Slaughterhouse-Five

"It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds."

Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-five

I have been told, multiple times by multiple people, that the firebombing of Dresden was the cross that Vonnegut carried his entire life. Those exact words: "the cross he carried." I wonder what it is about that particular phrasing that latches those words to this story. No matter, they are fitting. 

This is the Vonnegut book that it seems most people have read. Its common high school reading. "So it goes" is often referenced. I am happy that it wasn't the first book by him that I've read. I feel that I wouldn't have understood the context as well, the complex emotions he felt, and the guilt he experienced if I hadn't read some of his other books first. Kilgore Trout, from so many Vonnegut novels, is present to explain why science fiction is important and how people make up their own fictions every day to live with what has happened. Mr. Rosewater, of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,  shares a room in the veterans hospital with Billy Pilgrim (our protagonist) after he accidentally shot a fireman during a flash back. Howard W. Campbell, Jr., from Mother Night, appears to convince the prisoners of war to join his all American platoon to fight for the Germans against the Russians and then waits out the firebombing in a meat locker with the prisoners of war while the rest of the city burns. The intricacies and the absurdities pulled in from the other novels provided a wonderful backing to the story, and an intricate back story that made the absurdities Vonnegut points out more profound.

In Slaughterhouse-five we follow the story of Billy Pilgrim, a time challenged man who jumps from occasion to occasion in his life. He doesn't understand this until he is abducted by aliens who see the fourth-dimension, While he can't see his life as they do, he knows what will happen, how he dies, how he is born, and everything in between and nothing will change because that is how the moment is structured. The story is his life, bouncing around but centered around the firebombing of Dresden, an event which killed more people than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. There's a certain helplessness as Billy struggles to find the reason behind the things that he has seen, the things that have happened and will happen. 

This is a struggle that I think Vonnegut grapples with in most of the books I have read by him. The question of how do we make sense of the terrible things that have happened, and, since we are "so much the listless playthings of enormous forces," how and why should we go on? These are questions I feel like many people struggle with.

In Slaughterhouse-five there is a novel, written by Kilgore Trout, about a time traveler who goes back in time to see the Crucifixion of Jesus. The first time he goes back, he goes to far, and finds a twelve year old Jesus learning the trade of his father: carpentry. Roman foot soldiers come up and ask Joseph and Jesus to build a contraption to execute a rabble-rouser and they do, a simple thing made up of two posts. I think this story was significant, especially to Vonnegut. I think he was making a point of how even though we may make our crosses without knowing it, we still must bear them, and it wont make the pain any less. He made his, he went over seas and participated in war. But it doesn't make the burden any easier. Everyone is just doing the best they can and hindsight is 20/20. 

I loved this book. I would love to hear what everyone else thought of it, it was so intricate and emotional, clever and funny in places I didn't think possible. I love the way he brings out the absurdity and the humanity in frightful, terrible things. I think that everyone should read this book.