Slaughterhouse-Five

KURT VONNEGUT

A- Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death is a

1969 novel by Kurt Vonnegut. One of his most popular works and widely regarded as a
classic, it combines science fiction elements with an analysis of the human condition from
an uncommon perspective, using time travel as a plot device. It is a postmodernits antiwar
novel a historical fiction a science fiction and a semi-autobiographical fiction.
The novel is based on Kurt Vonnegut's own experience in World War II. In the novel, a
prisoner of war witnesses and survives the Allied forces' firebombing of Dresden. Vonnegut,
like his pro-tagonist Billy Pilgrim, emerged from a meat locker beneath a slaughter-house
into the moonscape of burned-out Dresden. His surviving captors put him to work finding,
burying, and burning bodies. His task continued until the Russians came and the war
ended.Slaughterhouse-Five treats one of the most horrific massacres in European history
the World War II firebombing of Dresden, a city in eastern Germany, on February 13, 1945
with mock-serious humor and clear antiwar sentiment.
Slaughterhouse-Five spans the life of a man who has "come unstuck in time." It is the story
of Billy Pilgrim experiencing different time periods of his life, most notably his experience in
World War II and his relationship with his family. The book is a series of seemingly random
happenings that, in combination, present the thematic elements of the novel in an
unraveling order.
Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death by Kurt
Vonnegut, a fourth-generation German-American now living in Cape Cod, who, as an
American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire-bombing
of Dresden, Germany, "The Florence of the Elbe," a long time ago, and survived to tell the
tale. The short title, "Slaughterhouse-Five," refers to the slaughterhouse) in which the main
character, Billy Pilgrim, stays as a prisoner of war in Dresden during the firebombing.
Vonnegut offers an alternative title for this book: The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance
With Death. The narrator explains that the first part of the subtitle in the first chapter is a
reference to the Children's Crusade of the 13th century, in which children were sold as
slaves

[[Chaplain's Assistant Billy Pilgrim, a disoriented, ill-trained American soldier, is captured by

the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. He arrived in France just as the Germans defeat his
unit; they had no time to issue him combat kit and a weapon. The Germans then imprison
him and other PoWs in a disused slaughterhouse in Dresden. During Allied air raids, PoWs
and guards hide in a deep cellar, because of that, they are of the few survivors of the city-
destroying firestorm. For unexplained reasons, Billy has become "frozen in time", perhaps
because of the slight brain damage he suffered in surviving an airplane crash. He meets
and is kidnapped by extraterrestrial aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who exhibit him in
a zoo, with movie star Montana Wildhack as his mate. The Tralfamadorians see in four
dimensions, the fourth dimension being time. Already, the Tralfamadorians have seen every
instant of their lives, believing they cannot choose to change anything about their fates, but
can choose to concentrate upon any moment in their lives. Billy travels in time,
uncontrolled by him, reliving occasions of his lives, real and fantastic, giving him constant
stage fright, because he never knows to what life occasion he will next travel. He spends
time on Tralfamadore; in Dresden; in the War, walking in deep snow before his German
capture; his post-war, whitebread, married life in 1950s U.S.A.; and the moment of his
murder. Moreover, by the time of his murder, Billy has adopted Tralfamadorian fatalism,
granting him personal peace, and communicates it to people, and so becoming popular
throughout the Earth.]]

B Slaughterhouse-Five opens with the narrator offering a narrative of the novel's genesis,
ending with a discussion of the beginning and end of the novel. The "story proper" thus
begins with chapter two although there is no reason to assume that the opening chapter is
not also fictional. This technique may seem unusual, but is common to postmodern meta-
fiction. The story itself purports to be a disjointed and discontinuous narrative, following
Billy's point of view "unstuck in time." While Vonnegut's work commonly contains such
disorder, it should be noted that the narrative of this novel does follow the trajectory set
out in the opening chapter. Vonnegut's prose style is comprised of short, declarative
sentences, which contribute to the sense that this narrative is the simple reporting of fact.
The novel employs the refrain "So it goes" when death, dying or mortality appear in the
narrative, as a transitional phrase to another subject, as a reminder, and as comic relief. It
is also used to explain the unexplained. There are 106 "so it goes" anecdotes laced
throughout the novel.
As a representative postmodern text, the novel is metafictional. The first chapter of the
book is not about Billy Pilgrim, but a preface about how Vonnegut came to write
Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut apologizes for the fact that the novel is "so short and
jumbled and jangled" and explains that this is because "there is nothing intelligent to say
about a massacre."
The author narrates in both first and third person. The first-person sections are confined
mainly to the first and last chapters. The narration is omniscient: it reveals the thoughts
and motives of several characters, and provides details about their lives and some analysis
of their motivations. The narrator primarily follows Billy Pilgrim but also presents the point
of view of other characters whom Billy encounters. The narrator's tone is familiar and
ironic, and he uncovers touches of dark humor and absurdity that do not diminish the
lyrical and emotional power of the material.
As major themes the novel explores the ideas of fate, free will, the illogical nature of
humans and. the destructiveness of war. The main character is "unstuck in time," meaning
that he experiences the events of his life in a seemingly random order, with no idea which
part of life he will "visit" next. As a result, his life does not end with death; rather, he
repeatedly experiences his own death before its time and this experience is often
intermingled with other experiences.
The concept of free will is questioned in this novel by Billy Pilgrim. His assertions that there
is no free will is confirmed by a Tralfamadorian, who says, "I've visited thirty-one inhabited
planets in the universe... Only on Earth is there any talk of free will". This device is central
to Vonnegut's belief that the vast majority of humanity is completely inconsequential; that
is, they do what they do because they must.
MOTIFS So it goes = the phrase So it goes follows every mention of death in the
novel, equalizing all of them, whether they are natural, accidental, or intentional, and
whether they occur on a massive scale or on a very personal one.
the presence of the narrator as a character = Vonnegut frames his novel with
chapters in which he speaks in his own voice about his experience of war. This decision
indicates that the fiction has an intimate connection with Vonnegut's life and convictions.
SYMBOLS The bird who says Poo-tee-weet? = The jabbering bird symbolizes the lack of
anything intelligent to say about war. Birdsong rings out alone in the silence after a
massacre, and Poo-tee-weet? seems about as appropriate a thing to say as any, since no
words can really describe the horror of the Dresden firebombing.
the colors blue and ivory = These cold, corpselike hues suggest the fragility of
the thin membrane between life and death, between worldly and otherworldly experience.