Review of Slaughterhouse Five

What a beautiful concept this author introduced — simple yet so devastatingly poignant. I read this book several times years ago, which reveals how much I was affected. It’s also on my dirty dozen list: the books I embarrassingly hide because pages are bent, covers torn, and bindings frayed to the point of falling apart. 

Written by Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Slaughterhouse-Five is a thinly disguised autobiography using a narrator to share the story, “more or less,” of the author’s World War 11 experience through the eyes of the main character, Billy Pilgrim. When Billy is captured by Germans, he and several other prisoners are delivered to the City of Dresden for forced labor and billeted at a converted, half underground, former slaughterhouse. But an extended Allied bombing raid between February 13-15, 1945 rains down percussion-like thuds, dust shaking booms, and brilliant flashes of light and fire, igniting horrific firestorms outside. After three terrifying days and nights, the prisoners and guards emerge into the steaming ash and rubble pile of a once vibrant city that the air force had turned into a crematorium. 

PTSD fractures Billy’s perception of reality, and the narrator guides us through a non-linear, time-traveling tale, from Billy’s time as a war dodging chaplain assistant in South Carolina, to his getting harassed by fellow soldiers in Europe, to a painful future with his wife and child, to an asylum, and to a series of events and characters who will show up in other Vonnegut novels, like Eliot Rosewater and the ever-present author Kilgore Trout.

One moment, in particular, though, strikes a deep chord. Billy is sitting in his den, a powerless observer watching a bombing raid unfold on television until something clicks. He imagines what would happen to a damned City like Dresden if he replays a carpet bombing in reverse. The fleeing planes return, flying backward. The rubble reignites into massive bursts of light, fire, and dust before the explosions curl in upon themselves and flame out. The once devastated buildings knit themselves together, rooftop penetrating bombs rocket back into the sky to be caught by the retreating bombers. The planes, flying backward, land and then workers unload the bombs into trucks. The trucks drive backward to a series of factories where hardworking men and women tear the bombs into pieces before merciless machines reprocess the metal into ore. The ore is then backloaded onto trucks, driven backward to open-pit mines, and dumped into deep pits. Large machines backfill the earth, and the plants and birds return, and Billy can make everything whole again.

———

All of us suffer loss, but we don’t have to be owned by it. We can feel whole again, or at least, love the beautiful moments when they arise, and feel hope. While longing for the ability to reverse tragic moments remains, at least we can learn lessons from consequences. Is war worth any gain? 

It’s a beautiful concept. 

Kurt Vonnegut Jr writes Slaughterhouse-five in his brilliantly nutty, science-fiction infused style. It’s an odd book, but that’s what makes it an original (and why I love it). Embedded within this quirky tale of a man surviving PTSD and decrying war (it does include the Tralfamadorian aliens — I’m giving you a head’s up; this is Kurt Vonnegut Jr, after all) lies some poignant truths that hit home. 

It may move you.

Check it out.