Slaughterhouse-Five

What is this book about?

Billy Pilgrim is an optometrist from upstate New York. As a US Army chaplain's assistant in the Second World War he is captured and imprisoned in a disused slaughterhouse in Dresden. In February 1945 the Allied bombing of the undefended city burns it to the ground; Billy survives because he is locked in an underground meat locker. Afterwards he claims aliens abducted him to Tralfamadore, and that he has come "unstuck in time."

Why read it?

Vonnegut needed twenty-five years to write it — he was in Dresden himself and came out from under the meat locker. His method is unseriousness: short sentences, jokes, time jumps, a massacre broken into pieces that will not line up. This is not evasion but a kind of honesty: when an event refuses to become a story with causes, perhaps it never was one.

Core Ideas

• The deepest damage of war is not death but the destruction of a person's ability to tell his life as a coherent story.
• Fatalism is at once a symptom of trauma and a defence: if everything is determined, there is nothing to ask why about.
• Black humour is not frivolity but the only tone in which an unbearable subject can still be spoken.
• The repeated "So it goes" is both numbness and the minimum accounting owed to each of the dead.

What questions does this book try to answer?

• How should an event that refuses to become a story be told?
• If free will is an illusion, where can responsibility for war possibly rest?

Who should read it?

For anyone interested in war literature, and for readers who assume classics must be difficult — the language here is extremely plain. If nonlinear narrative bothers you, start with chapter one, which is the author explaining himself.

How to Read It

The repeated phrase "So it goes" is the author's most thorough mockery of the cruelty of war — the source list's reading. Short enough for two or three hours, though the timeline will make you dizzy. On a first pass, do not try to put events in order — follow Billy's jumps. On a second pass, rearrange them chronologically and you will see that the structure is itself a model of traumatic memory.