Book Analysis of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, the entwinement between fiction and reality is accentuated despite their seemingly contradictory meanings. Slaughterhouse 5 unfolds verity about the fact by traversing through crucial themes such as destructiveness of war, trauma on ones’ perspective of life, the illusion of fate and free will. Such ideas help convey the facts about people, society, and life related to Vonnegut’s and Billy’s experience in Dresden. Vonnegut uses a variety of language forms and features, such as imagery, personification, metaphorical language, structure and juxtaposition, to express his negative sentiment towards militaristic conflict through the story of the protagonist Billy Pilgrim, whose life is a total reflection of Vonnegut’s personal experiences during World War II (WWII). Although the story revolves around Vonnegut’s personal experiences in Dresden, the trigger for him writing about his anti-war sentiment may have well been the start of the Vietnam War piling onto the trauma inflicted upon him decades before. 

 A rigid anti-war tone runs through Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five allowing him to express his perceptions upon the destructiveness of war without him being overt. When Vonnegut portrays the firebombing of Dresden to make his argument, he emphasises how overwhelming and appalling the war is. Instead of using very literal language, Vonnegut describes the bombing in a dramatised manner by saying, “There was a firestorm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn”. By utilising imagery, Vonnegut makes the reader imagine how the fire engulfed Dresden as a whole, just like a predator with its prey. Vonnegut exercises this description of Dresden to represent the entire war and demonstrate his disdain for how war dismantles relationships, communities, and places once loved. When Vonnegut talks about the destruction of everything organic, he gives the reader a distinct picture of the destruction of Dresden.  To signify the effects of war on Dresden, Vonnegut looks upon the usage of juxtaposition. Throughout the novel, Vonnegut tends to describe Dresden as a beautifully untouched city, “which looked like a Sunday school picture of heaven.” But when this image is compared with the obliterated Dresden, the picturesque scenery created in the minds of the audience is shattered. They are brought back to the visual images of death and the smoke rising from the blown-up buildings. Vonnegut illustrates the destruction of such a peaceful place to be ultimately futile, he shows that even many years later, while writing this novel, the image of the bombing of Dresden still haunts him, and this shows how the destructiveness of war does not always have to be on the battlegrounds, it can permanently affect a soldier when they are back home.

Slaughterhouse 5 focuses on the idea that the life we live is determined by fate.

Vonnegut combines the past, the present and the future through Billy Pilgrim, unexpectedly traversing from one tense of time to another. We realise this happens when Billy is in war, then suddenly, he travels into the future where he is an optometrist. An example of such events can be witnessed through the passage, "Billy is spastic in time, he has no control over where he is going next, and the trips are not necessarily fun." Billy Pilgrim was an American POW, and during this time, he reflects on moments of his life where he had the free will to do whatever he wanted. Vonnegut uses the juxtaposition of Billy Pilgrim's life before the outbreak of war, where he could study optometry and have a family—comparing it to Billy’s life in the present, where he is witnessing a mass murder. It seems somewhat ironic how before going to war, Billy’s job would have been to make people’s lives easier by making them see better, but during the war, Billy’s job was to kill or fatally wound people. The irony between Billy’s previous and current life shows the contradiction between the past and the present. Billy's perspective of free will being tied into fate is soon changed through the philosophy of the Tralfamadorians, which state that there is no such thing as free will because we cannot change the past, present, and future; all moments are inevitable. The Tralfamadorians believe the whole idea of freedom is unique to Earth. They converse about how life does not need an explanation, and that life will still run its course regardless of these moments. “Why you, why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber? Well, here we are, Mr Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why." This encounter with the Tralfamadorians conveys their concept of free will and fate as an illusion because they simultaneously live in the past, the present and the future. The illusion of free will gives us a vague idea that Billy accepts that it is futile to keep questioning everything and just accept it because nothing will come out of struggling with it. Vonnegut uses the illusion of free will to insinuate that free will in our life, determined by fate, is non-existent, and it is pointless to question everything.

Additionally, Slaughterhouse 5 reveals some things that we can never change. Vonnegut relates this truth mainly to time and war in the novel. Despite Vonnegut having a clear anti-war message and a very prominent opinion that war is meaningless, he also believes it is inevitable. In the first chapter, when the book is narrated from Vonnegut’s perspective, he talks about a conversation he once had with the movie-maker Harrison Starr. Kurt Vonnegut tells him that he is writing an anti-war book, and he responds with, “why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead? Vonnegut goes on to comment on Starr’s comment, saying “what he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that too. Furthermore, even if wars did not keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.’ Furthermore, Vonnegut expresses that time is unchangeable, and we cannot alter the past. This point is represented (and slightly exaggerated) through the Tralfamadorians’ philosophy on life. Billy learns from the Tralfamadorians that we cannot change anything about time. When he asks them, given their time-travelling abilities, why they do not stop one of their pilots from destroying their universe, they respond with “he has always pressed it and he always will” and that they will always let the pilot do so because the moment is structured that way. From this, Billy concludes that trying to change the past is useless. Vonnegut uses plot and dialogue to share his message that we cannot change anything about time; trying to change the past will not help us. Through these kinds of events, Vonnegut also expresses his view that some things, like war, are inevitable, and we cannot change their outcome or the fact that they will happen. However, by juxtaposing the Tralfamadorians’ philosophy on time, essentially that we cannot change the future, with his clear anti-war message, Vonnegut somewhat contradicts himself. He does not want the war to happen because of its destructive nature, yet he states that it is nearly impossible to prevent, so Why try to stop it? While this is somewhat confusing, Vonnegut conveys that society has gotten itself into an almost inescapable cycle of death and destruction. Using juxtaposition, plot and dialogue, Vonnegut can reflect this concept about a cycle of despair and position the reader to critique the horrible pattern and see this awful truth in our society.