Day 7: Slaughterhouse Five

I just finished Slaughterhouse Five yesterday. I guess if one had to summarize in one sentence, that person would most likely say that it was an anti-war book about freewill. But, it's really about the lack of freewill, isn't it. Billy Pilgrim, the main character "becomes unstuck in time" and travels around to all sorts of moments in his life, but he does not choose to do this. He time travels at random moments to other random moments. Were he to want to time travel, I'm pretty sure that he would not want to continually go back to his experiences during WWII, especially Dresden (pre and post bombing). This book, an accumulation of random moments of Billy Pilgrim's life, are all connected somehow by Dresden and his experiences there. This is also where the book gets its anti-war flavor. A second name for WWII/Dresden within this book is "The Children's Crusade" due to the tragic nature of the war and the war's main characters (youths). In the beginning of the main story, Vonnegut explains that the first and last phrase of the book will be "Billy has become unstuck in time" and "Too-weet-tee." In this way, he gives a frame to the story since the beginning, middle, and end do not fall in that order. Billy dies somewhere in the middle, in fact.

There is also an intrusive and omniscient narrator. The first chapter itself is from the narrator's point of view, told in first person and also involving the narrator's experiences in the war--Dresden itself. It almost seems like an imbedded story since we begin with the narrator's story and then he tells the story of another man which is, in fact, a book that he is writing. During Billy Pilgrim's story you read "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book." The narrator was present with Billy during the war and in some very particular scenes.

"So it goes" is also a saying that is repeated many times throughout the story. It is an ironic statement involving death. I suppose it is a way of saying "who cares?" or "whatever." This seems odd since the book is so anti-war and there is a strong stance against the deaths of all those people in Dresden. "Who cares?" does that really fit? I suppose that is why it is an ironic statement. I think it could also really surround the Tralfamodorians' view on death: that the person is just in a bad moment at that point of their life but that they will remain to live on in moments of the past, present, and future. The "it" could really be the image of the person at that moment...so the moment goes, so it leaves, so it changes.

One more thing: was Billy really abducted by aliens? It does put an odd twist on the book and really cement the fact that it is about the lack of freewill since the Tralfamadorians state that all moments are "structured" and occurred the way they will always occur. However, if one reads closely, one can see that many of the things that occur or are present during his descriptions of Tralfamadore are things that readers have encountered before in the book. For example, the saying on the locket of Montana was found elsewhere, and the entire "zoo situation" was in one of the books that Billy Pilgrim had read. Was he or was he not taken by aliens to live in a zoo? I suppose I shall leave you with this. It sort of reminds me of Pan's Labryinth.

~S