Slaughterhouse 3

I probably read this book not long after it came out, early 70’s, I know I’d read it before seeing the film in ‘76. Hadn’t re-read the book until now. Only found out about the graphic novel couple months ago. Can’t remember what spurred my new interest in Vonnegut. And not on google but on my local library system, which not only was where I discovered the graphic novel, but also that they had a DVD of the movie, which I never expected to see again. Then the idea sprung forth to experience all three and write about it. Wondering about the differences of media, adaptation versus creation.

1: The Novel

“All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.” So begins Slaughter House Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death. The title page has a longer explanation, ending in “This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from.”

The novel is about Billy Pilgrim, WWII preacher’s assistant, POW and witness to the fire-bombing of Dresden, who becomes a successful optometrist and is kidnapped by aliens from Tralfamadore. Did that abduction actually happen? These aliens see time as a continuum, with all of one’s life available. “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time,” tells you all you need to know of the structure of the telling.

The book’s other key phrase, oft repeated, usually when someone dies or something else unexpected happens, is “so it goes.”

Giving a plot synopsis tells you little about the experience of this novel. Vonnegut is an amazing writer, in terms of his skill with language, the full-bore creativity of the contents, and how it’s told.

The novel itself is a bit unstuck in time. The story of Billy’s war experience is told fairly sequentially, his other life experiences get threaded in and out, giving the feeling of a sudden change in tv channels. This is how Billy’s mind /existence zips around. When he goes to another time he is not watching but living it. One channel is Billy’s life on Tralfamadore, where he lives in a transparent dome with movie actress Montana Wildhack under constant observation. As a reader, I get used to the jumping around (more of the book is in WWII than out of it), feeling a little disoriented, as Billy might. In part a comment on how contemporary society—even back in the late 60’s when this book was written—also keeps jumping around, with unexpected sudden confusions, surprising deja vus and history repeating.

How does one categorize this book? As it contains extra-terrestrials and time travel, a science fiction label seems obvious. But those elements are just tools for Vonnegut’s story-telling, implying that our view of reality can be as speculative as any sci fi novel.

Above all (and who’s to say a novel can’t be in more than one category) it’s an anti-war novel, published in ’69 when the Vietnam War was hot and heavy. The bombing of Dresden and the resulting firestorm destroyed more than 1,600 acres of the city center. Up to 25,000 people were killed. There’s still controversy on whether this attack was necessary. By February 13^th of 1945, when the Dresden bombing started, the German army was well-depleted and getting hammered on the Russian front. Germany surrendered less than 3 months later. A historian character in the novel compares Dresden with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Billy’s war experiences are often bleak, but described fairly journalistically. Vonnegut shows how cruel Americans can be to each other when stressed in survival mode. Billy is short and emaciated, dressed in theatrical hand-me-downs, making him stand out like a target. I’m reminded of the movie King of Hearts, a French anti-war film that came out three years before this book did. Vonnegut balances war’s horrors with aliens, social commentary, quirky characters and “so it goes,” which can be intoned a variety of ways.

This book is also a satire of the American dream, the post-WWII lifestyle. There are many laughs at different levels here, from cheap puns to razor irony. As Billy and the other Americans are about to be sent to Dresden, one of the British POWs who’s staying, says “You needn’t worry about bombs, by the way. Dresden is an open city. It is undefended and contains no war industries or troop concentrations of any import.” So it goes.

This is also a novel about novels, about how to tell a story. The first chapter is in first person, a nameless writer who was in Dresden during the bombing (as Vonnegut himself was), wrote a non-fiction book about it, and later wrote a novel, which is the rest of this book (he comes back to first person in the last chapter.) The narrator and Billy cross paths on the way to and in Dresden. Whose story is this?

A couple other writer characters show up here, including the sci fi write Kilgore Trout (who appears in other Vonnegut books, and was pseudonym for a parodic sci fi novel Vonnegut wrote.) Kurt’s playing with the idea of authorship. One of Trout’s novels involves aliens with an alternative Gospel, with lines like “Before you kill somebody, make absolutely certain he isn’t well-connected.”

There’s so much going on in this novel, done with such a casual voice that belies Vonnegut’s mastery.  I’m sure countless analyses and theses have been done on it. One could get unstuck in this novel. The complexity just makes it richer. It’s a brilliant display of the writer’s craft, of one man’s multi-dimensional creativity, and a reminder of how terrible war (& human stupidity/short-sightedness) can be.