I share interesting things I’ve read/watched on Sundays and publish an essay, story, or book review on Wednesdays. This is a book review of Slaughterhouse-Five.
There is a lot to say about Slaughterhouse-Five, but I am going to begin briefly with the author, whose name makes eyes pop out of sockets and foam shoot out of mouths. In conversation, normally, I am the one to reach this state of rabid enthusiasm; but when the conversation turns to Vonnegut, the roles reverse. Since it is unpleasant to be calm in the face of violent raptures, over the years I have relied on a simple strategy: when they say he is funny, I declare him hilarious; when they say he is fantastic, I insist there has never been anyone better. Like a politician, I take whatever they give me, dribble it, pass it back bigger—all to avoid them biting me. But I have always found these theatrics bothersome because, often, the delirious speaker is a friend or family member with tastes similar to mine, and, to make matters worse, I cannot dismiss Vonnegut as one of those authors critics exalt because of their pretentiousness; he doesn’t even use semicolons. For this reason, selfishly, I chose Slaughterhouse-Five for the book club, hoping that his magnum opus—widely considered one of the greatest novels ever—would convert me. And, in a sense, it did: I still reserve a natural coolness for him, unlike my fervor for Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Maugham, Salinger, Chekov, Murakami, and others; but, finally, I understand why he is so beloved and revered.
From the outset, the novel proves that Vonnegut succeeded in the impossible task of creating his own version of modern English. Salman Rushdie described his language as “whistling”—as good a word as any—though I think that an image of a shiny silver starship with large screws is more apt: the novelist’s other-worldly concepts shape his quirky prose and link it to science-fiction as inextricably as Hemingway’s curt language is to masculinity and Fitzgerald’s florid language is to romance. He creates his genre-defining style by hunting for unusual terminology—snootful, scrofula, festooned, jazzed and jangled—and ignoring the dictionaries altogether when it doesn’t exist—bitchy flibbertigibbet, Tralfamadorian. Even in the whirlwind of his inventiveness, we consistently come in contact with his mastery of writing fundamentals: in the first chapter, he demonstrates it directly as he tells us the emotionally evocative story of how the book came to be; through the rest of the novel, we feel it through his poignant juxtaposition, and, of course, the unforgettable repetition that defines the work. His language is as poetic as it is singular:
An unseen hand turned a master valve. Out of the showerheads gushed scalding rain. The train was a blowtorch that did not warm. It jazzed and jangled Billy’s skin without thawing the ice in the marrow of his long bones.
The Americans’ clothes were meanwhile passing through poison gas. Body lice and bacteria and fleas were dying by the billions. So it goes.
And Billy zoomed back in time to his infancy. He was a baby who had just been bathed by his mother. Now his mother wrapped him in a towel, carried him into a rosy room that was filled with sunshine. She unwrapped him, laid him on the tickling towel, powdered him between his legs, joked with him, patted his little jelly belly. Her palm on his little jelly belly made potching sounds.
Bill gurgled and cooed.
This originality is matched by a steadfast authenticity, which gives the reader the sense that his writing is entirely representative of his identity. When one reads, he develops a relationship with the writer; thus, as we do with potential friends, we look for signs of deception and pretense. In Vonnegut’s case, there is none to be found: his style runs through his novels, through his natural speaking voice, through his appearance. Just as one imagines a big shirtless hairy-chested Hemingway brandishing two dukes, the mind draws up Vonnegut as he turns out to be: crouched over a typewriter with unruly hair and a bristly moustache. He does not deceive us, not even a little, and the reader feels that he knows him as well as an eccentric uncle who shows up late to Thanksgiving dinner with whiskey on his breath and a pocket full of strange stories.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut applies his remarkable voice to a fictitious world, which allows him to convey realities more effectively than if he gave a strict literal account. Novels are important because they provide a different path to reaching resonant philosophical and emotional truths, and although there are powerful firsthand accounts of war, plenty of veterans specifically mention Slaughterhouse-Five as the book that best captures its horrors, which reminds me of one of Hemingway’s famous quotes:
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.
Central to creating this effect are the aliens that have a different perception of time, which allows the reader to understand war’s grotesque indifference to human life. The concept strips the novel of the romance that Fitzgerald, who wanted to die overseas, pined for, and Hemingway espoused in much of his work; yet it allows him to feel the palpable tragedy that also exists in their works, devoid of any beauty, and to convey the apathy behind the disposal of millions of young lives. Prior to World War I, men viewed battle as a spiritual calling, but after its atrocities the sentiment started to turn. The brutality of World War II, which the novel focuses on, completely shifted the public’s attitude, later resulting in the protests against the Vietnam War and our strongly-felt repugnance for its successors. We now understand that the callous disregard for human life underpinning war is the ironic Tralfamadorian perspective:
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamordoians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’
The entire novel is shaped by how Vonnegut plays with the fourth dimension, and Billy Pilgrim becoming unstuck in time does a tremendous amount of work for the reader. At one level, the concept could be related to the experience of PTSD; at another, it speaks to the lack of human free will; at another, it encourages presence and equanimity with regards to fleeting moments; at another, it fosters a sense of nostalgia through the prospect of revisiting beautiful memories; and, at yet another, it renders insouciance regarding death. Most novels operate within the bounds of human experience, but by opening the doors to other possibilities we can see how confined and warped our perspective is; for the entirety of the novel, we acquire a new mode of operating outside of our current senses.
Since war is a subject of perennial relevance, the vantage point Vonnegut makes accessible to us is one worth repeatedly returning to. Violence is a common aspect of human life that we may never escape, and Slaughterhouse-Five is a work that we can use to remember timeless truths, which is why, in a world with a declining readership, the novel continues to sell, roughly, 125,000 copies each year. This book contains an entirely new way of understanding a subject as core to the human condition as love and pain, which gives it as unwavering weight and pertinence as any in the literary canon. Today, for those of us who are not experiencing bombs bursting overhead, it is especially significant to remind ourselves of the realities on the ground in war-torn regions—most notably Ukraine and Russia, but also Afghanistan, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and more. All over the world, we are sending children out to die.
So, even though I am still not a full-fledged member of the Vonnegut cult, I vehemently recommend reading Slaughterhouse-Five for its originality, language, and, most importantly, its singular viewpoint on the babies, on the young lives ending early, on the sunny hopes of a few years ago that will be vanquished, all for, for, for what?
I put off reading this post for way too long because Vonnegut is a top-three author for me (Hesse and Clarke are the other two in no particular order), and wanted to give it my full attention. I think you've done a very good job of highlighting Vonnegut's special appeal. He is high-brow masquerading as low-brow kinda like Joseph Heller but with more fart jokes. If you are continuing to ride the Vonnegut train, there are frankly no disappointing options, but I recommend "Sirens of Titan" if you enjoy those soft-scifi elements, and "Breakfast of Champions" as my personal favorite of his work.