Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (Review)
It is rare for me to re-read a book. The list of books I want to read is so daunting that it almost makes me anxious to use my time for something I’ve done before. Yet while books may remain constant, we do not. I grew up loving Kurt Vonnegut, and I wanted to see if his work would resonate in the same way. Slaughterhouse Five did not disappoint, and it was most certainly worth my time.
Kurt Vonnegut’s famous book was regularly the subject of book burnings, and it prompted a letter from the author to the school board in Drake, North Dakota. The school board burned its copy of Slaughterhouse Five, and Vonnegut responded with a letter often entitled, “I am very real.” The letter (in addition to the book) is worth a read in this disconnected and vitriolic era.
Slaughterhouse likely received such a harsh response because of its very strange nature. The book (outside of the fantastical sequences with time travel and alien abduction) is essentially Vonnegut’s semi-autobiographical account of WWII. Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist, is a veteran who survived POW status and the firebombing of Dresden. Pilgrim’s life is told in fragments as he slips through time and experiences life as an abductee by Tralfamadorians, an alien race. The Tralfamadorians view the past, present, and future all at once, which gives the book an intentionally disjoined and uncomfortable feeling. It is also a figuratively (and occasionally literally) naked book that lays bare the ugliness of war and the senselessness that can permeate through even the most normal of lives. People do not tend to like discomfort, but Vonnegut’s book can’t help but prompt deep and meaningful reflection on the nature of existence.
Here are a few of my thoughts and favorite excerpts from the book:
Great quote about Billy Pilgrim’s mother: “Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”
The backwards movie about the American bombers in WWII was lovely. “The guns paused to suck bullets out of the trees and people...The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into containers, and lifted them into the air...The steel was re-melted and put into the ground, where it would never hurt anyone again.”
The opening observation from German book on American enlisted men is excellent: “America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, "It ain't no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be." It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?"”
The book continues: “Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.”
The phrase, “So it goes” appears 106 times in Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut uses it at each appearance of death in the book, and its use can’t help but cause the reader to think about mortality. On its face, “so it goes” may seem indifferent to the tragedy of death, yet its constant appearance strikes me more as a commemoration of life, even when the character who dies is an unsympathetic figure. That said, while the reader may pause to see the tragedy of death, Vonnegut is also highlighting the way the world tends to shrug when a death occurs. This contributes to the tragedy, and—I would argue—prompts a deeper desire to appreciate life.
It may seem clear from the description that Slaughterhouse Five is strange. Yet, if you are someone who typically avoids science fiction, I highly recommend looking past the oddness to explore the world Vonnegut created. While the narrative reaches across the vastness of time and space, it is deeply intimate in its examination of human belief and what it means to be alive. Slaughterhouse-Five was well worth reading years ago, and it was certainly worth a second look today.
