Slaughterhouse-Five - So It Goes

Slaughterhouse Five

Author: Kurt Vonnegut

I been hungrier than this. […] I been in worse places than this. This ain't so bad.
–Hobo

There is no why. –Tralfamadorian

Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.
–Edgar Derby's epitaph

"Anybody ever asks you what the sweetest thing in life is—" said Lazzaro, "it's revenge."

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.
–Tralfamadorian

The first description of this book I read was very simple:

Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world's great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most.

For some reason I decided to scroll further down the Amazon.com page, where I found the company's review of the book. It proved much more confusing:

Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

The phrase, of course, which surprised me, was "abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore." Never had I been told that this book included alien abduction or time jumping. I'd always heard it was a classic anti-war book about someone who experienced WWII, akin to Catch-22. Although, that comparison alone should have clued me in to something: I tried to read Catch-22 and couldn't wrap my head around it enough to finish it; it was just too out there. I'm not sure how I expected anything less than Tralfamadorian abduction in Slaughterhouse-Five.

With that second description in mind, I began reading. I was pleasantly surprised to find the Tralfamador wasn't the main focus of the book. That alone made the book – oddly – more believable. The way that Vonnegut lays out the story, jump around though it does, beautifully sets up the abduction as just another part of the narrator's life, as was the bombing at Dresden. Because both events, which could each serve as a traumatic focal point of a story, are treated as just another part of one man’s life, both events are downplayed.

I'm no psychologist, but I'm going to ignore that fact for a moment. It seems to me that the part of this story that is true – and by "true" I mean true in the life of the character; a literary truth and not a literal truth (though to be fair, Vonnegut himself did experience the very event about which he writes) – is the Dresden bombing and the events surrounding Billy's time in the war. This real life experience was too much for him to take, mentally and emotionally. So instead of trying to deal with it, he travelled far away from his existence – as far away as Tralfamadore. He created a safe place inside his head where he could hide when the world tried to remind him that he watched men die.

I do the same thing, and I can't even claim a traumatic wartime experience caused it. I'm often creating worlds in my head where I can be a hero, a badass, a singer, an actor or an athlete. In fact, isn't that partially why we read books or watch movies – to escape the real world and whatever stress, trauma or disappointment life brings and instead be transported to a world where we can be or do whatever we’d like? This project, then, could be considered my Tralfamador…

My takeaway: Sometimes physically surviving something as traumatic as the bombing at Dresden (and watching an acquaintance get shot for pilfering a teapot) is only half the battle. And you are my Tralfamadorians.