Personally acknowledged by the author himself as one of his finest achievements, Kurt Vonnegut's semi-autobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five tells of the fire bombing of Dresden, Germany just before the end of the Second World War.
Chaplain’s assistant (and eventually optician) Billy Pilgrim is captured by the Germans during The Battle Of The Bulge and is transported as a POW to Dresden. It is on that slow trip to Dresden where Billy first becomes “unstuck” in time.
Narrating through various time periods, Vonnegut employs a mosaic of genres, particularly science fiction and realism to preach of the futility and absurdity of war. By using sci-fi as a device he's is able to chronicle the protagonist’s life via a non-linear time plot yet keep the suspense the traditional linear narrative - no, this is not a typical war novel.
Billy neither a war hero nor soldier lives various parts of his life randomly, so in one paragraph Billy will be in Dresden, then Chicago twenty years later – occasionally several times on a single page. An author without the requisite literary skill risks bamboozling the reader, but this is Vonnegut at his mercurial peak.
Jumping from one time place to another, the memories of Dresden never leave Billy (and probably Vonnegut), he is forced to re-live them for eternity. But this guarantees Billy a certain, if albeit, bittersweet immortality.
In an extraordinary twist Billy is abducted by a race of aliens, known as Tralfamadorians – as he always known he would be. He is taken away to the planet Tralfamadoria and placed in a sort of intergalactic zoo. It is there where he is placed with pornographic model Montana Wildhack and “forced” to mate. During a conversation with the Tralfamadorians, Billy challenges the notion that all events are preconceived but is rebuffed with the response that everything has happened and will continue to happen.
Exploring the concept of fatalism, that is that no man has power to influence the future and therefore his own actions, the Tralfamadorians explain to Billy that events - specifically war, is an inevitability (just as the end of the universe is, and always will be, caused by a calamitous Tralfamadorian).
Vonnegut cunningly uses the Tralfamadorians to give an outside perspective of the human race, while the idea of ‘free will’ is exclusive to earth – “only on earth is there ever talk of free will.”
Though the novel sounds confusing, Vonnegut manages the consistent time-travelling jumps skillfully, without the reader becoming disoriented - a real achievement for a unique concept.
Despite Slaughterhouse-Five depictions of horrific atrocities it's a deeply satirical and humorous black comedy (as his books tend to be) resulting in a wholly satisfying read. Very few books deserve the hype surrounding them – this one does.
So it goes.
“All time is time. It does not change. It does not warm itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.”
Note: Vonnegut uses David Irving’s inaccurate claim in The Destruction Of Dresden that 135,000 people were killed in the fire bombing – actually the figure was somewhere between 24,000- 40,000.
