Books: Slaughterhouse-Five

On its surface, Slaughterhouse-Five (actual full name: Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death) is a profoundly disjointed narrative of author Kurt Vonnegut’s experiences as a World War II prisoner of war told through the eyes and experiences of his fictional proxy Billy Pilgrim.

Vonnegut occasionally inserts himself into the narrative or acknowledges that the work you’re reading is autobiographical historical fiction, creating a meta universe that both draws you in and sets you outside the characters and plot.

Billy’s adventures unfold in short, jarring sentences and jump through time and literal space—which are key aspects of the novel’s postmodernist structure and spirit. Postmodernism in literature (which thrived in the second half of the 20th century, with this novel being written in 1969) broke away from linear, plausible storytelling to embrace logical impossibilities, ponder questions about existence, and often create imperfect character and story arcs that never get resolved.

It’s through this everything-at-once literary lens that poor, beleaguered Billy Pilgrim jumps randomly from surviving the cruelties of war and the (historically true) bombing of Dresden to wetting his pants in childhood fear at the top of the Grand Canyon to losing his wife in a string of bizarre circumstances after he survives a plane crash to being abducted by aliens, ensconced in an interstellar zoo, and mating with a fellow earthling and adult performer with the delightful name Montana Wildhack.

And it’s through this structure that Vonnegut processes the horrors he experienced in war and illustrates the disassociative struggles of living with PTSD.

The story is by its very nature absurd and peppered with droll humor and truly singular characters (many of whom appear in other Vonnegut works) with names like Kilgore Trout and Bertram Copeland Rumfoord. This being a novel centered around war, the frivolity is heavily balanced with often nonchalant accounts of death … always followed by Vonnegut’s “And so it goes” expression of existential futility.

The novel’s other recurring expression—”unstuck in time”—provides succinct, efficient shorthand for not only Vonnegut’s narrative structure but for the scattered aftershocks he continues to experience from of war itself, the upheaval it creates, the lives it redirects and the metaphorical slaughter it wields on his psyche … and by extension the world’s.