The Theme of Time in Slaughterhouse Five Essay Examples

A man once said, “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre”. That man was none other than Kurt Vonnegut, the author of Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut’s novel tells the tale of Billy Pilgrim, a World War II veteran who recalls his capture by the Germans and subsequent bombing of Dresden. On top of his war stories is a simultaneous adventure to the planet Tralfamadore, where Billy is granted the ability to time travel into the past, present, and future at unpredictable periods. Thus, the idea of time is manipulated throughout the story to highlight Billy’s perception of life before, during, and after the war. When stories are told through random sequences of anticlimactic events, a novel like Slaughterhouse-Five devalues the importance of a structured reality and instead, emphasizes the idea of war as a destructive, jumbled mess of unfortunate events. 

Kurt Vonnegut ignores that traditional style of a linear plot by using randomly ordered events to purposefully develop the consequences war inflicts on an individual. After the war, Billy is wracked with intense anxiety and intrusive thoughts. When under delusion and paranoia, Billy “is spastic in time” and tossed around within the story as “he never knows what part [he has to] act next” (Vonnegut 26). From Billy’s struggles to find his concrete telling of the war, the narrator intentionally alters the order in which events are told to boost the metaphor that war is not a straightforward catastrophe. Narrations of Billy’s war experiences are manipulated in regards to context and time, which can represent the ultimate effects war has on Billy. In detail, Billy’s world has been shocked by the PTSD of the war, combining fear, anger, and confusion into one story. When Billy hears sirens, the noises scare “the hell out of him” because “he [expects] World War Three at any time” (53). Combined with the following story of a photographer in Germany taking pictures of Billy’s feet, the reality Billy perceives is represented through the confusing third-person narrations. Whereas traditional novels keep the timeline forward with purpose, narrations in Billy’s story have no definite connection to each other and are misplaced to further embrace the mysterious tolls of the war. When something as violent and gruesome as war exists, there are symbols in the narrative style that show mental tolls are taken. To tie it all back, the narratives provoke confusion and chaos as they are compared to the internal troubles war victims go through. By telling Billy’s life out of order, sudden and confusing narrations from different points of his life represent Billy’s true feelings of PTSD after the war. 

As a result of two separate narrations, Slaughterhouse-Five demonstrates the chaotic exchange in which the abduction of Billy by the Tralfamadorians is given light to establish a middle ground showing that war is no more important or valuable than any other tragedy. When Billy is abducted by aliens and arrives on the planet of Tralfamadore, he is shocked by the submission he is forced under. Robbed of his free will to act upon whatever orders, he puts war into perspective by “simply shrugging [off] what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people” (29). Before this encounter, Billy views the war as the biggest tragedies in his life because of all the violence he endured. However, when Billy struggles to gain independence from his alien abduction, his worries about the war seem to be taken for granted. Though the war has its harsh consequences on its victims, it is no more harmful than other tragedies. Realizing that  Tralfalmadore exists indefinitely in space, the narrator proposes that “time is all time” as it does not “lend itself to warnings or explanations; it simply is” (76). By comparing a real-world problem like WWII to a fanatical story of an alien abduction, a common message is extracted. This theme stresses the idea that all existing events have no more significance than another. Narrations in the novel blur two completely harmful, yet insignificant incidents into the perspective of existence. In other words, the untimely narrative of the Tralfamdorians challenges the stereotypical image of war as a horrible event that destroys lives. Though war is arguably destructive, a separate narrative like the Tralfamadores can put every event in existence into question when realizing what is significant or not in the grand scheme of life. The two narratives in Slaughterhouse-Five merge into an overlapping idea that undermines war as just an event that exists with both harm and insignificance. 

Through the time-traveling narrations that seem to have no definitive ending, Vonnegut’s narrative style establishes that war achieves no true closure with the collapse of soldiers and structure. When realizing the purpose of telling Billy’s war story, the narration speaks on behalf of “no characters…and no dramatic confrontations because most of the people in it are so sick”; “one of the main effects of war is that people are discouraged from being characters” (137). The theme that war has no ultimate closure is obvious within the narrations. By the middle of the novel, it is apparent that the narrations are stirred to provide a lack of purpose within the war. The absence of a structured story makes the message clear that war just exists as each person is just another number in the grand scheme of chaos. When the story concludes with Billy walking out of the Dresden bombing, “[he] wandered out onto the shady street,” where there was “only one vehicle” (179). The anticlimactic ending to a bouncy narrative shows that the tales of war will never achieve an overarching message. Instead, the war story is told to present truths through a witness’s perspective, making the audience generate their takeaways from the novel. Still, the unsettled narrative of the story’s ending is a metaphor that war will never have a groundbreaking ending. Through the final narrations of Billy’s war story, the anti-climatic ending of the war pursues a hidden meaning in which war will remain as just existing stories without dramatic conclusions.

Throughout the novel, Slaughterhouse-Five alludes that the uncertainty and aftermath of war can be confusing and anxious, as shown through a mix of narrations spanning different periods. On the other hand, two completely different narratives within Billy’s life combine to form a middle ground which undermines the significance of war by proving that it is not as important as the audience thinks. Finally, the narrative’s ending is an anticlimactic scene, which promotes the idea that war exists as is, as it should go without much thought. The approach of an abstract narration in Slaughterhouse-Five further implies the uncertainty of war as an insignificant part of life that just exists as a confusing mess. 

Works Cited

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. Penguin Books, 2010.