Wisdom to Tell: Why ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ Still Matters

Reviewing Kurt Vonnegut’s Classic Anti-War Novel

When Billy Pilgrim is a boy, his father chucks him in the pool to teach him how to swim. As a young chaplain’s assistant in World War Two he’s captured by German soldiers and pressed into grueling conditions aboard a prison train before surviving the firebombing of Dresden, Germany.

After the war, he becomes an optometrist, enters a mental hospital, marries, befriends an unsavory science-fiction author, gets kidnapped by aliens, survives a plane crash, discovers his wife has died in an accident, finds new love, convinces his kids he’s off his rocker, begins a second career as a public speaker, and is knowingly shot by an assassin.

All of this more or less happens in this order. But Billy Pilgrim wouldn’t remember it that way, nor do readers experience it so. That’s because Billy, as Kurt Vonnegut’s narrator explains near the beginning of Slaughterhouse-Five, “has come unstuck in time.” These events all interweave for Billy, the past intruding in the present, the future butting into the past.

Various editions of Slaughterhouse Five, including the original, published by Delacorte in 1969.

“Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun,” the narrator explains. “He is in a constant state of stage fright . . . because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.”

It’s as though Vonnegut took the card deck of typical story structure and shuffled it before dealing out the reader’s hand—but only seemingly so. While Vonnegut chops his narrative in bits, he still offers a through-line with a mostly standard story arch.

Unconventionally Conventional

The novel doesn’t actually begin with the announcement of Billy becoming unstuck in time. That’s chapter 2. The first chapter involves the autobiographical, metafictional tale of how Vonnegut came to write the novel.

Having lived through the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden, Vonnegut always thought he’d write about it. He couldn’t, though he kept working at it and getting nowhere. A moviemaker asked him about it, one of two key expository exchanges that set the stage for the action to come.

“Is it an anti-war book?” the man asks.

“I guess.”

“Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?”

The point, as the narrator explains, is that “there would always be wars . . . they were as easy to stop as glaciers.”

The second exchange involves the wife of a war buddy Vonnegut visits to reminisce about their days in the service, particularly surviving the attack on Dresden. She disapproves and lets him know why: Writers glorify war and thereby perpetuate it. Vonnegut understands and promises her he won’t write that kind of book. He didn’t. Not at all.

Within a few pages we hit the inciting incident—Billy Pilgrim’s curious condition of becoming “unstuck.” All the subsequent action in the nonlinear narrative depends on his ping-ponging through time and space.

It happens in 1944 while leaning against a tree in a Luxembourg forest, pausing amid a wintertime march with three American soldiers disconnected from their larger unit. Billy suddenly lunges ahead in time to his death, then back to the womb, then to his childhood at the bottom of the pool, then to 1965 visiting his mom in a nursing home, then to 1958 to a Little League banquet, then to 1961 and a New Year’s party where he gets disastrously drunk, then back to the tree in the war.

All this back-and-forth could be jarring, but it’s oddly smooth, even subtle, in Vonnegut’s hands except when causing a rattle in readers’ eyeteeth is the point.

Billy, it would seem, suffers from shell shock, what we’d call post-traumatic stress disorder. With his memories scrambled by PTSD, he can’t keep the events of his life straight, and the yo-yoing forms the core of the rising action, including his capture by Germans, experience as a prisoner of war, his postwar marriage and optometry career, plane crash, the threat on his life by a fellow prisoner of war, and his abduction by aliens in a flying saucer from the planet Tralfamadore.

Events build to the climax of the firebombing of Dresden in which tens of thousands of innocents perished, unnecessarily. (Even the aftermath is unjust; witness the American soldier charged with “plunder” and executed for stealing a teapot.) The wild and zig-zagging timeline pushes toward this moment and its aftermath—when the survivors, including Billy, including Vonnegut himself, emerge from their shelter and survey the carnage:

When the Americans and their guards did come out, the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.

In the falling action, which chronologically happens decades later, Billy unsuccessfully tries telling the world about what he learned about life and time when abducted by aliens. And the resolution? Back in Dresden, Billy and the men begin clearing away the rubble and the bodies. Spring comes, and the birds resume their song—curiously offered as a question: “Poo-tee-weet?”

There’s no sense in those syllables, but they’re nonetheless freighted with meaning.

Vonnegut in 1971. Photo by Bernard Gotfryd, Library of Congress.

So It Goes?

Nature, the world itself, is asking humanity what it was all for: the deliberate destruction and death. Vonnegut leaves the weight of answering with the reader but offers us some conceptual equipment to arrive at a conclusion. That’s what Billy’s mental breakdown—with its time shifting and aliens—accomplish.

The nonlinear narrative defuses a clear sense of cause and effect. The relationship between events is associative, not causative, and the associations form from Billy’s spastic bouncing through time.

It’s tempting to explain war and other forms of wanton destruction in terms of who’s at fault, who started it. Vonnegut seems to say that doesn’t matter—or, worse, gives an excuse to glory in the destruction caused in responding because it’s innocent, even righteous. But how can leveling a city like Dresden, killing huge numbers of innocents in the process, be righteous? Leaving aside causation allows Vonnegut to say there’s something fundamentally wrong underneath the whole enterprise of war, no matter who starts it.

But it’s inevitable, right? That’s what the anti-glacier comment at the beginning suggests. And the aliens, too. The bizarre episodes on Tralfamadore where Billy is kept in a zoo under continuous observation with a B-level film star also abducted from Earth essentially serve as chance to address the question of fatalism.

Tralfamadorians experience reality not like a person reading a sentence, learning the meaning as they go, but like a person taking in a picture or a painting; all the information is there in one view. They know the end from the beginning because they see it all at once.

This produces an ironic fatalism Billy, damaged by his experience in the war, ends up embracing. To stave off boredom on his trip to Tralfamadore, Billy asks for something to read. While he can’t read a Tralfamadorian novel, he looks at their layouts, noticing they’re arranged in clusters of symbols.

“We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other,” the aliens explain.

There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

That’s one thing for a work of art; it’s another for life itself: Billy discovers that the Tralfamadorians know how the world ends. “We blow it up,” they explain, “experimenting with new fuel for our flying saucers. A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears.”

Billy objects. “If you know this,” he says, “isn’t there some way you can prevent it? Can’t you keep the pilot from pressing the button?”

“He has always pressed it, and he always will,” they explain. “We alwayslet him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.” Billy asks if that’s how war on Earth is, too. “Of course,” they say. Death is just part of how the world is structured, a point the narrator makes by slipping in the phrase “so it goes” whenever someone dies. It appears more than a hundred times in the book.

Single-line portrait of Kurt Vonnegut by Xandriss.

But is that answer satisfactory?

Wisdom to Tell

Later when Billy talks with a historian about the bombing of Dresden, the historian says “it had to be done.” Billy agrees. “Everybody has to do exactly what he does,” he says. “I learned that on Tralfamadore.” But there are at least two moments when this fatalism is challenged.

Before he’s abducted by the Tralfamadorians, Billy’s spastic sense of time allows him to watch a movie in reverse. It’s a war movie, the kind loathed by the wife of Vonnegut’s war buddy. But in reverse the movie tells a different story. It’s one of my favorite passages in the book. Here’s a piece:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crew-men. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

The narrator traces the story further back, following the bombs back to America where they’re dismantled and broken down into their constituent minerals and stored in the earth for safekeeping, “so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”

The point? Someone had to choose to take those minerals out of the ground and use them for their destructive ends. Someone has to decide to wage war, to kill. And where there’s a choice, there’s a chance for change—which leads to the second challenge to fatalism.

Long after the war, Billy sits at Lions Club meeting when a guest speaker, a Marine, gives a talk about the Vietnam War and the need to increase U.S. bombing efforts. Billy doesn’t protest despite his own experience of carnage in Dresden. No, the narrator explains that Billy, as an optometrist keeps a sign in his office, the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.”

Unfortunately for Billy, he feels powerless. “Among the things Billy Pilgrim couldn’t change were the past, present, or future,” says the narrator. But what about us? The point of Slaughterhouse-Five isn’t resignation in the face of evil. Billy isn’t a hero.

Near the end of the novel, Billy sees the prayer again, this time engraved on a locket worn by his companion, the actress, in the Tralfamadorian zoo. “The wisdom always to tell the difference.” Vonnegut is putting us in Billy’s seat, something he says he’s going to do at the beginning of the story, where he says with what words the story will end: that bird’s question, “Poo-tee-weet?”

Vonnegut’s telling us readers there’s a quiz at the end of his “beautiful and surprising and deep” novel. The question still matters. So do our answers.

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Slaughterhouse-Five is book No. 7 in my classic novel goal for 2024. Here’s what I’ve read so far and what’s in store for the rest of the year.

• January: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• February: Alice Walker, The Color Purple

• March: Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

• April: Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha

• May: Chuang Hua, Crossings

• June: Willa Cather, My Àntonia

• July: Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

• August: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat

• September: Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

• October: Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

• November: George Eliot, Middlemarch

• December: Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying

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