'Slaughterhouse-Five': Touching the Themes

I have just finished reading ‘Slaughterhouse - Five’, the novel by Kurt Vonnegut. It took me longer to read, even though it is a short novel, because I read it in so many sittings. What do I make of the novel? It tells the story of one Billy Pilgrim, who has become unstuck in time, and travels through time back and forth reliving the parts of his life, over and over. Billy Pilgrim is an Optometrist, a soldier, a husband, a father, an abductee on an alien plant, and a time traveler. All his experiences through these periods of his life get intermingled as he jumps from one time to another, revisiting and reliving.

Vonnegut himself fought in World War 2 as an American serviceman. ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ is his novel based on the time when he was captured by Germans and imprisoned in the basement of a slaughterhouse at Dresden, Germany as a prisoner of war. In that slaughterhouse he survived the bombing of the city by Allied Forces in which tens of thousands of people in Dresden perished.

‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ is about a lot of things: the flow of time, horror and insanity of war, absurdity of life, human agency, the suffering inherent to existence, fate, death, and the cold universe gazing at us (scowling or laughing we never know).

To catch the pulse of the book, here is a dialogue which occurs between Billy Pilgrim and the Tralfamadorians who have come to take him to place him in their zoo.

“Welcome aboard, Mr. Pilgrim,” said the loudspeaker. “Any questions?”

Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: “Why me?”

“That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?”

“Yes.” Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.

“Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”

It is a terrific answer. Light bulbs went up in my mind as I read this line —

“Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”

Why does anything happen that happens? Are we like bugs trapped in the amber of this moment? And if we are, do we accept and surrender to whatever comes with it? Do we resign ourselves to fate? The novel seems to suggest so. All things — good, bad, tragic, horrible, comic, sad, impressive, repulsive — happen. Just happen. There is no why.

Here is another dialogue.

“It would take another Earthling to explain it to you. Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or avoided. I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.”

“You sound to me as though you don’t believe in free will,” said Billy Pilgrim.

Our human consciousness is obviously limited to this moment in the Present, and therefore we infuse tremendous significance and meaning into it. So much seems to depend on the action we take in the Present, on our exercise of free will. But if we could — like Tralfamadorians — see the Past, Present, and Future all at once, see the flow of time — all things which have happened, continue to happen and will happen — we too, possibly shall realize that all time is all time, and that it is not about achieving some ends and avoiding others. There is nothing which can be done to change a thing; it is all set. Billy Pilgrim knows his plane is going to crash, he boards it regardless as he has seen all time. Tralfamadorians know that they are going to blow up the universe; they will do it anyway.

“How—how does the Universe end?” said Billy.

“We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers. A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears.” So it goes.

“If you know this,” said Billy, “isn’t there some way you can prevent it? Can’t you keep the pilot from pressing the button?”

“He has always pressed it, and he always will . We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.”

Kurt Vonnegut saw a horrible war. He fought on the side of the Allied Forces which bombed Dresden and massacred several thousands of innocent civilians. The morality of even the good side was hollow. So how to explain what was happening? What to think of the senseless horror? Is the human suffering inevitable? Is there anyway to rationalize it?

‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ was his meditation and possibly an answer to these questions. ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ can read like a work seeped in fatalism (the phrase ‘so it goes’ appears a lot) and spirit of surrender before the overwhelming machine of the universe. It seems to say that like bugs caught in the amber of time there is little we can do to determine our fate, death is just around the corner, and even before the ultimate end we shall encounter all sorts of pain and suffering.

So, is there any joy to be found being trapped in the amber of the moment?Tralfamadorians have an advice for the earthlings.

“That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.”

Slaughterhouse Five is a great novel. I loved reading it. I have focused more on the philosophical aspects of it which I found really stimulating, but novel is really set upon Billy Pilgrim’s entire life from beginning to the end, and reading it is absolutely joyful. I am going to now start another one of Vonnegut’s novels.

(Small note: the book, many times while reading it, reminded me of ‘Catch-22’, another great novel about war and its absurdities.)