This is the Vonnegut that I started with back in senior AP English, the first work from Vonnegut that I'd ever read. It's the book that I've read more frequently than any other, having picked it up every few years since 1991. When people ask me what my favorite book is, this is the one that I typically put forth as my choice.
This is also the book via which most people are introduced to Vonnegut, and that tends to put a lot of people off because it's a very interesting book being neither straight forward war novel nor science fiction exploration. The combination of the two, however, makes for a phenomenal and gorgeous exploration of both.
I am thrilled to have reread that novel after reading Vonnegut's other works because I found lots of interesting things that I'd never noticed before because I didn't know his earlier works.
- The opening chapter is as direct and open a work as we've seen from Vonnegut thus far. This is the only time when he has put himself into his works without pretense of surrogate, of Kilgore Trout or some other charade that the character wasn't Vonnegut.
- On page 9 (of the edition shown above - all pages will reference that edition, whichever it happens to be because it's the edition that my students read each year in one of our Junior-year English classes and the one that our school library has and which I read because I'd loaned my copy to Calen a couple of years back) Vonnegut tells of his time as a newspaper man reporting on the death of a man at the hands of a runaway elevator. Vonnegut glosses over the grisly details but remembers exactly that his copywriter was eating a 3 Musketeers Bar. Here, as he does quite often throughout the book, Vonnegut's focus isn't on the horrible details of the events that he saw but rather on the small, often trivial details that flood back to his memory around those events. He will, throughout this book that is tangentially about the bombing of Dresden, treat war in the same way, glossing of the worst details and focusing instead on something that was noticed in passing while the atrocities were committed.
- In the same chapter, Vonnegut visits an old war buddy of his and finds the buddy's wife angry at Vonnegut.
Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation. "You were just babies then!" she said.
...and he did. (page 14)
"What?" I said.
"You were just babies in the war - like the ones upstairs!"
I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.
"But you're not going to write it that way, are you." This wasn't a question. It was an accusation.
"I - I don't know," I said.
"Well, I know," she said. "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra or John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And was 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 encourage by books and movies.
...
"I tell you what," I said, "I'll call it 'The Children's Crusade.' " - While our protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is waiting to be loaded onto a boxcar as a German prisoner of war, he meets Wild Bob whose invitation to visit him if ever Billy is in Cody, Wyoming we will hear throughout the book. At this point, Vonnegut firmly places himself in the story, not as narrator, not as character, but rather as background soldier. "I was there. So was my old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare." (page 67)
- Vonnegut reappears in a few pages, calling up Billy Pilgrim in the middle of the night, his breath smelling of mustard gas and roses through the phone. (page 73)
- Billy questions the Tralfamadorians (they're back again), asking 'why me?' when he is abducted. Vonnegut has the aliens answer with equally senseless questions 'Why you? Why us? Why anything? ... The is no why?"
This very much matches Vonnegut's position on destiny and reason throughout his books that I've read so far. It is a major theme in this novel as things happen because they do, 'and so it goes.' The Tralfamadorians view their lives, their world in this fashion, seeing the future, the past, the present all as having already happened and looking for no reasons or ways to change those events. What is simply is. What will be already is, as well. 'And so it goes.' (page 77)
This philosophy is echoed by the German guard when asked the same question, 'Vy you? Vy anybody?' (page 93) - In Billy's morphine dream he dreams of giraffes with horns like doorknobs, and the narrators asks why? He receives no answer. Neither our lives nor our dreams respond to logic or searches for reason. (page 99)
- Eliot Rosewater makes an appearance in the book, a fellow mental patient beside Billy. The universe of Vonnegut's books begins to tighten together, something that becomes tighter still in the next book I'll be reading (and that I've read before), Breakfast of Champions. (page 100)
- An English colonel, a German prisoner of war, speaks to Edgar Derby, an American officer. The colonel says 'You know - we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved face, it was a shock. 'My God, my God -' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade.' "
Again, echoing Vonnegut's recurring theme of wars being fought by babies. (page 106) - In one of the few appearances in this novel, Vonnegut's anti-religious stance is related by the Kilgore Trout in his novel The Gospel from Outer Space:
He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
But the Gospels actually taught this:
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.
The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:
Oh, boy - they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes. (page 108) - The Tralfamadorians choose not to dwell on the same times in their lives, focusing on and living in the happy times instead. Does this echo Vonnegut's reluctance, the long time it took him to write his Dresden novel? (page 117)
- Lance Rumfoors and his bride, the former Cynthia Landry, pass by the window of Billy's honeymoon suite. They aren't the Rumfoords of Sirens of Titan, but they are clearly part of the same family. (page 120)
- Howard W Campbell, the main figure of Mother Night, is a strong presence here as a German soldier reads from Campbell's monograph about the poor spirit of the American soldier and again when he appears in Dresden recruiting American soldiers for his Free American Corps to fight for the Germans against the Russians. Vonnegut even tells us that Campbell would eventually hang himself while on trial as a war criminal. Again, Vonnegut's universe comes together more tightly. (pages 129 & 163)
- In Campbell's monograph he tells of the wealthy being embarrassed by the poor in America, of the American soldiers being dressed as poor, adding to their lack of dignity when fighting. This returns to another of Vonnegut's recurring theme of the divide between poor and wealthy in America. Campbell relates as myth the American espousal that it is easy for a poor person to work hard and become wealthy, meaning that any poor person must be a failure if they remain poor. (page 130)
- In the final chapter, Vonnegut returns to us directly and muses on death, one of the recurring themes of Slaughterhouse Five:
Robert Kennedy, whose summer house is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.
Edgar Derby is shot for no reason at all, certainly nothing that merited killing when reflected on the actions of World War II. Billy's fellow corpse miner rips his insides to shreds and dies in the last days of the war. Even Billy walks openly to his death.
Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.
And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.
So it goes.
Vonnegut has previously mused that trying to stop wars is like trying to stop the wind.
Under a heavier hand, thoughts like these could lead to abject hopelessness, but Vonnegut's tone is far lighter. Even though there is no rhyme or reason to the world, we should still be kind and loving to each other for as long as we can be. As Eliot Rosewater related, "There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."
As Vonnegut writes here, "And even if the wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death."
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I continue to be on the lookout for a female character in Vonnegut's works. Here we have three women: Billy's wife, Valencia; Billy's daughter, Lily; and Billy's paramour on Tralfamadore, Montana Wildhack. None of the three are anything more than one-dimensional companions with whom Billy passively spends his time when not unstuck in time.
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This is the finest of Vonnegut's works so far, and it is a brilliant novel and musing on life, death, and war. I'm glad I reread it.
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I am always amazed that people look to ban this book. Rarely has there ever been a better message in a book than that no matter how hopeless and pointless the world may appear, we should be kind to each other and look at the best parts of our lives.
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