Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. So begins Vonnegut’s book, a story that takes place in Germany during World War II. Billy Pilgrim and several other American soldiers are captured by the Germans and taken to Dresden where they witness, and survive, the February 1945 bombing of the city. This part of the story is based on Vonnegut’s real life experiences as a POW, where he really did witness the bombing of Dresden and survived along with the other POWs and their German guards inside an underground slaughterhouse meatlocker (Slaughterhouse Five is what the real German guards called the detention facility). Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time, meaning that he travels through time to different events in his life, including his childhood, his service during the war and time spent as a POW, his marriage, his old-age as a widower, and his murder. He also visits events in his life that occurred when he was abducted by aliens and put on display in a zoo in the planet of Tralfamadore, where he was wedded to Montana Wildhack, a porn movie star that is also abducted. A reason is never given as to why Billy has come unstuck in time.

I interpreted this unusual plot in two ways (if either is correct, or if none of them are, I don’t know and it probably doesn’t matter): 1) Billy really does become unstuck in time and is able to time travel to different events throughout his life, including a time where he was abducted by real aliens; or, 2) Billy’s experiences during the war, and his repressed memories of those experiences, are turning him insane. I’d say either device is pretty cool.

I enjoyed this book more than I expected to given the subject matter and unusual plot. It is very graphic in its description of war and imprisonment, which is very significant given the source material. As Vonnegut himself says in the prelude (which is really the first chapter), the novel is “short and jumbled and jangled,” with events jumping throughout the book to different moment’s of Billy’s life. During the war, Billy grapples with his ineptness and horror at witnessing a massacre. After the war he grapples with depression. As such, it is a sad and grave book…but in a good way. It is an anti-war book but not in a preachy way. It says: “Look, these are the horrible things that happen during a war. Look.”

Also, for some reason, I liked the descriptions of the science fiction books that the Kilgore Trout character writes (Trout is a science fiction writer that also appears in many other Vonnegut books). Also, it is the sixty-ninth entry to the American Library Association's list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000. Just thought I’d put that out there.