ago.

Vonnegut begins his story by saying, “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” Billy travels through time from one moment in his life to another in a seemingly random order. From his current life as a middle-aged optometrist, to his childhood, to his time in an underground meat locker during the bombing of Dresden during WWII, to the time he was abducted by aliens and put in a zoo, Billy never knows where he will be next.

Although Billy jumps around in time endlessly, the main story that is told from his life is the one that gives the book its title. Told through the lens of Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut recounts his own experience during the bombing of Dresden during WWII.

Billy, set out to fight for America, is thrown into the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium and immediately taken prisoner behind German lines. After being sent to a POW camp in Germany, Billy and his fellow Americans march onward to the city of Dresden, where they begin work.

Residing in an underground meat locker named “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Billy, alongside the other POWs, is trapped inside it one night when Allied forces bomb the city mercilessly. After hours upon hours of the unceasing sound of the terror being rained down from above, the bombing stops, and it is safe for everyone to leave the slaughterhouse.

Emerging from their safe haven underground, Billy and his fellow POWs see the destruction that had been occurring above them. They are surrounded by the near 130,000 dead bodies that litter the once peaceful city around them. After days upon days of excavating and shoveling the bodies into ditches and trucks, Billy and the other POWs are finally released after the Russians capture the city.

Billy returns home to become an optometrist, get married, and raise a daughter and a son. On the night of his daughter’s wedding, Billy is abducted by two aliens called Tralfamadorians. He is taken to Tralfamadore, where the aliens leave him with a movie actress named Montana Wildhack in a transparent dome in a zoo where Tralfamadorians can observe the extraterrestrial creatures.

The Tralfamadorians explain their perception of time to Billy, telling him that they see all of time at once, so that everything that has been, always will be, and everything that will be, always has been.

After his wife dies, Billy’s daughter is more than fed up with her father's stories of time travel, but Billy insists that he knows exactly how he will die; a vengeful man he knew in the war will hire someone to shoot him. This fact leaves Billy unfazed, knowing that he will experience his death and will then return to some other point in his life.

Although Vonnegut’s story begins with Billy becoming “unstuck in time,” Kurt Vonnegut really begins his famous anti-war book with the two lines, “All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.”

These sentences are reflective of the author’s real-life experiences. So much of Vonnegut’s award winning science fiction war book is based on his personal experience during the bombing of Dresden in WWII. He really was saved with his fellow POWs in an underground meat locker named “Slaughterhouse-Five,” and was forced to excavate dead bodies for days on end.

It took Vonnegut over 20 years to be able to process everything that had happened to him and actually sit down and write a book about it. The way that war desensitizes its participants is strongly reflected through Vonnegut’s most famous line, “So it goes.” This short phrase is repeated at least 100 times throughout the novel, used every time death is mentioned.

As Kurt Vonnegut once said, “Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”

Slaughterhouse-Five is purely Vonnegut in the very best way imaginable. Undoubtedly his best known novel, this book, although undeniably grim, is not lacking in hope. The humanist in Kurt Vonnegut never fails to shine through, and, as Billy Pilgrim says he wants written on his headstone, “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”