Slaughter-House Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

I’ve been reading war novels lately: War and Peace, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls. So, as I was looking for something to read in the bathtub a couple of nights ago I pulled out a paperback of Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House Five I had on my bookshelf. I first read Slaughter-House Five in high school. I loved it and immediately read all of Vonnegut’s other novels. Slaughter-House Five was his sixth. I was even more a fan of Cat’s Cradle. But after a couple of disappointing novels published in the 1970s I outgrew my Vonnegut obsession. I read a few others of his later books but not everything. He died in 2007. Re-reading, I was happy to see that Slaughter-House Five still held up to my memory of it. It’s human, and inventive, and provocative in a way attractive to a thoughtful teenager, if ultimately not the profound book I had thought it was.

Vonnegut published Slaughter-House Five in 1969. Near the end of the book he dates the writing nearly exactly when he writes (as himself):

“Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.

Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.

And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.” (p. 210)

Slaughter-House Five is an anti-war war novel based on Vonnegut’s personal experience in Europe in World War II. He repeats the phrase “so it goes” after every death in the novel, and there are many. Vonnegut participated in the Battle of the Bulge (December-January, 1944-45), ended up wandering behind enemy lines, was captured and taken to Dresden as a prisoner of war, was put to work in a factory making a nutritional supplement syrup, and then survived the allied bombing of Dresden (February, 1945) by hiding out with other POWs in a sub-basement of the factory (a converted slaughter-house, number five). All of this provides the through-line of the novel, Vonnegut’s experiences transferred to a character named Billy Pilgrim, and then expanded and surrounded with fiction about Billy’s life after the war, including science-fiction elements of time-travel and an alien abduction to the planet Tralfamadore.

Vonnegut makes his anti-war intent clear in an opening chapter that serves as a kind of author’s introduction. Vonnegut, as himself, describes his long-frustrated desire to write a novel about his war experience. He tells of contacting an old buddy from the war and getting together for an evening to trade war stories and hoping to find inspiration for his novel. They meet at the buddy’s house with the man’s young children upstairs and his wife hovering around. The buddy’s wife is clearly upset. Finally she tells Vonnegut what’s made her angry. She thinks he’s going to write a novel that makes war noble and soldiers heroes:

“You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.” (p. 14)

She thinks Vonnegut is going to write a novel like For Whom the Bell Tolls. The movie version of that novel starred Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. They made a movie version of Slaughter-House Five, too. It starred Michael Sacks and Valerie Perrine. Michael Sacks had a few more small roles in small movies in the 1970s and then quit acting to become a stock-broker. Valerie Perrine is a perfectly respectable actress but not Ingrid Bergman.

And Slaughter-House Five is not For Whom the Bell Tolls. Billy Pilgrim is the opposite of Robert Jordan in nearly every way. Billy is a clown. He’s passive. He’s not a leader, barely even a follower as he constantly asks to be left behind. He isn’t a hero. He doesn’t drop bombs, bombs are dropped on him. Robert Jordan makes things happen. Things happen to Billy Pilgrim.

But I wouldn’t call For Whom the Bell Tolls a pro-war novel. It’s sad. It’s heart-breaking. Nearly all the characters you come to love and root for die by the end. And the campaign to blow up a bridge which forms the plot comes to nothing. The bridge blows but it makes no difference to the battle, or the war, or the cause. The good-guys lose. The Nazi’s win.

Hemingway’s theme is that a good cause is worth fighting for even if it fails. Vonnegut’s theme is more pessimistic, that there is no cause worth fighting for. The business about time-travel and the planet Tralfamadore allows Vonnegut to present his metaphysical position against free will. All eternity happens at once. Human beings mistakenly believe we are traveling through time toward an open future. The aliens on Tralfamadore know that the future is as fixed as the past and to them, all time is available simultaneously.

In light of that philosophy the proper way to live is the way Billy Pilgrim does, passive, accepting, resigned. Nothing he can do will change an inevitable future. If evil is destined to win, it will win. So why fight it? Or really, though, why do anything?

In the midst of the war in Vietnam that did seem purposeless and unwinable, Vonnegut’s philosophy must have resonated. But is that the proper response in a situation like World War II, or the Spanish Civil War of Hemingway’s novel? Vonnegut saw the destruction of World War II but he must also have understood the reason for the war. It wasn’t some beguiling Hollywood romance of war that he and his buddies were fighting, it was the threat of fascist world domination. Some causes require more than a shrug and “whatever.” And although the future may be fixed and free will an illusion (who can say?) none of us actually lives as though our actions make no difference. Why write an anti-war novel?

Even Billy Pilgrim spends a lot of time in his later years trying to convince others that the aliens exist and the passage of time is an illusion – but why would it matter what people thought if the future was already fixed? Twice in the book Vonnegut quotes the serenity prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.” (pp. 60 and 209). But Vonnegut’s philosophy would claim that change is never possible, so courage is never called for, only serenity.

Vonnegut’s writing style is like Hemingway’s: short declarative sentences. Vonnegut spent some time as a journalist before he turned to fiction, and it shows. But Hemingway’s terseness is a cover for strong emotions below the surface. Vonnegut’s prose doesn’t conceal anything; it’s all surface. If anything, manly Hemingway is the more poetic.

The book is divided into 10 chapters, but the divisions seem fairly arbitrary, and the chapters themselves are further divided into many short segments that range widely over time and space as Billy Pilgrim involuntarily time-travels to different parts of his life.

Many of Vonnegut’s stable of stock characters appear in this novel: Eliot Rosewater (who was the lead character of Vonnegut’s previous novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater), Howard W. Campbell, Jr. (who was the lead character of Vonnegut’s third novel, Mother Night); and Kilgore Trout, a science-fiction writer. Even the Tralfamadorians appeared before in Vonnegut’s second novel, Sirens of Titan.

The swirling around and re-use of characters and ideas from book to book resembles the structure of Slaughter-House Five itself, and, I suppose, represents Vonnegut’s unified view of existence At first it feels comforting, a self-contained world, manageable, knowable, nothing to strive for or fret about, no need to fear death. Eventually, though, a fixed future begins to feel oppressive. As I grew out of my teens and began to read more Vonnegut I began to want to break free of his hermetic philosophy. It turns out I did want a cause. I wanted something to work on and something I could meaningfully contribute to. I wasn’t so concerned about death, but I did want something I could live for.

After the war Eliot Rosewater and Billy Pilgrim are recuperating in a military hospital and discovering the science fiction novels of Kilgore Trout. Vonnegut writes:

“Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy one time about a book that wasn’t science fiction. He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brother’s Karamazov by Feodor Dostoevsky. “But that isn’t enough any more,” said Rosewater.” (p. 101)

I’m glad to have more books to read than just The Brother’s Karamazov. Of course Dostoevsky knew nothing of World War II. And Slaughter-House Five is a worthy addition to any bookshelf. But it’s an addition that is also a subtraction, saying no to the complexity and the purpose and meaning of life shown by Dostoevsky and Hemingway. Post World War II, and even post-Vietnam, I disagree with Vonnegut’s, “no.” Life requires both serenity and courage, and wisdom always to tell the difference.