Slaughterhouse Five

Finding books for Belonging is taking me to books I never would otherwise read. Sitting half read on my pile, for instance, is Robinson Crusoe: a book I found interesting, yet unengaging. The books 300 year old prose means that while the concepts and plot are good, deep reading is required to parse the words themselves.

But today's blogpost is about a much more recent book: Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five.

This book has affected me in a way books rarely do; it has the rare quality of making a reader lose all faith in humanity. It is written simply, clinically, and - in my mind most disturbingly - with a unceasing, unfailing sense of detachment.

The book's plot is on two main levels. The first, and main, is the Everyman Protagonist Billy Pilgrim. Billy, a soldier in WWII who is entirely unsuited to warfare, recounts the story of how he became a prisoner of war, his time in the POW camp, and how he eventually makes his way as indentured labour to the peaceful, non-military city of Dresden. While staying in an abandoned Abattoir - the titular Slaughterhouse Five - Dresden is bombed by the Allies. 135,000 people die. So it goes.

The second level of the plot is also about Billy Pilgrim, but this is Billy Pilgrim after the war. Billy is 'unstuck in time.' He travels in time along his own personal timeline. He talks about his life before the war and after - when he becomes a reasonably successful optometrist and business owner. He cries himself to sleep, and constantly reminisces about the days of Dresden, and the deaths there. So it goes.

Those words are important. They are mentioned everytime something dies, or some horrible brutality takes place. They signal the true message of the book: that actions are meaningless in a world where fate is predecided, and that on a deep level, you cannot really control your own destiny. Characters do brutal things for petty reasons. Let me quote you the story of Lazzaro's dog.

When he was gone, Lazzaro promised Billy that he was going to have revenge, and that revenge was sweet.
"It's the sweetest thing there is," said Lazzaro. "People fuck with me," he said, "and Jesus Christ are they ever fucking sorry. I laugh like hell. I don't care if its a guy or a dame. If the President of the United States fucked around with me, I'd fix him good. You should have seen what I did to a dog one time."
"A dog?" said Billy.
"Son of a bitch bit me. So I got me some steak, and I got me the spring out of a clock. I cut that spring up in little pieces. I put points on the ends of the pieces. They were sharp as razor blades. I stuck 'em into the steak - way inside. And I went past where the dog was tied up. He wanted to bite me again. I said to him, 'Come on doggie - let's be friends. Let's not be enemies no more. I'm not mad.' He believed me."
"He did?"
"I threw him the steak. He swallowed it down in one big gulp. I waited around for ten minutes." Now Lazzaro's eyes twinkled. "Blood started coming out of its mouth. He started crying, and he rolled on the ground, as though the knives were on the outside of him instead of on the inside of him. Then he tried to bite out his own insides. I laughed, and I said to him, 'You've got the right idea now. Tear your own guts out boy. That's me in there with all those knives.' "
So it goes.

So it goes indeed. For the whole novel. None of the brutalities are as vicious as this one, which is why this one stuck with me. But what struck me more is the sheer fatalism of the piece.

The narrator reports everything as fact: uncondoning and uncondemning. Hundreds of tiny, meaningless tragedies pepper the novel, each followed with that phrase of total, despairing resignation to fate. So it goes. So it goes. So it goes. On and on and on and on.

The fact that the main character is a time traveller means that he cannot actually change anything about his past. He is more or less forced to watch his life fly past from the back seat. He marries an ugly, boring, but rich woman - not from love or even affection, but that's because what he does in the future, so that is how it goes. He lives his whole life in the post-traumatic shadow of Dresden, and the barbarity that took place there. But he cannot not go to Dresden, because that is how it goes.

This is a man so detached from the quandries of life, death, free will, and fate that the facts he reports to the reader are just that: not events, not markers, not lives or deaths or anything of the sort. Just facts. This man died. So it goes. That man was maimed, and succumbed to infection. So it goes. The city of Dresden - a town with no military presence, or strategic importance, was firebombed on the 13th of February, 1945. So it goes. One hundred and thirty-five men, women and children die. So it goes. The aftermath looks like the surface of the moon with not a single building standing intact. So it goes. Through all this ruin, one prisoner of war loots a teapot. In the face of all the devastation around them, the German soldiers take time to try and execute by firing squad this old, tired schoolteacher. So it goes. Billy Pilgrim digs the grave, only to find people already buried beneath. So it goes.

It is another proof of the fact that the English HSC is designed to make people commit suicide. Billy Pilgrim doesn't belong anywhere. He doesn't belong in the War, he doesn't belong with his wife, he doesn't belong in this world because of his time travelling and the only other place he visits - an alien world - he finds happiness there. Happiness as a zoo exhibit in a cage, stared at by aliens who can move along their timelines totally at will.

I don't really know what more to say. He follows around a washed-up science fiction writer. He comes out about his time-traveling the year his wife dies, and his daughter has him institutionalised. But that isn't what the book is about. The book is about Post Traumatic Stress, and it is very good at delivering it. I could rate this all the stars in the night sky, but I don't know if that's the point of this book. You aren't supposed to like it. It is humanity through a looking glass, and anyone who likes what they see is insane.

So instead of calling it good, I will call it powerful. It is a powerful plea against war, brutality without cause, and especially brutality when the cause is not good enough.