Cover Letter

This essay started off as a blog post titled Climax of Slaughterhouse-Five. That blog

post focused on how the organization of the book left the reader with an incomplete story to

represent the missing stories of the people who died in the war. As I outlined this paper, I

realized that I wanted to address the lifelong effects war has on soldiers. I struggled to decide

which point I wanted to focus on more: the casualties of war or mental health of participants.

During the peer review process, I was informed I needed to be more focused, so I decided to

focus on the soldiers and mention the casualties of war in that context. I also made the paper

easier to read for people who had not read the book. Another peer review helped me to fix

awkward sentence structures and make the essay relate more strongly to my claim throughout.

Overall, this essay highlights how Vonnegut uses literary technique just as much as the story to

express the immorality of war.

Foster Solomon

Dr. Holt

Science Fiction 12

8 December 2017

No End to War

Sometimes breaking the rules makes more sense than following them. Namely, books

have a beginning, a middle, and an end, in that order. Kurt Vonnegut chooses to make

Slaughterhouse-Five an exception to that rule, allowing him to forgo other typical literary

practices. For example, he labels the prologue Chapter 1, writes in first person even though he

is not the main character, and uses text breaks when the same scene or thought continues. Still,

the most significant abnormality is the lack of a major climax. Vonnegut builds up to a big

finale, but there never is one, resulting in a sense that there is more to the story than is possible to

discover. The story of war is never complete for soldiers, who will always remember the lives

lost, as the world also should.

Foreshadowing makes the absence of culmination of the story all the more apparent. A

chronological summary of Billy Pilgrims life is given at the beginning of the book. The rest of

the book expands on that summary, but in the order that Billy experienced it, jumping from time

to time as a stream of consciousness would move from memory to memory. The reader is never

in suspense waiting to know what will happen he or she already knows so they want to know

how and why it happens. Vonnegut only gives brief descriptions or focuses on small, seemingly

unimportant details similar to the details people remember from traumatic experiences so the

reader never fully understands how the event happened.

 Chapter 1 first introduces the reader to the ending as Vonnegut tells his war buddy

Bernard V. OHare about the book he wants to write:

I think the climax of the book will be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby, I said.

The irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of

people are killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for

taking a teapot. And he's given a regular trial, and then he's shot by a firing squad.

(Vonnegut 6)

Whereas a traditional book would employ vague foreshadowing and then use Edgar Derbys

death as a suspenseful climax, instead it is continually mentioned through the rest of the book: at

his introduction, in the prison hospital, on Billys honeymoon, again in the prison hospital, etc.

Now the reader expects a dramatic scene with every detail of the minutes leading up to Derbys

death, but there never is. Only a brief paragraph informs the reader that Derby has died. After all

the time spent foreshadowing Derbys death, the reader feels like there must be more to the story

than just that.

The bombing of Dresden compares to Derbys death in its foreshadowing to description

ratio. The book finishes with the most momentous event of Billys life, an event foreshadowed

by the majority of the book, but only describes it briefly, omitting how it actually happens.

Vonnegut could have made the bombing one, huge, noteworthy climax, but spread it out in short

pieces throughout the last few chapters, making the recount of the actual bombing seem very

short and concise. Billys time in Dresden is interspersed with experiences from other times in

his life, preventing a successive timeline and refusing a sense of completion for the reader, just

as soldiers are refused a sense of completion.

 Vonnegut informs the reader at the end of the first chapter that the book will end with

Poo-tee-weet?, but that in no way prepares the reader for the book to end (Vonnegut 28).

Although Vonneguts story is complete, Slaughterhouse-Five doesnt feel complete. Instead of

the story drawing a line between a starting point and an ending point, the book is structured like

an ascending, widening spiral one that can not stop (Allen). When the book ends, readers are

left to keep climbing, and they have to discover what all of this means to them without

Vonneguts assistance.

If told chronologically, the story could have definite beginning and end, but time follows

Tralfamadorian rules in Slaughterhouse-Five. The aliens from the book live in the fourth

dimension, so they can see that everything happened, so the order doesnt matter. As the pages

run out, the falling action and resolution that usually conclude a book have already occurred, and

the climax was split into sections scattered through several chapters. The book is like a puzzle

that hasnt been put together yet. Since all the pieces are there, a Tralfamadorian would be able

to see the whole picture, but a human can only see pieces. Although the reader has the entire

story, it is difficult to see the story as a whole. Therefore the reader cant place the events in a

way that gives the book a true end.

Vonnegut had outlined the Dresden story many times on one end of the wallpaper was

the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and then there was all that middle part,

which was the middle. (Vonnegut 6) In those outlines, the end was going home after the war,

which is only described in the first chapter from Vonneguts standing, never from Billys.

However, just telling the story of the events of the war was not enough to fully explain the

bombing of Dresden. The later effects of the bombing on the survivors lives also contributes to
the story, like when Billy admitted himself to a mental institute. The continued pain caused by

Dresden could not be expressed in a story with an ending.

Therefore, Vonnegut chose to use the human inability to see time as a whole to share

every part of his story, but make sure that the reader keeps thinking about the issues he

presented, lives lost in war and the survivors who will never be the same. He needed each event

to show The Childrens Crusade, but concluding the story would make his experience

something of the past (Vonnegut 19). For Billy Pilgrim, the war always wages on as he jumps

through time because, as Tralfamadorians say, he is always in the war and he always will be,

along with Roland Weary, Edgar Derby, Kurt Vonnegut, Bernard V. OHare, Paul Lazzaro, and

every other soldier. The story of war never ends for them, so it should never end for the reader.

No true complete story of a war will ever exist, and Vonnegut does not want the reader to

think that this story is the only one. Each person who died in World War Two could have written

a book about what they went through in the war, but never will. Each of the 135,000 people who

were killed in the bombing of Dresden had their own infinitely complex life that ultimately lead

to them being one of 135,000 nameless people who will never say anything or want anything

ever again. (Vonnegut 24)

Soldiers see the nameless people. As Billy hears the bombs raining down on Dresden, he

thinks of all the people that hes seen that are being killed: the guards who had gone home to

their families, the showering girls he had walked in on, and everyone in the neighborhood near

the soldiers. The soldiers who have already suffered through the physical pain of war are sent

home to remember the lives of the people who died, whether they are fellow soldiers, enemy

soldiers, or civilians. With so many people killed, there is no limit to how different the world
could be if they had survived, and the soldiers are the only ones who can even begin to

comprehend the world of possibility that vanishes when a mass murder happens.

Slaughterhouse-Five has no conclusion because Vonnegut knows he does not have the

right to conclude the bombing of Dresden. The story has no end. The absence of chronology

allows him to leave the reader without the satisfaction of knowing it is all over because it never

is. Too many parts are left unreported and can never be reported, and those who experienced it

will never stop experiencing it. Vonnegut wanted the reader to understand that this still happens;

war still happens; innocent people die for being born in the wrong place; young people continue

to die as expendable soldiers. In Billys life and the real world, So it goes. (Vonnegut 125)
 Works Cited

Allen, William Rodney. The Use of Time in Slaughterhouse-Five. Slaughterhouse-

Five, Chelsea House, 2006. Bloom's Literature,

online.infobase.com/HRC/Search/Details/1937?q=slaughterhouse five. Accessed 28 Nov. 2017.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-five, Or, the Children's Crusade: A Duty-dance with

Death. Dial Press trade pbk. ed., New York, Dial Press, 2009.