“Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade” by Kurt Vonnegut
Meet Billy Pilgrim. He is a WW2 war veteran who becomes “unstuck in time”, where he often compulsively relive random episodes from his traumatizing past.
The narrative of the story follows a nonlinear pattern that jumps back and forth between 3 of his major timelines:
- His time as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany (1944-1945), where he is locked with other prisoners in an underground meat locker called “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
- His postwar, seemingly normal, life in a suburban New York, where he marries a wealthy woman, has children, and become an optometrist.
- Alien abduction (1967) where he was abducted on the night of his daughter’s wedding, and was placed in a glass zoo by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore.
The randomness in the flashbacks and flashforwards are intended to show Billy’s severe PTSD, and shows the readers how it feels to live with it, which resonates with Kurt Vonnegut’s own real-life trauma from witnessing the 1945 Dresden bombing.
And by focusing on the PTSD of the war veteran rather than glorifying the heroics, Vonnegut is sending an anti-war message through this novel. In fact, as hinted in the subtitle of the book “The Children’s Crusade” he also points out that wars are mostly fought by frightened and inexperienced kids, not rugged heroes.
Equally interesting is the Tralfamadorian view, where they believe that all moments from past, present, and future coexist simultaneously. Hence, the phrase “so it goes” that is used repeatedly in this book, which shows an attitude of accepting deaths without being affected by it, because time is an illusion and death is never truly final. This numbness approach to life is also fully adopted by Billy Pilgrim, where he does not try to change anything or escape his fate and instead passively accepts whatever is happening in his life.
If you’re thinking that the Tralfamadorian view looks like more of a coping mechanism for his severe PTSD, it does look that way. Despite Vonnegut intentionally left it ambiguous, the alien race, the abduction, and the sanctuary planet indeed look more like a mental escape invented by Billy.
Especially when Billy doesn’t start to tell about his alien abduction until a year later in 1968, just after surviving a horrific plane crash that killed everyone else except him, and after his wife died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. The massive physical and emotional traumas are likely to worsen the war PTSD and trigger the alien sanctuary, which become the only thing that kept him from completely breaking down.
It can be an eerie novel that is uncomfortable to read at times. But after struggling for over 20 years on how to write it, Vonnegut resorted with plain prose, short sentences, and a dark sense of humor to counter-weight all the horrors. Which left us with a strange lingering after-taste, and a deep empathy towards the fragile, broken, and defenseless Billy.
This is exactly the intention of the book, and this is why it becomes one of the most celebrated anti-war novels of the 20th century.
THE CHAOS THEORY 