Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five is a novel that gives insight on the meaning of life, time, and war. The thought being able to view every moment in our lives concurrently, and not linearly, is presented. Kurt Vonnegut brings into the book the idea of time being relative and only existing in our imaginations. He also shows the brutality and senselessness of war. The novel describes the life of a World War II veteran named Billy Pilgrim, as he lives through the war and the fire-bombing of Dresden, becomes a prisoner of war, marries and settles down as an optometrist, and even visits an alien planet.

Slaughterhouse-Five does not follow an ordered timeline. The life story of Billy Pilgrim is “presented as a series of episodes with no chronological order”. Billy states numerous times in the novel that he has become “unstuck in time” (Vonnegut 23). The novel jumps, and shows how Billy “has seen his birth and death many times” and “all the events in between” (Vonnegut 23). The way in which the novel skips around a timeline demonstrates how life is nothing more than scenes in a movie, and that no matter how you view them, they always turn out the same.

Slaughterhouse-Five also echoes the theme of meaningless and brutality in war. Yet, throughout the book, Billy is relaxed and accepting of all things around him. After every death, Billy indifferently states “so it goes” (Vonnegut 69). Billy also was shown the reality of war. After seeing the young, clean shaven American soldiers at a camp, Billy was shocked at how young they were, saying, “My God, it’s the Children’s Crusade!” (Vonnegut 91). This shows Billy’s view of war as irrelevant and of no practical use. He believes that people are no better off, as far as getting along, than when they started the war. Because of his beliefs about war, Billy reluctantly goes through it accepting everything that happens to him. For example, when Billy is picked up by a wandering group of soldiers, he is expected to be the first one to die. He accepts that idea and even tells the soldiers to leave him because he would just get them captured or killed. In the end, the soldiers do just that and ended up being killed by what Billy said were "three inoffensive bangs” (Vonnegut 81).

Billy also visits the alien planet Tralfamadore in the book. His trip to Tralfamadore determines his views on time. The Tralfamadorians see in four dimensions (time being the fourth), whereas humans only see in three. The Tralfamadorians try to explain to Billy that time is like “a stretch of the Rocky Mountains” and that “it (time) does not lend itself to warnings or explanations”. Since they can see time as a concurrent picture of events, they have a different way of viewing the entire universe. Because they are able to see all motion (past, present, and future), to them “the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti” (Vonnegut 127), whereas human beings can only see stars as a single speck. The novel’s basic premise about life and time is that death is too important to ignore, yet is nothing to fear, and that people should accept the unchangeable course of life and of death.

Although readers often accuse Vonnegut of “showing life as a meaningless, unalterable chain”, in Slaughterhouse-Five, the main character actually does find his meaning. After being abducted by the Tralfamadores, the aliens tell him that there is no such thing as free will. “All time is all time. It does not change. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.” (Vonnegut 85-86). As the alien stated this, Billy did not feel worthless, in fact, he felt encouraged because now he knew that things were beyond his control. He could not change the past or the future. After this realization, Billy states “I, Billy Pilgrim will die, have died, and will always die on February 13, 1976.” That prediction, of course, turns out to be perfectly correct. Realizing that everything is planned out, Billy ends his search for meaning. He understands that he can do nothing to stop the senseless acts, which take place around him. Like the Tralfamadores, he must try to concentrate on the good moments and not on the bad ones, as he could do nothing to stop them or to change them.

The novel centers on determinism. It shows how we as a people believe we are deciding our fates, but yet we cannot see a larger picture, let alone the complete work. As the characters move towards their inevitable ends, they believe that they are making decisions that affect an outcome. Yet, they do not see how the impact of other characters and events caused them to think or act in a certain way. The characters continue pushing their way towards fate, and even if they accept that their fates are predetermined (as Billy did), they still have to continue on their lives’ journeys. Each character did what he willed to do, but did not determine what he willed.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five suggests that a man can not change his fate. Any attempts to change the past or the future are meaningless. To him, the search for meaning is futile. Yet, Vonnegut displays that, despite a deterministic universe, life goes on. For as the Baron d’Hobach once said, “You will say that I feel free. This is an illusion, which may be compared to that of the fly in the fable, who, upon the pole of a heavy carriage, applauded himself for directing its course. Man, who thinks himself free, is a fly who imagines he has power to move the universe, while he is himself unknowingly carried along by it.” Since we cannot change the course of the future, we must learn to enjoy and accept the present, and to take pleasure in the current that carries us along.

Works Cited

Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. “Slaughterhouse-Five”, Dell Pub: New York. November, 1991