(Book 375 from 1001 books) - Slaughterhouse-Five = The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969) is a science fiction-infused anti-war novel by Kurt Vonnegut about the World War II experiences and journeys through time of Billy Pilgrim, from his time as an American soldier and chaplain's assistant, to postwar and early years.

It is generally recognized as Vonnegut's most influential and popular work. A central event is Pilgrim's surviving the Allies' firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner-of-war. This was an event in Vonnegut's own life, and the novel is considered semi-autobiographical.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز نوزدهم ماه می سال 2011میلادی

عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «سلاخ‌خانه شماره پنج»؛ نویسنده: کورت ونه‌گات؛ انتشاراتیها: (روشنگران و مطالعات زنان)؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش نوزدهم ماه می سال2011میلادی

عنوان: سلاخ خانه شماره پنج؛ نویسنده: کورت ونه گات؛ مترجم: علی اصغر بهرامی، تهران، روشنگران، 1372؛ در 263ص؛ چاپ دیگر 1380؛ چاپ بعدی سال1381؛ شابک 9646751490؛ چاپ ششم سال1389؛ موضوع: جنگ جهانگیر دوم - از سال 1939میلادی تا سال 1945میلادی از نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده 20م

کورت ونه گات: (زادروز: یازدهم ماه نوامبر سال 1922میلادی، ایندیاناپولیس، ایالت ایندیانا، درگذشت: روز یازدهم ماه آوریل سال 2007میلادی) در شهر «نیویورک، ایالت نیویورک»؛ ملیت: آمریکایی؛ پیشه: نویسنده از سال 1950میلادی تا سال 2005میلادی؛ همسران: «جین مری کاکس» از سال1945میلادی تا سال1971میلادی، «جیل کرمنتز از سال 1979میلادی تا سال 2007میلادی)، دارای چهار فرزند؛ والدین: «کورت وانگات سینیور، ادیت لیبر»؛

آثار: رمان‌ها: ‍«پیانوی خودنواز (1952میلادی)»، «آژیرهای هیولا (1959میلادی)»، «شب مادر (1961میلادی)»، «گهواره گربه (1963میلادی)»، «خدا شما را حفظ کند، آقای رزواتر (1965میلادی)»، «سلاخ‌خانه شماره پنج (1969میلادی)»، «صبحانه قهرمانان (1973میلادی)»، «اسلپ استیک (1976میلادی)»، «محبوس (1979میلادی)»، «مجمع الجزایر گالاپاگوس (1985میلادی)»، «ریش آبی (1987میلادی)»، «زمان لرزه (1997میلادی)»، «مرد بی‌وطن (2005میلادی)». مجموعه داستان‌ها: «قناری در خانه گربه (1961میلادی)»، «به خانه میمون خوش آمدید (1967میلادی)»، «انفیه ­دان باگومبو (1999میلادی)»، «خدا شما را حفظ کند، دکتر کورکیان (1999میلادی)»، «جوجو را نیگا (2009میلادی)». نمایش‌نامه: «تولدت مبارک وندا جون (1971میلادی)».؛

کورت وانگات جونیور، در رشته زیست‌ شیمی، از دانشگاه «کورنل» فارغ‌ التحصیل شدند، در ارتش نام‌نویسی کردند، و برای نبرد در جنگ جهانی دوم به «اروپا» اعزام شدند؛ ایشان خیلی زود به دست نیروهای «آلمانی» اسیر، و در «درسدن» زندانی شدند، پس از پایان جنگ و بازگشت به «ایالات متحده آمریکا»، در «دانشگاه شیکاگو» به تحصیل «مردم‌شناسی» پرداختند، و سپس به عنوان تبلیغات‌چی در شرکت «جنرال الکتریک» مشغول به کار شدند، تا سال1951میلادی که با نهایی شدن انتشار نخستین کتاب ایشان، «پیانوی خودکار»، آن کار را ترک کردند و تمام‌ وقت مشغول نویسندگی شدند؛ آثار ایشان ترکیبی از طنز سیاه، در مایه‌ های علمی‌ تخیلی ه­ستند؛

از آثار ایشان: «گهواره گربه»، «سلاخ‌خانه شماره پنج» و «صبحانه قهرمانان» بیشتر مورد ستایش قرار گرفته‌ اند.؛ در سال1999میلادی آستروئید یا سیارک 25399، را، برای بزرگداشت ایشان «ونه گات» نامیدند.؛

چکیده این داستان: «بیلی پیلگریم»، قهرمان داستان، در زمان خدمت خود در آرتش «آمریکا» در جنگ جهانگیر دوم، قابلیت حرکت در زمان را پیدا می‌کند، و از آن لحظه به‌ طور همزمان در زمین، و در یک سیاره ی دور، به نام «ترالفامادور»، زندگی خویش را پی می‌گیرد؛ او به فلسفه سرنوشت «ترالفامادور»ی ها باور پیدا می‌کند؛ آنها قادر به دیدن محیط خود در چهار بعد هستند؛ بنابراین از همه ی رخدادهای بگذشته و آینده باخبر هستند؛ واکنش او به رخدادهای ناخوشایندی که رخ می‌دهد، گفتن این جمله است: «بله! رسم روزگار چنین است.»؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 31/05/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 07/05/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Kurt Vonnegut always had his own unique attitude to society and history. Therefore Slaughterhouse-Five is a special story of man and his place in war and peace.

Shells were bursting in the treetops with terrific bangs showering down knives and needles and razorblades. Little lumps of lead in copper jackets were crisscrossing the woods under the shellbursts, zipping along much faster than sound.

War is a wonderful thing – it presents a man with a gift of madness. And madness is even a more wonderful thing – it allows a man to travel in time, to go through space to distant planets, to see things others can’t see.

‘Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, here we are… trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.’

So it goes… Then it stops…

Kurt Vonnegut is an author that appeals to condescending liberals, as he always talks down to his readers as if they are idiots. For example, reading “so it goes” over and over again got extremely annoying because I already got the point in the beginning. This is a very overrated book, as many people think it is the best work of literature ever written. Kurt Vonnegut thinks he is so clever, but he's not. He comes across as pretentious and uninspired, the way most far left-wing socialist writers do. I’m sorry that some of us who don’t like this book are too simple-minded to “understand” it. I did understand it. Some people just don’t want liberal bullies shoving their ideology down their throats all the time. The characters do not make you think or feel anything. It reminds me of Nietzsche, the incredibly overrated philosopher. If you want to write a book with an anti-war message, don’t be arrogant and condescending with your writing and ideas. It will just turn people off. The writing and story is unimpressive. I like novels with plots and complex characters that challenge and evoke strong feelings. This book does not do that. It is for people who think they are better than you because again, Kurt Vonnegut appeals to those who put down religion and “follow science” yet allow the butchering of children. It is the type of book that pretentious, arrogant English students love and look down on anyone who disagrees with them, despite these self-righteous students’ false claims that they are the most open-minded while they sip their overly expensive lattes and look at ugly artwork. I wouldn't waste time reading this book.

Third read, but I'm going to be honest (sorry for the fans): just like the last two times (when I was 16 and when I was 51), the story didn't really grab me, the undertone is too cynical for me and the bombardment of absurdisms too large. But if you unravel everything and put it back together, then this is quite an impressive novel. And not so easy to place, even if it is put away in categories such as science fiction, absurdist or (anti-) war novel (I don't actually think it's a real anti-war novel). Of course, it is all that, but after the third reading it is clear to me that it is essentially a philosophical novel.

For example, there is a very specific and ingenious view of time. For this, the Tralfamadorians, among others, are staged: they do not know linear time (one moment after the other), but see everything in one glance, from beginning to end; a bit like God according to Augustine in his Confessions. Causality is a notion that is simply irrelevant to them: “Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or avoided. I am a Tralfamadorian and I see all of eternity as you would see a range of the Rocky Mountains. Eternity is eternity. It doesn't change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It exists. Watch it moment by moment and you will see that we are all, as I said before, like insects stuck in amber.”

That 'divine' way of looking permeates this entire novel. So, the key passage to understand Slaughterhouse Five, then, seems to me to be this one, where the Tralfamadorian talks about the books they read: “each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message-- describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

Well, I feel that's the way you should read Vonnegut's book: all those absurd bits of stories (in the now, in the past, in the future, in Dresden, in the US, on the planet of the Tralfamadorians…) just take them together, and then you get that "profundity of those many wonderful moments".
This makes this novel seem utterly postmodern. And that is best illustrated in the great scene in which Billy sees a war documentary backwards. Not only is this book postmodern, it is also un-American through and through: Billy is an anti-hero, life is absurd (with war and heroism as the epitome of absurdism), the manageability and the malleability of life and reality are illusions. And central and more fundamental: the notion of free will is an absolute illusion, because everything is as it is, just as it is, “so it goes”. And all this is served by Vonnegut in a sauce of dry humor.

Seen in this way, this book seems quite impressive. But I'm going to repeat it: it still didn't appeal to me, too much of a mixed bag to me. Perhaps I am still stuck in (the illusion) of modernism?

Leggere questo romanzo è fare un salto nel buio e rimanere senza fiato.
Al termine ci si domanda se sia un romanzo sulle atrocità della guerra, sulle esperienze ancora vivide di un testimone, un romanzo di fantascienza e viaggi nel tempo oppure un delirio indotto dai farmaci per anestetizzare la sofferenza fisica e mentale di un reduce.
Fatto sta che Mattatoio n.5 non lascia indifferenti.
Riesce a comprendere tutti questi elementi ed altri ancora, una fonte infinita di riflessioni e congetture per dimostrare, infine, la follia umana.

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Reading this novel is taking a leap in the dark and being breathless.
At the end one wonders if it is a novel about the atrocities of war, about the still vivid experiences of a witness, a science fiction novel and time travel or a delirium induced by drugs to anesthetize the physical and mental suffering of a veteran.
The fact is that Slaughterhouse n.5 leaves no one indifferent.
He manages to understand all these elements and more, an endless source of reflections and conjectures to finally demonstrate human folly.

One of my favourite all time books, one that is always there in the back of my head. Powerful and angry with humour. I have to say the George Roy Hill movie of this book has helped keep in in my consciousness. Great stuff Mr Vonnegut.

Why do I love this book? I love it because of the villains. Not just the obviously villainous Paul Lazzaro--although he's one of the great villains of modern fiction. During the hellishness of war all he can think about is his own petty need to avenge slights done to him--but the larger, less obvious villains in this book: the Tralfamdorians. They’re not the type of villainous space aliens you see in most science fiction, arriving in flying saucers and hell bent on enslaving humanity, only to be stopped by some intrepid space cadet. (Vonnegut hated being categorized as "science fiction" because most science fiction at the time was just juvenile male wish fulfillment, which he clearly was not interested in. In fact he kind of satirizes that kind of thing in this book.) His aliens are much more fascinating than that.
The Tralfamdorians aren't much interested in Jesus Christ's message of universal love. They're more interested in the message of Charles Darwin, that beings die to improve the species. (At least that's the message as they see it. Like I said they're villains.) To them the idea of free will is silly. (Well, villains can be right sometimes.) The world is structured in a way that everything that happens is meant to happen and there's nothing we can do about it. Concern for human feelings is useless and therefore we shouldn't give a second thought to massacres and slaughter. Just say "and so it goes," and move on. This was certainly the feeling of the Nazis with their belief in the destiny of the everlasting Reich (or whatever the phrase is,) and the Communists with their belief that the road to the future must be built on the corpses of the present. (Stalin’s most famous saying—"One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic.")
To Billy--like Vonnegut, a witness to the slaughter at Dresden--they provide an escape. They put him in an enclosure where all his needs, material and sexual, are met and where he is protected from the poisonous gas outside. To mankind their philosophy provides an escape from moral responsibility.
In the first chapter of the book Vonnegut tells his friend he is writing an anti-war book. His friend responds that he "might as well write an anti-glacier book," and Vonnegut kind of agrees with him. Wars, like glaciers, can’t be stopped. And yet he wrote the book anyway. Yes, death is inevitable, but to Vonnegut humanity is also worth mourning. What happened to Edgar Derby is worth relating, and we should be moved by it. Vonnegut is not satisfied to sum up Edgar’s death with the phrase, "and so it goes." I love this book because Vonnegut conjures up this fascinating alien race with a view of life that provides an opportunity for escape, but then punctures the illusion by showing that it is as facile as it is attractive.

5★
“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.

People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.

I've finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.

This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.”

Dresden. February 1945. The author narrates the story of Billy Pilgrim and says, almost as an aside, that he was there. Vonnegut certainly was there, and this is his story, except that he seems to have dealt better than Billy with the horrors (and there is no better word) of the war he survived. He says Americans never really knew about Dresden.

This was published in 1969 and added fuel to the fire of the anti-Vietnam war protesters.

There are several different layers of time – the last year or so of the winter war in Germany, various times in the future and the present, and a life lived on the distant planet of Tralfamadore, to which Billy has been abducted and lives in a zoo to be watched and admired. So it goes (as the author says throughout).

He may be in a hospital bed in one scene, doze off, and wake up in a freezing boxcar in Germany on his way to the POW camp. Or he may wake up in Tralfamador where his wife (human) says he’s been away again, hasn’t he? So it goes.

If we think it’s confusing, imagine what’s going on in Billy’s head. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, managed in the “present” by his doctor who tells him only to have naps every afternoon. He does. And he cries. In secret. So it goes.

Each scenario is as real as the other, and it seems entirely believable that Billy sees the future as well as the past. He’s a likeable man who experienced terrible things. He marries a woman whom he says isn’t the sort he’d really like to marry, but he’s seen into the future and knows that he has a pretty good life with her, so why not? It’s an interesting idea.

But the reason for the story is the bombing of Dresden, and like Lot’s wife, the author was compelled to look back. Vonnegut tried for a long time to write about the war, but he tells us he wanted to discuss it with his good friend first. He went to visit, and was surprised to be cold-shouldered by the friend’s wife, Mary. She finally explains why.

“‘You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.’

So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.

So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: ‘Mary,’ I said, ‘I don't think this book of mine is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.

I tell you what’ I said, ‘I'll call it ’The Children's Crusade’.

She was my friend after that.”

This is that book and it is dedicated to her.

As an American prisoner of war in Germany, Billy and the others were housed in a slaughterhouse, building number five, and worked in a factory. When they heard the allies were bombing, they went down below into what seems to have been a cavern.

“So it goes. A guard would go to the head of the stairs every so often to see what it was like outside, then he would come down and whisper to the other guards. There was a fire-storm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn.

It wasn't safe to come out of the shelter until noon the next day. When the Americans and their guards did come out, the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.

So it goes.”

It’s quite a ride, from bleeding feet traipsing across war-ravaged, frozen Germany to the future, back to the past, to Tralfamadore and to a reasonably prosperous middle-class, middle-American life.

It’s certainly an amazing example of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder consuming a man’s life and how he learned to live with it. I see many readers have classified it as science fiction, but that’s assuming we are supposed to believe that the Tralfamadorians are real and not just in his imagination. I think they’re imaginary, but I like their concept of time. Billy writes to the newspaper, explaining:

“. . . an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

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 Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes.'"

I’ll put a personal note behind a spoiler, since this is so long already.
I grew up in America, and I’ve been familiar with the title of this book since it was written. I know it is studied in schools, but I never knew anything about it. We had a German exchange student years ago (in Australia), and she was very politically savvy and aware. She lived near the East German border and was so excited that the Berlin Wall had just come down. But one of the first things I remember her saying to me was something about Dresden and shaking her head.

I don’t recall what it was, just that it was a terrible thing, and I think she expected me to apologise or something, but I imagine I fell back on the usual “It was necessary to end the war”, or some similarly trite excuse. Truth be told, I knew absolutely nothing about Dresden except it was the home of Dresden china/porcelain. I was far more ignorant of history than she was. And I was, and am still, ashamed.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.”

Slaughterhouse-Five is an iconic book for readers and is widely studied in academic environments. Vonnegut’s elements of unconventional narrative structure, satire, science fiction, autobiography, and historical fiction create a distinctive style. This is an American classic and one of the greatest anti-war novels. He stated that this novel resulted from a 23-year struggle to write about his experiences as an American POW. In my opinion, at its heart, this book served as a therapeutic process for Vonnegut’s psychological and emotional trauma.

Note: This book was published in 1969. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) became an official diagnosis in 1980, when the American Psychiatric Association provided the framework for clinicians to identify and treat the diagnosis, filling an important gap in psychiatric theory and practice. (Previous historical wartime diagnoses such as - shell shock, battle fatigue, combat stress reaction, traumatic war neurosis, etc.)

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”

A strange and intriguing book that I found very hard to rate: a mixture of wartime memoir and sci fi - occasionally harrowing, sometimes funny and other times thought-provoking.

PLOT
It is the episodic story of Billy Pilgrim, a small town American boy, who is a POW in the second world war, later becomes a successful optometrist and who occasionally and accidentally travels in time to other periods of his life, so he has "memories of the future". Oh, he also gets abducted by aliens, along with some furniture. "So it goes." (That is the catchphrase of the book, and I found rather annoying after the umpteenth time. It's used in Philip K Dick's "Ubik" (review here), which I assumed was a nod to Vonnegut, until I discovered both were published in the same year).

It starts with an old man reminiscing about his life. He is asked about the point of writing an anti-war book, "Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?" After that, it jumps about, much as Billy does, "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time... he is in a constant state of stage fright".

The most thought-provoking bits for me were Billy's mother who tried "to construct a life that makes sense from things she found in gift shops", the bathos with which some war events were described (e.g. being executed for stealing a teapot), and the alien Tralfamadorian's multi-dimensional and multi-sexual world. For instance, they have five sexes, but their differences were in the fourth dimension and they couldn't imagine how time looks to Billy (they also told him that seven sexes were essential for human reproduction!).

MESSAGE
A main message is surprisingly positive: if we could only see or feel the fourth dimension, we would realise that "when a person dies he only appears to die. He is very much alive in the past".

SPOONS
Spoons are mentioned oddly often, as a description of how people lie (lovers or fallen soldiers). Then, near the end, actual spoons are briefly important. I have no idea whether this is significant.

UPDATE: Thanks to a comment from Matthias on his excellent review (read it here), I have, not an answer, but a great spoon reference in The Matrix:
"Do not try and bend the spoon, that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: There is no spoon."
Spoon Boy

RELATED BOOKS
It has strong links with several other books: as it's Vonnegut, the "fictitious" sci fi writer, Kilgore Trout, gets several mentions.

The mode of time travel clearly influenced Octavia Butler's Kindred, review here,
and Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, review here.

When he watches a WW2 film in reverse, it's very like Amis's Time's Arrow, review here.

For a more linguistic and philosophical take on the implications of Tralfamadorians living in all time, simultaneously, see the heptapods in Ted Chiang's The Story of Your Life, review here.

Also compare it with the Borges short story A Weary Man’s Utopia, which is in The Book of Sand, review here


It also left me wanting to read a Tralfamadorian book with its simultaneous threads, "no beginning, no middle, no end... What we love in our books are the depths of many marvellous moments seen all at one time", which is surely what Vonnegut was trying to create for mere human readers.

Don’t be fooled: this is a short novel, but a pretty difficult one! Kurt Vonnegut, like his protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, witnessed long ago one of the most dreadful (and now almost forgotten) events during the crepuscular spring of 1945, when the Allies, pretending to eradicate Nazism, utterly destroyed the German city of Dresden and killed tens of thousands of civilians (comparable to the Hiroshima bombing). This event is the bleeding core of the novel. So it goes.

What is more bewildering about this book is its disjointed time structure: very soon in the story, Billy Pilgrim, a former prisoner of war, gets “unstuck in time”, thanks to the intervention of a Tralfamadorian flying saucer. He then keeps travelling in time from one paragraph to the next, going back and forth from the days before the Dresden destruction, to his childhood years, to his postwar life as an optometrist who is writing a book about Dresden and suffers a plane crash, to the time of the Vietnam War and Ronald Reagan (the present time when Vonnegut was writing), to a geodesic sphere on the far-off planet of Tralfamadore, to Times Square, and back to the firestorm of World War II.

In doing so, we get to know a gallery of quaint yet pitiful characters Billy meets along the way: Weary the bully, Lazzaro the enraged sadist, Campbell the American Nazi, Kilgore Trout the crook sci-fi writer, the Spinozist four-dimensional Tralfamadorians, Montana the porn star, the rich and fat Valencia who dies in her car, Derby the teacher who dies before a firing squad, Jesus Christ a “nobody” who dies on a piece of wood. So it goes.

Added to this sense of disorientation (which indeed is that of Billy/Kurt), Vonnegut uses a dry, detached and fatalistic humour, when describing the most unspeakable, even unthinkable, moments of this war experience, that, if amusing, truly conveys a sense of utter despair. So it goes.

Oh, Vonnegut, you clever bastard. How did you construct a novel with such a complex plot, such recondite themes and tremendous artistry, using such simple prose? Time collapses and unfolds, the reader gets endings before beginnings, the message is fateful and looming, and the vocabulary level is appropriate for middle schoolers. You got to love a writer who can do that.

Vonnegut understands the nature of comedy like few others. Comedy is just tragedy from a distance, tragedy from a certain perspective. The novel sparkles with humor, and the reader is left with a pit in his stomach. A gnawing, gaping feeling that clutches your insides, and spreads through your mind like a weed. And here I just wanted a quick laugh.