Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five"

We all have heard about how terrible war is. We all know and understand, at least in theory, that it is nothing to be trifled with, and that the worst, the very worst and ugliest chapters in human history have always been attached to war, because war permits things that could never happen under more normal times.

There are many ways that an author can write an anti-war novel, and many of them have come to attain the status of classics. War is something that humanity always seems to engage in, and the level of destructiveness has just gone up and up and up as we improved our technological capacity. What had once been limited and regional wars became unlimited “total” wars on a global level. In the most recent global war, there were two atomic bombs dropped in Japan that horrified the world. Forgotten, or at least in the shadow, of all of that destruction that marked the true beginning of the “Atomic Age”, were the firebombings in Japan and Germany that actually killed more people than either of the two more famous bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Germany during the single biggest overnight mass killing, and he tried to take a different approach to war than the popular portrayals of war that was shown in movies and television at the time. The wife of a friend took exception to what she assumed was going to be another war book that glorified the macho male role of the war, so Vonnegut promised to call the book “The Children's Crusade”, to show that most of those fighting on both sides were basically just boys. He wrote about being a prisoner of war in Dresden on the night when it was firebombed by the Allies. Dresden was an “open city”, meaning it had no military value, posing no military threat. So it had been largely left alone throughout the war. Yet, in one February night in 1945, when it was clear that Germany was close to collapsing in defeat, Dresden was bombed like no other city had been bombed before. Statistically, it ended up being the single biggest overnight massacre in history.

Vonnegut himself survived because he was being held as a prisoner of war, and so they were by slaughterhouses (his was Slaughterhouse-5, which is where the book gets it's name from) that had underground storage shelters. It was one of the few areas that actually managed to survive the bombing. The rest of the city was completely decimated.

The prisoners of war had survived, and they were utilized in the clean up effort, as much to clean up the mess that their fellow Allies had caused – much like the Allies would force Germans to visit the death camps – as to be helpful and pick up bodies and begin the clean up process. In the process of that, one American soldier was caught with some personal belongings from dead Germans that he picked up, and was thus summarily executed. The irony of that captured Kurt Vonnegut, and so he added that in the book.

In fact, much of the book is likely quite autobiographical, although of course, he also had to make it different.

The main character of the book is Billy Pilgrim, and his plight is a strange one. He has, as Vonnegut says, become “unstuck in time”. So one moment, he is giving a speech presentation before a crowded room of people, the next he is back in Germany , being taken prisoner following his capture during the Battle of the Bulge, and then he is a little boy being thrown into a swimming pool and almost drowning. Next, he is at his home, with a wife and kid and a life that he has built in the post-war years.

            It is funny how much you forget about when you reread a book that you have not read in a long time. Such was the case with both Slaughterhouse-Five and Johnny Got His Gun, both of which I had assumed that I had read well, but which, as it turns out, I had to questions this time around, since there was either so much that I had missed, or simply could not remember.

Slaughterhouse-Five was Kurt Vonnegut's breakout book based upon his experiences as a prisoner of war in Germany, posted in Dresden when the city was firebombed, thus making him one of the few survivors of what was, ultimately, the greatest overnight massacre in European history.

Of course, it would not be a Vonnegut novel if it was not a little bit stranger than that, and so there is some time travel in there, and Vonnegut keeps you guessing as to whether this really is a form of time travel, where the main character, Billy Pilgrim, gets "unstuck in time", or whether all of this is merely in his head, and there might not be something wrong with him.

This is an anti-war novel, and Vonnegut is strongly effective in his humanist language. He vividly describes the feeling of being underneath Dresden on the night of the infamous bombing, and how strangely alien the landscape of the previously enchanted city looked like otherwise. He was quite taken with the beauty of the city prior to it's destruction. But when he visited it decades later, he claimed that it lacked character, so new was the architecture and all else.  Dresden had been an "open city" of no real military value throughout the Second World War, and thus had been spared the relentless bombing that many other German cities had to endure. The sirens would sound, but it had become a routine for the people of Dresden, who knew that these were false alarms. But all of that changed one night in February of 1945, when the outcome of the war was largely determined already. Dresden was firebombed, and well over 130,000 people were killed overnight. The fire that took over the city was so powerful and took up so much oxygen, that those who had not been burned by it were deprived of the oxygen required to breathe. Hardly anyone survived.

Obviously, this is not a war novel in the traditional sense. In fact, the full title of the book is "Slaughterhouse –Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance With Death" is meant to evoke the truth that the soldiers on both sides were really just children yet. As monumental as the events were, and as much as they changed our world and our maps, the actual combatants were fresh-faced youth, predominately. This is not a macho war novel, and John Wayne would not be suitable in a movie version of this work to portray the soldier depicted in this story.

Vonnegut just takes a different approach. At one point, Billy Pilgrim is at home, watching a video of a war movie, and he watches it several times through. He watches it to the end, and then rewinds the tape, and watches the war unfold backwards. Watches the destruction and death reverse themselves, watches all-consuming fires suddenly sucked up, and a peaceful landscape prevails. He watches women in factories "touchingly" taking apart weapons. Again, it is a different kind of a war novel. One that nobody but Vonnegut could have written. It seems such a simple idea when you read it, but nobody else thought to write such a "war novel" prior to Vonnegut.

Famously, this work immortalized the words, "So it goes.", which the author uses repeatedly, to strong effect. This is a literary device that, when overdone or misused, can grow tiresome or very repetitive. Yet, Vonnegut is able to make it work, and to strong effect, systematically punctuating death and suffering with these three words. It is unconventional, yes. But if anything, it enhances the work.

This work also differs from many macho-minded war novels and movies and stories by not automatically portraying good guys and bad guys. Germans are not viewed as evil, and Americans are not systematically viewed as good. They are all systematically viewed as all-too human, soldiers and civilians alike, and that is what makes the story of the burning down of Dresden all the more tragic. These are real people that the reader can surely identify with, even granting the reality of distance and time and circumstances and nationalities. Portrayed are actually ordinary, everyday people caught up in a whirlwind not of their own creation. Yet they pay the price anyway. So it goes…