tooth soup

photo credit: Katie Spence

I was not aware of Kurt Vonnegut when he passed away last year. I hadn’t read a single book of his, and that situation remained until a few weeks ago when, after watching a documentary on another fallen hero, Hunter S. Thompson, I decided to buy some of the books I had intended to a long time ago and never did. So in went Catch-22, South of No North, The Cheese Monkeys, and Slaughterhouse-Five. And out I walked looking like a ‘cult classic’ wannabe late to the party.

Slaughterhouse-Five is the first of the four that I’ve read and I find that kind of sad, because now the others have such a high bar to flip towards that surely they’ll trip and stumble. But we’ll wait and see. In any case I, like just about every other person on the planet that has read Vonnegut it seems, found it wonderful. It’s told from the perspective of a man named Billy Pilgrim, who becomes ‘unstuck in time’ following an aeroplane crash in his late life. This leads to a narrative that jumps back and forth throughout a few major settings of his life: his brief experience as a chaplain’s aide in World War II, as a prisoner of war in a Dresden slaughterhouse (number five, giving its title to the book) during the famous firebombing, postwar with his fat, millionaire heiress wife, and as an elder man who spreads the word of his fatalist philosophy, developed as a result of his being kidnapped by an alien race.

As you may have guessed by that last item, there are a couple of science-fiction elements in the book, but not enough that it falls into the dreaded void that might have seen a lot of people ignore it out of their pig-minded refusal to read genre fiction. The literary mechanism of time travel can’t really be called science-fiction, as it there is no grand machine, and it is never known if it occurs only in Billy Pilgrim’s mind. The alien race that picks up Billy and helps him understand his time shifting is unavoidably going to be thought of as sci-fi, but they could just as easily have been a group of monks. So there’s really no reason to be a literature snob, there’s ideas like this in all genre fiction. <backs down off soapbox>

A major theme in the book is the concept of time and space as related to death. The aliens (Tralfamadorians) that help Billy (and display him in a zoo with a porno star, incidentally) can see in the fourth dimension, time, and therefore can visit any point of their life at any time. As a result of their unique sight, they believe that the body exists forever; when a body dies, it merely stops existing in that time and place, but continues to exist in other times and places where it was still alive. This fatalist worldview is something that Billy preaches later in life, which ends up amassing him a public profile that leads to his death at the hands of a revenge-loving fellow slaughterhouse refugee. The famous quote of ‘so it goes’ is the standard response from the Tralfamadorians (and also the narrator) whenever death occurs.

Slaughterhouse-five has been called an anti-war book (in fact, the back cover claims it to be the most famous anti-war book every made, which I find hard to believe), but I think it is more of a comment on the human condition; the way that we operate in ways so perpendicular to what we know is what we want as a result of our modern environment. That it is mostly set in a warzone doesn’t really mean that it is anti-war, I think Vonnegut has used war as an extreme example of the silliness of humankind’s value system. Without sounding like a hippy, I’d recommend it to anyone who thinks that work is life, or that politics is life, or that religion is life. I found it brilliant as a piece of literature, brilliant as a story, and brilliant as a different view on the problem of modern life.

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