Author: Kurt Vonnegut
I really tried with Vonnegut. Last summer I started reading Player Piano and a few months ago I started reading Timequake. I gave each around fifty pages and could not do it. Timequake was especially bad.
The difference with Slaughterhouse Five was it was one of the couple books I brought on vacation with me, so I was stuck with it and decided to just power through.
This book has almost no logical flow. I struggled to understand what was happening basically the entire way through. I’m not exaggerating when I say it feels like Vonnegut took a bunch of mushrooms and then just danced on his typewriter and somehow got an acclaimed “masterpiece” out of it. It was very difficult to follow and not an enjoyable read from my perspective. And I don’t mean enjoyable in terms of “a fun summer read” because I understand this is a book about the horrors of war.
I can say with confidence I am done with Vonnegut. I won’t pick up another book of his.
Slaughterhouse Five is said to be one of the great anti-war books. It revolves around the bombings of Dresden. Dresden was not an important city in terms of military strength, or critical infrastructure, so many refugees across Europe took shelter there under the assumption it wouldn’t be a target. However, the city was heavily bombed and brought to ruins, killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Kurt Vonnegut was one of the people in Dresden who managed to survive. Apparently his writing of this book was a response to his question of “Why me?” In other words, why did I survive Dresden, while so many others died. His main character “Billy Pilgrim” faces the same question in response to surviving Dresden. He does not no how to deal with the guilt of that question, so he invents a fake world called Trafalmadore. Trafalmadorians don’t believe a person ever dies, but just stops living at a point in time, but they can jump back in time and relive moments. They believe everything is predestined, so anything that happens would have happened anyway, and it is no ones fault. In other words, guilt is not necessary because no one is responsible for their actions. Effectively, life is repeating, random, and meaningless. Latching on to how Trafalmadorians view life is how Billy copes with his guilt and PTSD from the bombing. The book follows Billy’s life and jumps around in time fairly randomly. It also jumps to Billy’s perspective as he imagines he is taken by the Trafalmadorians and kept in a human zoo on their planet.
We see throughout the book the price of accepting the Trafalmadorian way of thinking. Free will is non-existent since everything is pre-determined, so we lose the ability to succeed, to fail, to feel pain or joy. Billy has a very dreary view on life, he is depressed and doesn’t see the meaning. He doesn’t sympathize with people dying and simply says “so it goes”. As he jumps around time, he knows when people will die, but does nothing to save them as in his view its meaningless and pre-destined anyway. The price Billy ultimately pays in coping is losing his humanity.
I can respect the book because Vonnegut experienced the bombing personally and wrestled with the same questions as his character. I also happened to be reading it over February 24th, 2022 (when Russia invaded the Ukraine) so it felt especially relevant to be reading an anti-war book.
There is probably some unique “genius” in the way it was written, it just did not work for me.
Fun fact. Since I started tracking the books I am reading back in 2017, this is my 100th book. It feels like an accomplishment. I know 100 books over 5 years isn’t that impressive or crazy, but I am proud nonetheless.
I am saddened by the fact however that this book is my 100th. A book I did not enjoy reading. But to quote Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim “So it goes”.