Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut - Essay Example

SLAUGHERHOUSE FIVE Few books have made as much of an impression on me as Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. The way this book presents the true horror of war was fascinating to me. To be perfectly honest, many books I read about war are not very interesting. They certainly talk a lot about explosions and heroism but they dont really make you feel like you are in the war or show how idiosyncratically people can experience a war. What I discovered from reading this book is that the horrible things in the Second World War were probably so bad that a traditional narrative would not be possible to describe them. Vonnegut felt he had to go beyond what normal books do, to veer into the world of science fiction to explain the horror. He shows how bad it truly is and how disjunctive the difference between life in a warzone are with life after war. That is in part why Slaughterhouse Five is a masterpiece and meant so much to me. Billy Pilgrim immediately caught my attention. To begin with, it is very strange to have a character in a book about war who is not a hero and is not a villain. Billy is just a simple chaplains assistant. He doesnt have much of a personality or any real opinions. All his life he seems to simply wander into difficult situations. In a way, he is a bit like the character Forest Gump. He is simple and innocent. He is not made to fight in war. He is not made to do anything important really. In a sense, like Gump, he is fortunes fool. We keep waiting to find out the moment when Billy becomes a hero, but he never really does. That is key to the point that Vonnegut is making, in my opinion. He is trying to show how the normal narratives or stories about war are false. There may not be heroes to redeem horror in the end (Allen, 40). One of the most impressive features of this story, in my opinion, is how Vonnegut uses science fiction techniques in a literary story. There is usually a very big divide between literature and science fiction. Usually, they arent mentioned in the same breath. But in Vonneguts hands we begin to see what science fiction can do. It is not just a hokey medium. Instead, it is a way of gaining distance on our own world and taking a different perspective that lets us see some philosophical differences between our world and ones imagined. Billy visits some strange places and learns a great deal about the world. In Tralfamadore he learns about free will and what it really means through its absence. Vonnegut, in my opinion, is trying to write about war and destruction in a new way. He is showing us that we are foolish to think that any one person can alter the path of the world; and he shows us that Billy himself is just a cog in the machine, unable to understand his life, his world, or his country. This really made me think about my own life and what it meant. I read how Billy just walked through much of his life like a zombie, never really reflecting on it but instead escaping into alternate universes and planets where he could be slightly free, but also trapped. This, as some critics have written, is a kind of “cosmic irony” (Bloom, 54). Billy may feel free when escaping to his fantasies, but he is also a prisoner, as when he is held captive in a human zoo (Vonnegut, 257). I dont want to be like him. An interesting aspect of the book is how much of the story could be a product of a person with a mental illness. Is the author showing us Billys strange fantasies or time travels to indicate to us how he is reacting to the stress of the war, even years later? Or is this part of the story for another reason? It might be easy to dismiss much of what Billy does as the product of a mind that was ruined in Dresden, but Vonnegut never lets us off easily. He simply says, “Listen: Billy pilgrim has come unstuck in time” (Vonnegut, 27). What does that mean? Billy confuses Dresden with other planets he says he has visited (Broer, 7). We arent sure what to think. We are always trying to figure out if what happens to Billy is real or not. I like this guessing game as it keeps the reader on his or her toes. It is true, as the critic Anthony Burgess, once wrote that “Slaughterhouse is a kind of evasion—in a sense, like J. M. Barries Peter Pan—in which we’re being told to carry the horror of the Dresden bombing, and everything it implies, up to a level of fantasy... ” (Merill and Scholl, 67). But the book is also more than a version of Peter Pan. The author seems very aware of what he is doing. And part of that technique allows us to refuse to place horror at the centre of the world, but to show that it is relative and not absolute. When I read the newspaper these days I see a lot of stories about war and violence. They often just sit on the page in front of me. I can read how a thousand people have been killed in Libya or that a tidal wave killed ten thousand. Of course, I feel bad, but it hard to feel the enormity of these things. One of the most impressive things for me when reading this book was the sense of horror I was able to feel about the violence of the bombing of Dresden and its after effects. It is only a relatively small part of the book but it is the central element. The author made me feel the horror, by showing me how absurd and uncontrollable it was and comparing it to other situation. But the most important thing Vonnegut shows is that the event was so terrible that people who lived through it had to escape to other planets (real or imagined) in order to continue living with going completely crazy. That really drove the message home. Work consulted Allen, William Rodney. Understanding Kurt Vonnegut. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Bloom, Harold, ed. Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse-Five. Modern Critical Interpretations. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001. Broer, Lawrence R. Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994. Merrill, Robert and Peter A. Scholl. Vonneguts Slaughterhouse-Five: The Requirements of Chaos, in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring, 1978. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five. RosettaBooks, 2001. Read More