In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement.
Today I’ll be looking at a classic of modern American literature that also happens to be a classic science fiction novel. It is the story of Billy Pilgrim, a WWII veteran who witnesses an atrocity and after being kidnapped by aliens, becomes unstuck in time. It is bleak, pessimistic, but in the end, while the book doesn’t seem to want to admit it, is also a tale with a lot of heart.
Sometimes science fiction authors become popular with much wider audiences, writers like Ray Bradbury, Arthur Clarke, and Robert Heinlein. And popular mainstream authors also dip their toes in the genre of science fiction, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. One of the better authors to do so was Kurt Vonnegut, especially in his best-known book, Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut always reminded me of Mark Twain (who he resembled in some of his book jacket publicity photos), another author who used satire to great effect and, while pessimistic about the world, obviously cared deeply about humanity.
The copy I used for this review emerged during a recent search through a shelf in the corner of my basement. It is from the first Dell paperback printing from 1971, when I was sixteen. It had a cover price of 95 cents, which would have been affordable to me in those days only because of my paper route.
About the Author
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922- 2007), who dropped the “Jr.” later in his career, was a noted American author who often used tropes and elements from science fiction and fantasy in his writing. His work was largely satirical in nature, and filled with dark humor. He served in the U.S. Army during WWII, was captured during the Battle of the Bulge, and survived the bombing of Dresden, Germany, where he was being held as a prisoner of war. The horrors he witnessed had a profound effect on his writing and his worldview; this is particularly evident in Slaughterhouse-Five, where he intertwined a personal memoir with the tale of a fictional character.
Vonnegut wrote fourteen novels, numerous short stories, as well as plays and non-fiction works during his long career. His first novel was published in 1952, and while he produced a number of well-received works over the years, it was not until the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969 that he received widespread recognition. While Vonnegut did not want to be pigeonholed as a science fiction writer, he had a clear fondness for the genre and a number of his works were nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards, with the 1972 movie adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five winning a Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation. After his death, Vonnegut was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
The Horrors of War
When I was young, I had the idea that war was an exciting and noble endeavor, full of adventure and opportunities for heroics. But as I reached my teenaged years, with the American involvement in Viet Nam going sour, there were three books that made me realize war was not as glamorous as I had once thought. First was Slaughterhouse-Five. The second was MASH by Richard Hooker, the story of surgeons in a field hospital during the Korean War. And the third was Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, the story of bomber crews in WWII.
I also saw the horror of war manifested in my father’s difficulty with talking about his own WWII service. He would tell stories about a variety of experiences, things like being chased by angry bees and building bridges, but not about combat. Like Vonnegut, he also fought in the Battle of the Bulge, in his case as a combat engineer. Once he and I talked in theory about how infantry units could combat an armored attack, and he described various countermeasures that could be used, especially by an engineering unit that had earthmoving equipment and lots of explosives. It was only later, when I saw an award citation after his death, that I realized his descriptions were from his own experience, and our conversation had been about combat after all. It is not unusual to find veterans who avoid talking about the horrors they faced, or indeed, avoid talking about their service altogether.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, like many other veterans’ recollections, skips around the experiences that were the toughest to face. The bombing of Dresden was one of the most horrific events of a brutal war. People tend to focus on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not realizing there were other bombing attacks that, while they took more bombers and bombs to do it, produced immense destruction and loss of life. In addition to the high-explosive bombs dropped on Dresden, incendiary devices were used to produce firestorms that destroyed widespread areas. The bombing of Dresden was primarily the product of four raids, carried out by both British and American bombers, and took place from the 13th to 15th of February in 1945. While some estimates of casualties exceeded 100,000, numbers verified by German records put the casualties more in the still horrific range of 25,000. To this day, there is dispute about whether the bombing of Dresden was justified and proportional, as the city lacked military infrastructure and was far from the front lines.
Slaughterhouse-Five
This is one of those books that felt very different when re-reading it as a seventy-year-old, as opposed to the young teenager who first encountered it. There was a depth to the narrative that I completely missed the first time around. And I had forgotten the entire title of the book, which as it appears on the title page, is: Slaughterhouse-Five OR THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE: A DUTY DANCE WITH DEATH BY Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. A FOURTH-GENERATION GERMAN-AMERICAN NOW LIVING IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES ON CAPE COD [AND SMOKING TOO MUCH], WHO AS AN AMERICAN INFANTRY SCOUT HORS DE COMBAT, AS A PRISONER OF WAR, WITNESSED THE FIRE-BOMBING OF DRESEN, GERMANY, “THE FLORENCE OF THE ELBE,” A LONG TIME AGO, AND SURVIVED TO TELL THE TALE. THIS IS A NOVEL SOMEWHAT IN THE TELEGRAPHIC SCHIZOPHRENIC MANNER OF TALES OF THE PLANET TRALFAMADORE, WHERE THE FLYING SAUCERS COME FROM. PEACE. This long descriptive passage sets the stage for a story that was unlike anything I had ever read in my youth, fitting neither in the category of Science Fiction, which my father collected and stored in our basement, nor in the category of Serious Fiction, of the kind I was given to read by teachers in my school.
The second thing I forgot about the book was how it begins. I could have sworn it started with the sentence, “Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time,” a line that actually appears in the book as “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” But that line does not appear until the beginning of the second chapter. Vonnegut breaks all the rules of novel writing with a first chapter that describes (in the first person) his efforts to become a writer, and his repeated failed attempts to write something about one of the most powerful events in his life: his survival of the bombing of Dresden. This deliberate breaking of the fourth wall does not end with the first chapter. There are repeated references during the novel to the fact that Vonnegut was present at many of the WWII events witnessed by his fictional character: being taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge, traveling by rail to a prisoner-of-war camp previously only inhabited by British officers, being transported to the city of Dresden to be used as a contract laborer, and then surviving the horrific Allied bombing of that same city. And the book ends not with Pilgrim, but with Vonnegut and an old war buddy traveling back to Dresden. Yet breaking the rules only serves to make the book more powerful, a novelistic feat few could carry off.
The book then skips through the major events of Billy’s life, from birth to his service as a chaplain’s assistant in the war, to his marriage, the birth of his children, his kidnapping by a flying saucer from the planet Tralfamadore, his captivity on that planet with the young movie actress Montana Wildhack, and his life upon his return to Earth. It also introduces the Tralfamadorian concept of time, which they view as a whole, rather than something experienced sequentially—they observe all points on the space-time continuum at once. Since everything that will ever happen has already happened, the Tralfamadorians do not seek to change or explain aspects of existence; when facing tragedy or death, they see it not as an end but a moment in a series of other moments that are constantly unfolding, and say simply, “So it goes.” The term feels like a favorite phrase I learned when I was in the service, a comment usually delivered with a shrug of the shoulders, “Shit happens.”
Billy, an inept scarecrow of a man, is separated from his unit, links up with an obnoxious bully named Roland Weary, then the two of them join up with a pair of scouts. But the scouts, concerned these two misfits will doom them, head out on their own (only to be killed while trying to ambush a German patrol). And it is here that Billy first becomes unstuck in time, reliving his youth, and then seeing events from the viewpoint of his future. Billy sees himself as an optometrist, and notes a prayer he has hanging in his office, “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.” [This is the Serenity Prayer, written by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, which has become widely used in addiction recovery programs—though Billy doesn’t seem to be aware of it.] At this point, Billy realizes he can’t change anything about his life.
Billy and Roland are packed into boxcars for transport. Billy then experiences his abduction by the alien Tralfamadorians, when he awakens in the middle of the night, already realizing what is about to happen, and watches television to pass the time until their arrival. He experiences a war movie in reverse, where neighborhoods are healed as bombs rise from them, and back into the bomb bays of damaged aircraft. Enemy fighters then suck bullets from the bombers, healing their damage, and the bombers fly backwards to their bases. Billy asks his alien captors why they abducted him, but they explain there is no “why”—every moment simply exists, trapped like bugs in amber. When Billy returns to the boxcar, Roland Weary dies of gangrene after telling everyone that Billy is responsible for his death, and a vengeful man named Paul Lazzaro takes Roland seriously.
Billy skips around his life, and while in WWII, he and his companions are placed with British prisoners, who through a clerical error, have more food than they know what to do with. They put on a feast for the Americans, only for those emaciated men to become desperately ill from the rich food. In the future, Billy ends up in a mental institution next to a former Army officer named Eliot Rosewater, who introduces him to science fiction, and specifically the work of an obscure author named Kilgore Trout, whose ideas are fascinating but whose prose is terrible. Billy marries a homely but rich woman because he already knows that she will be his wife, having seen his future, and they have two children, a boy who becomes a Green Beret, and a daughter who fusses over Billy in his old age.
Billy shuttles back and forth through his life, which includes the relatively happy period in a Tralfamadorian zoo where he is mated with the pretty young actress, and they have a child together. He experiences his death, which occurs in a balkanized future America at the hands of an assassin hired by Paul Lazzaro. He actually meets Kilgore Trout, who is far less impressive in real life than he is in print. And the narrative finally bounces its way around to the moment where Billy loses his mind, and then to the trauma that caused his breakdown, where only the fact that POWs are being held in the basement made of a reinforced concrete saves him from dying in the firebombing of Dresden. He witnesses the aftermath of the bombing, where he and his companions are put to work burying bodies. Billy next experiences two happy moments from his life, first a time after the bombing of Dresden where Billy and his friends had been fed, gotten a good night’s sleep in a bed, and found a wagon to ease their travels. And the second moment is from his captivity on Tralfamadore, where Montana is breastfeeding their child, and he realizes that the locket she wears around her neck has the Serenity Prayer engraved on it.
The book finally ends by returning to the experiences of Vonnegut, who has used Billy’s sometimes fanciful adventures to finally get his own wartime story off his chest. The ending is bittersweet but profoundly meaningful. The book may seem chaotic and rambling, but it is beautifully crafted, and you can feel its rhythm whenever Vonnegut hits you like a sledgehammer with the fatalistic refrain, “So it goes.”
Final Thoughts
Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the best novels I have ever read. Unlike many other books I have revisited in this column, which have not aged well, it feels just as fresh and relevant today as it did when I first read it. And now that I have the life experience to appreciate many of the themes of the book, I found it even more meaningful.
And now I turn the floor over to you. If you’ve read it, I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts on Slaughterhouse-Five. Or your thoughts on any other works by Vonnegut.
There is a case to be made that Slaughterhouse 5 is the greatest American war novel. It stands with The Red Badge of Courage and The Naked and the Dead IMO
The three novels that convinced me war was not a Sgt Rock comic book were Catch 22, Slaughterhouse-5 and Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo.
I think I have read almost the entire Vonnegut oeuvre and was blessed to attend a talk he gave once. I only return to this, Cat’s Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions. He was a beautiful writer and a better person. Someone tried to convince me once that John Updike was the better writer and, craft wise maybe. But Vonnegut lived through Dresden. All Updike had was a waning libido. Give me a writer who has something to say over one who has never seen the outside the constant company of other writers.
I still have a copy of “Johnny Got His Gun,” which I couldn’t bear to read more than once. It may qualify as the most horrifying and depressing book ever written.
It is too bad I was not on Jeopardy yesterday night, because the answer to Final Jeopardy was Kurt Vonnegut!
Here is a bit of trivia-Kurt had an older brother who was fascinated by severe storms.
Some even talked about s’ferics, where an old tube television could (allegedly) be a tornado detector.
Toothpaste heir Sterling Colegate fired instrumented rockets into tornadoes to test Bernard’s theories.
In retrospect I’ve got to wonder about that librarian who introduced me to Vonnegut in 1977 when I was 12 by pointing me to “Welcome to the Monkey House”. She also thought “Grendel” was appropriate for a 6th grader. I read Slaughterhouse 5 when I was in 7th grade. Don’t recall too much about it, honestly.
“Kilgore Trout, whose ideas are fascinating but whose prose is terrible.” I know he’s supposed to be a sort of Marty Stu of the author, but that could describe a few actually successful golden age authors.
Well, the character’s name was inspired by Theodore Sturgeon. How much else of the character traces to Sturgeon, rather than Vonnegut himself, is open to interpretation.
Read it twenty years ago for a literature class in college about a selection of modern/experimental American fiction. I was so young that the only helpful reference point I had for surreal satirical sci-fi was Douglas Adams, but obviously Slaughterhouse-Five is very punchy and not the slightest bit lighthearted. Actual literary scholars have probably said much more than this, but although there are a lot of ways to read the SFF elements, I remember thinking that one big takeaway message could be that war as we know it would only make sense from the standpoint of an extremely different, extremely non-human existence – that extraterrestrials with a completely divergent sense of time, causality, and knowing could accept it, but that we shouldn’t.
I would also like to add that, for me at least, the film version was really well done. It is a relatively rare example where it seems that BOTH the book and the movie were top notch.
Particularly for science fiction.
I love Vonnegut and this book and look forward to rereading it again soon.
Many years ago we heard Vonnegut on one of those ubiquitous NPR weekend shows and he was telling the host why he became a writer. He had some sort of terrible sales job that he hated and was awful at and he needed money so he could, and I quote: “Feed my family, my goddamn family…” My friends and I now all have kids and we quote that to each other all the time.
I few years ago, during a trip for a niece’s wedding, I took a side route and visited the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library and Museum in Indianapolis. I too have that same weathered copy that you reread for this article. What better place to get a new copy of one of my favorite books.
When we got back home, I took it out to read. Immediately I realized something was wrong. The book I held in my hand actually began on page 249, went on another 25 pages to the conclusion. It then began again on page 25 where it went to its conclusion again. I was confused and then had to laugh. How perfect that a novel about a character unstuck in time would be, itself, unstuck and randomly rearranged.
I emailed KVLM and told them to check their other copies for the misprint. Mine seems to have been the only one. They said if I sent it back, they’d send me a new copy. I told them sorry, I’m keeping it. I love this mixed version too much. I think Kurt would have found it amusing.
They did too and sent me a new copy anyway, and a copy of their excellent yearly journal “So It Goes”. I highly recommend a visit if you are in the area.
I have not read Slaughterhouse-Five, however, after reading this summery, I certainly will.
Though Vonnegut did not approve of movies in general — as opposed to books, he thought they stifled the imagination — he was quite enthused about the George Roy Hill adaptation of “Slaughterhouse Five,” stating that he felt it effectively conveyed the tone and essence of the book as written. Years later Hill went on to direct the film version of John Irving’s bestseller “The World According to Garp,” which had something of a similar vibe.
It’s also possibly worth noting that several characters from “Slaughterhouse” made appearances in other Vonnegut novels: the aforementioned Kilgore Trout in “Breakfast of Champions,” and the American Nazi sympathizer Howard W. Campbell (Vonnegut’s dig at the right wing SF editor John Campbell) in “Mother Night.”
I read Slaughterhouse-Five in my high school science fiction class. This uniquely bizarre story gave me a taste for military sci-fi and also my fascination with aliens. The Tralfamadorians are the first aliens I read/viewed in fiction that were neutral and not full of evil plans to Take Over the World.
I adore Vonnegut and his quotes. His reason to go for a long walk to mail a letter, for example (“…I might see a baby….”), showed me that sometimes you have to ‘choose joy,’ especially if you have a lot of memories that can interfere with finding joy spontaneously.
The moment I always recall is when Billy tells the Tralfamadorians that he thinks humans must be especially evil, pointing out that he himself has seen the bodies of teenage girls who had been boiled alive by his own countrymen, and known that they returned home convinced they had done a great and noble deed; and been washed in the soap made from rendered-down body fats from people murdered by those girls’ fathers… and the Tralfamadorians reply that no, that’s perfectly normal.