Like always, feel free to discuss anything that particularly interested you in the book or to respond to another student’s post. Here are some prompts to get you started thinking:
- Comment on the book’s style. How would you characterize it? What makes it unique, interesting, easily recognizable? (You might talk about tone and voice; level of formality; sentence length, structure, or syntax; diction; paragraphing; use of figurative language; etc.)
- What do you think is the point of the self-reflexive opening chapter of the novel in which Vonnegut meditates on his own difficulties in writing the book?
- Why choose a “hero” like Billy Pilgrim? Why do you think Vonnegut chooses to make Billy come “unstuck in time” in the novel?
- What are we supposed to think about the Tralfamadorians and their world-view? Does Vonnegut believe (and want us to believe) that the Tralfamadorian philosophy of life is more sane and reasonable than that of earthlings? Or do you believe that Vonnegut satirizes the Tralfamadorian view—that he presents it ironically?
- Do you believe this is an anti-war book or not? Vonnegut concedes in the opening chapter that trying to stop wars is like trying to stop glaciers. Is he a fatalist, as some critics have charged, or does he think change is possible?
One of my favorite movies as a kid was Footloose starring a young Kevin Bacon (I even named my oldest child Ren after Bacon’s character!) There’s a scene early in the movie when Ren, who has just moved from Chicago to the small town of Bomont, learns that the conservative townsfolk are in an uproar over the teaching of Slaughterhouse-Five at the local high school. Ren says the book is great and defends it as a classic. I remember immediately wanting to read the book after watching this scene, and I eventually did.
To me, it is an anti-war book – revealing the atrocities of combat and weapons of mass destruction and the ways in which they forever change the young people who are sent away to fight. Billy Pilgrim can’t unsee what he has seen in Dresden, and these memories continue to haunt him decades later even as he manages to start a family and career. His struggles to carry on a “normal” life after the war, to repress what he was forced to do as a soldier, eventually cause him to become “unstuck in time.”
I think the scattered chronology of the book is meant to reflect what the Tralfamadorians believe: that past, present and future are all one. They believe that free will does not exist. Pilgrim’s life seems to both support and reject this value. At times, he seems in control – starting a family and staking out a career in optometry. Other times, he seems schizophrenic, slipping in and out of reality and flashbacks.
Sadly, the novel’s important messages about the stark realities of war are often overlooked or ignored by those who fixate on the book’s raunchier parts about sex shops and bestiality. But attempts to ban a book like Slaughterhouse-Five are not merely fictional scenes from a movie. Book bans are alive and well in America today, organized by those who prefer a sanitized world where sex and war and drugs are hidden away from the innocent eyes of children.
This is my first time reading Slaughterhouse-Five and it’s as devastating as I anticipated. My older sisters read it in high school, and though I loved to read anything, I avoided it; it scared me. Rightly so. No one can debate that all war truly is hell, being a POW the ultimate horror, and being “there” for the bombing of Dresden couldn’t be anything but life-altering, as it clearly was for Vonnegut. I’m amazed he could write this book, but I also believe he had to. He had to bear witness. In the first, self-reflective chapter, he references Erika Ostrovsky’s “Céline and His Vision” and the belief that “no art is possible without a dance with death.”
The choice of Billy Pilgrim as “hero”/protagonist is pivotal in my opinion. Following the violence, perversion, atrocities through the eyes of a largely innocent, inexperienced and physically weak 22-year-old character underscores the depiction of a world gone mad. Billy’s war-time experience is as far from his original reality — a student at optometry school in Ilium, NY — as are his “trips” to Tralfamadore, which seem to be a visceral reaction to the trauma he’s endured.
To me, this is absolutely an anti-war book. Even if Vonnegut was convinced that wars are as inevitable as glaciers (the latter ironically now melting away), that doesn’t equate to endorsing them. And I’m not even sure he was convinced of that comparison or simply relating the comment and choosing not to debate it at that moment. Vonnegut repeatedly goes back to the insanity of Edgar Derby being shot by a firing squad for “plundering” a teapot while 135,000 people were annihilated in the bombing of Dresden. The arrogance of Rumford in the hospital scenes portrays so effectively those who view war in black-and-white, based on a survival of the fittest theory, and that often, these are the people who interpret and record history.
Finally, to Ron’s comments regarding attempts to ban the book – yikes! The horrors of war go on, but we can’t talk/write about them? To be sidetracked by the sexual and drug references is to so fundamentally miss the point, it’s mind-boggling.
My first thought as I started re-reading this novel is how gentle – how tender – Vonnegut’s voice is. Even when writing about the most brutal behavior, he seems to treat his characters kindly, with a sort of gentle sympathy. Perhaps because they are all “trapped in the amber of the moment”, unable to do anything other than the things they do?
But I don’t think Vonnegut is a fatalist, at least not completely. Billy Pilgrim (and we should examine that name, too) often seems adrift, unable or unwilling to take initiative or make decisions; he explains this to himself as the result of his time with the Tralfamadorians and the understanding of time he gained from them. (The plane will crash, has always crashed, is crashed – why bother trying to change it?) But I think it’s important that we see Billy’s indifference, his inability to take (or lack of interest in taking?) action, long before he meets the Tralfamadorians. He first becomes unstuck in time while “trying” (in the loosest sense of the word) to survive behind German lines. It’s as if he has already decided that his actions do not matter, that what will happen has already happened, always happens. In other words, I think you could argue that Billy embeds himself in that amber. And by extension, yes, war is inevitable – as long as we believe it to be inevitable, as long as we embed ourselves in that amber.
The structure of the book unsticks the reader in time – poor Edgar Derby, for example, is always being executed for stealing the teapot; he always has been. It is inescapable – Billy has to not only remember it, but relive it. And the distinction between remembering and re-living is also critical, I think – this is a traumatic response, the inability to remember an event without reliving it. I think we also see that trauma in Vonnegut’s beginning and ending to the novel – or rather, in passing the main telling of the story off to another, perhaps Vonnegut can dodge some of the pain in the telling.
The scholarship’s interpretation over Vonnegut’s ideological position —whether he validates trafalmadorian’s determinism or individual free will— seems dichotomized. The scholars who responded right after the publication, at the beginning of the ‘70s, pend toward the first interpretation, while the last decade’s scholars toward the latter.
Personally, I strongly disagree with first wave scholarship. Accepting that Vonnegut validated trafalmadorian’s determinism implies that Billy Pilgrim is his literary alter ego, thus the two of them coincide. This position is easily questioned by the fact that he made a point to distance himself from his character through irony and satire. Therefore, I don’t even believe that Vonnegut agrees with Harrison Starr’s position on the matter. The way I read the exchange that the writer had with him is that he cannot forecast if wars will cease to exist for good —most likely not, considered the demonic nature of the system. However, this doesn’t justify individual passivity. Indeed, on page 24 he declares his position straightforwardly, when he writes, “I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.”
I think that the message Vonnegut intended to convey had been incomprehensibly misunderstood by the scholars who first responded to the novel, while instead it was unequivocal to me. In fact, as Robert Merrill pointed out in his article “John Gardner’s Grendel and the Interpretation of Modern Fables,” “[…] modern fabulators have tended to produce works in which it is essential that we perceive the errors of their basically sympathetic protagonists. If we fail to note these errors, or if we interpret them inappropriately, we are in danger not only of misconstruing the author’s meaning but of actually reversing it.” Which is exactly what had happened to Vonnegut’s masterpiece.
I think that’s a really great observation regarding what Vonnegut (as the writer/character) says to his son about war; and compare that to Billy Pilgrim’s son, who becomes a Green Beret. What Billy tells his son about war, if anything, must be quite different… which really highlights an important difference between Billy and the writer.
This is my first time reading this novel and I think it is superb. Like a few of my classmates, Vonnegut was an author I was weary of. I thought of him as…literary… and though I do like reading literary pieces, literary war novels sometimes are expected to be … depressing.
Now, this is not to say this novel was not depressing. In certain ways the way that Vonnegut writes is absolutely devastating. Ye, one of the ways this novel is gorgeous for its devastation is how.. simplistic and, as a classmate state, comforting and tender the language is. The phase “so it goes” is so simple yet so clear in a novel about war. Almost as if your grandpa is telling a war story, Vonnegut uses the phrase to convey that when one is in war, helpless to the world around him sometimes the catastrophe events are just “so it goes.” I also think the simplistic phase also creates a friendly relationship with the narrator as he jumps through time. If Billy Pilgrim jumps through events as well as (as I suspect) some ptsd, then « so it goes » allows the reader to accept certain.. suspends of reality— which for someone in war is a necessity.
I think this is anti war book simply because Vonnegut makes it very clear in multiple parts of the book that there is not Honor or Glory. In fact, it is a beautiful warning created by insider insight as Vonnegut tells the reader about the duel experience of war in phrases like « Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt » and « How nice — to feel nothing, and still get credit for being alive. » Vonnegut is clear that there is a nothingness that follows from witnessing war. Not only to be excited for life, but to notice that he is no longer in pain. This is a beautiful and bizarre book and I enjoyed it more than I thought.
The most fascinating element of this novel to me was the concept of being “unstuck in time.” I have never read Slaughterhouse Five before, but I interpreted Vonnegut’s use of the flashbacks and forwards and non-linear storytelling (along with the aliens) as a way to show what it is like to live with PTSD – specifically maybe trauma from war.
PTSD from wartime trauma can come with triggers for the individual that may send them back (mentally/emotionally) to a time during the war. I understood Vonnegut’s use of Billy being unstuck in time as trying to show what it could feel like to be constantly pulled in and out of certain moments in your own timeline without your permission – whether by a trigger or a flash of a memory, etc. The use of time was a great way of showing how veterans may process and live with PTSD and wartime trauma.
The Tralfamadorians and their beliefs on death are also a clear indicator of Vonnegut trying to express certain emotions of someone going through extremely violent wars – mainly a deep need to disconnect from the realty (or repaint the realty) of the immense amount of death and violence. The Tralfamadorians believe that when someone dies they are only gone in the present – but still exist in the past timeline, therefore, they are not gone. It’s a coping mechanism that Billy inherits.
I am not sure I saw it as an anti-war novel, but more so a novel to help readers understand the affects of war on a person’s psyche and how PTSD may be experienced by a veteran returning from war.
Like many of you, this was my first time reading this book. Initially, I found it to be somewhat slow, also not enjoying the writing style of Vonnegut compared to maybe Salinger and Jackson’s styles, but after completing the novel I found it to be both a powerful and provocative anti-war book. Vonnegut clearly uses the character Billy Pilgrim as a way to showcase the devastating effects of war- not just the physical effects, but the emotional effects as well. One part that stood out to me in particular was the opening of chapter three, when the Germans and a police dog have found Weary and Billy. Vonnegut writes, “The dog, who had sounded so ferocious in the winter distances, was a female German shepherd. She was shivering. Her tail was between her legs. She had been borrowed that morning from a farmer. She had never been to war before. She had no idea what game was being played…” (pg. 66) In this instance, the dog is essentially a symbol of the innocent lives lost in World War II, and in any war in general. Soldiers, like the dog, are drafted or “borrowed,” forced into a “game” that they have no idea how to play, and are expected to “win” so to speak, losing their innocence and abandoning the life they once knew. In my opinion, this is a clear anti-war sentiment expressed from Vonnegut; war is a catastrophe that steals not only innocence, but innocent lives.
I also found it interesting that Billy is clearly suffering from PTSD throughout the entirety of the novel, disassociating so much that he believes he has encountered the Tralfamadorians and is constantly finding himself in alternate realities, but that the term PTSD is never used. This is intentional on Vonnegut’s part because at this time, PTSD was not formally diagnosed and did not become a reality for medical professionals until after the Vietnam War. Therefore, the frustration stemming from those around Billy, like his daughter and Rumfoord, exists because they are unable to conclude that Billy is clearly facing PTSD and is unable to healthily cope with the horrors that he has seen throughout his life as a result of the war.
I also found the book to be an anti-war book because of the consistent use of the phrase “So it goes.” It is apparent that this phrase represents the fact that despite war and chaos, death and destruction, life goes on regardless. Each time Billy resorts to using this phrase, he is attempting to show the reader that life does not stop for anyone or anything. That death is all around, but yet so is life. Therefore, this correlates to the idea of an anti-war novel because Vonnegut is almost using the phrase sarcastically; he is saying, “millions are dying, people are suffering, but okay, so it goes.”
I do think, ultimately, that “Slaughterhouse 5” is an anti-war book, mainly because it does nothing to glorify the process of war but also because it shows the absurdity of it all. The firebombing of Dresden accomplished nothing, and even though the aftereffects of the destruction were described by Billy as being a hellscape, he does not protest against Professor Rumfoord, saying the bombing “had to be done,” and Billy agrees, not so much that the bombing “had” to happen, but that that was just the way of things, the way of war (253). To me, it’s this detached acceptance of horror that makes Vonnegut’s writing so effective as an anti-war narrative. The casualness of it is disturbing; the depiction of how detached and callous the mind can become when overwhelmed by the constant bombardment of death is deeply troubling. In a way, I think Vonnegut is showing what happens when WAR wins, not one side against another in the war, but when conflict itself is victorious, people cease to care, and horror is treated as something that has always happened, is happening, and always will happen.
This is my second time reading the novel and just as I did the first time, I found it a stunningly profound anti-war novel. I think the opening chapter of the book is a perfect way of explaining the choices he makes throughout the text. When O’Hare’s wife gets angry with Vonnegut for wanting to write a book about Dresden and says that people write about wars “so that wars will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs,” and Vonnegut promises to call it the Children’s Crusade, he sets up the tone he uses throughout the novel and which characterizes Billy. He highlights the weakness and frailty of human beings participating in a horrible and violent war with little thought for anything but meeting their own basic needs and surviving and making it home and living with dignity. I love that he ends the chapter with Lot’s wife looking back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and being turned into a pillar of salt because she wasn’t supposed to but does anyway—this is Vonnegut looking back on a tragedy that the American government didn’t want people to look back on, but looking back anyway because it is impossible not to be affected by the destruction of so many human lives. I think he both endorses and satirizes the Tralfamadorian point of view. Billy (and I) find comfort in the idea that people live on through the past and are never truly gone. However, they urge Billy to think only of good and happy moments and to pretend the bad ones aren’t happening—if Vonnegut believed this, I do not see why he would write a book about Dresden.
This story was very interesting to me in that the style played a very heavy part in conveying the message that the author was pushing for. I think using a WWII veteran as a protagonist would have been a very wise choice given the time in history that this was written. Vietnam was not really like the second world war in that people were far more divisive about it. The novel was trying to talk about why bad things happen and how to make sense of it. A veteran with PTSD who has flashbacks of war times and possible delusions suffers because of the draft–forced enlistment into something awful that no one should ever have to take part in. I think there were maybe a number of people reading this novel who were maybe struggling with troubled fates or bad things happening in their lives that were out of their control who this may have resonated with. Billy is trying to get by but everything is jumbled and confusing for him. He can have longer periods of time were he is in the late sixties, and then he will all of the sudden be on the battlefield or on a far off planet. “And so it goes” is repeated a lot throughout the story. He is out of control of what is happening to him and he has learned that the best way to cope with and make sense of the things that have happened to him is to accept that shit happens and there isn’t any reason for it.
This was my first time reading “Slaughter-house 5.” It was a really intense read, I often had to put it down and walk away for a few minutes. The frankness with which Vonnegutt describes the conditions of the train cars and more details of the reality of being a prisoner of war was at times disturbing, but I think to describe it in any other way would be disrespectful to the memory. I would say that this is an anti-war book in that it shows the reality of war, not the glossy performance often seen in commericals urging young people to enlist. War isn’t beautiful or poignant, it’s just painful and destructive and horrible. I’m sure that Vonnegutt got a lot of hate for the book, especially considering when it was published, but I’m glad he wrote it.