Kurt Vonnegut’s thriller Slaughterhouse-Five, a wonderful novel about a man named Billy Pilgrim, is one of the most unique books of its time. Instead of writing the novel with a beginning, middle, climax and end, Vonnegut gives the story an entirely non-linear time scale. While slightly difficult to follow at times, this method does the actual story of Billy Pilgrim much justice, as Billy uncontrollably time travels to different moments in his life whenever he is under emotional stress. So, the reader’s experience is somewhat akin to what Billy is dealing with in his life. The story of Billy Pilgrim itself is somewhat farfetched – Billy is a World War II veteran who, later in life, is abducted by a mysterious species of aliens known as the Tralfamadorians. The Tralfamadorians reveal certain truths about the nature of time to Billy, most importantly that each and every moment in one’s life not only occurs simultaneously, but also infinitely occurs over and over again. Based on this idea, no moment in any person’s life is any more permanent than any other moment in their life, a notion that helps Billy overcome many of the tragedies he witnessed while he was at war. Although Billy’s Tralfamadorian abduction tale is absolutely integral to the story, Slaughterhouse-Five is not a novel about extraterrestrial lifeforms; it is a novel about war.
To begin, if Vonnegut had intended to write his novel predominantly about the Tralfamadorians, he would have made them seem more plausible. Instead, the Tralfamadorians are described as looking like upside-down plungers. Not only is this an odd image, in general, it is also biologically silly as it would be very difficult to move around with a suction cup where your feet should be. Additionally, when Billy is taken to Tralfamadore, the aliens lock him up in a zoo-like cage to be examined. While this idea is not necessarily impossible, it is more likely that if humans ever encountered far more intelligent lifeforms than themselves, they would not simply be locked up in cages like animals – instead, they would most likely be killed or put to work. Granted, there is no definite way to determine what might be the normal treatment for humans recently enslaved by an alien species. However, it is clear that Vonnegut is attempting to illustrate some level of absurdity when he describes the Tralfamadorians. Through all of this, Vonnegut is trying to show that the lessons about time that the Tralfamadorians teach Billy are much more important than the details of the aliens themselves.
When Billy learns of the reality of how time works, or at least how the Tralfamadorians believe it works, he is instantly granted some level of comfort from his memories of World War II. In the war, Billy witnessed many terrifying tragedies, the most prominent of which was the bombing of Dresden, a civilian city in Germany. The Americans bombed Dresden in a display of power, and they killed over 20,000 civilians in the process. During the bombing, Billy, a few other American soldiers, and a few German soldiers watching over them, are hiding in a bomb shelter in the basement of Slaughterhouse-Five, an abandoned slaughterhouse on the outskirts of the city. When the bombing finally concludes, the mismatched group of soldiers emerges from the basement to see utter devastation. Restaurants and stores around the city that were open for business just a few hours earlier are now reduced to piles of rock. Burnt corpses lie as far as the eye can see, and the true devastation that the bombing caused is glaringly obvious through the eyes of the German soldiers, who have just learned that everything and everyone they know and love is gone.
Now, back to the the flying saucer where Billy is being held en route to Tralfamadore. When Billy asks the Tralfamadorians how the universe is expected to end, they tell him, “We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers. A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears” (Vonnegut 111). Naturally, Billy asks the Tralfamadorians why they would not prevent this if they already know it will occur. To this, they respond, “He has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way” (Vonnegut 111). This brilliantly illustrates the Tralfamadorian concept of time; fate is pre-determined and cannot be altered, so if something is known to happen in the future, no matter how terrible it is, it cannot be prevented. When Billy realizes this, he says to the aliens, “So – I suppose that the idea of preventing war on Earth is stupid, too” (Vonnegut 111). Once the ship arrives in Tralfamadore, Billy notes that the planet seems very peaceful. The Tralfamadorians correct him: while it is currently peacetime on Tralfamadore, war is no less inevitable on this distant planet than it is on Earth.
Finally, war is a more central theme in this book than extraterrestrial life because Billy’s entire Tralfamadorian story – his abduction and then his imprisonment in an alien zoo – is likely just a coping mechanism. After witnessing the bombing of Dresden, Billy needs to prove to himself that tens of thousands of innocents did not die pointlessly. Note that Billy cares deeply about the deaths of these many Germans, even though they are technically his enemy. To Billy, death on this scale is a tragedy, no matter which side it occurs on, which further emphasizes the point that this book is trying to make: war, although unavoidable, is idiotic and useless. As was stated earlier, the Tralfamadorians teach Billy that each moment in life is no more important or permanent than any of the others. Take Billy, for instance – his ability to time travel means that he has witnessed his own birth, his own death, and every moment in between countless times.
As a result, Billy’s death, and anyone else’s, for that matter, is just one out of an infinite number of moments that each person experiences in his or her life. This greatly comforts Billy as he can apply this rule to each innocent civilian who lost their life in Dresden in February of 1945, just a few months before World War II came to a close.
This idea of the Tralfamadorian story being a coping mechanism becomes clear when you look at Billy’s tale from the perspective of Barbara, his daughter who is tasked with taking care of him as he grows old. When Barbara hears Billy’s alien story, her father is to her like any other crazy, old war veteran whose life was drastically altered when he went to war. Instead of believing that her father actually encountered an advanced alien species, it is considerably easier for her to believe that her father’s perception of reality was simply altered during the war, causing him to believe that he saw these things, without actually seeing them.
All in all, it is evident throughout the novel that Vonnegut means to say that war is the reason for the Tralfamadorian tale, and that the story of the aliens is simply a way for an old, tired man to deal with horrendous catastrophes that he witnessed in his past. Slaughterhouse-Five is a novel about the nature of war – not an intriguing alien race called the Tralfamadorians – and it goes to great lengths to show just how devastating needless fighting can be.
Bibliography:
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-five, Or, the Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. New York: Dial Press, 2005. Print.
“Bombing of Dresden in World War II.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 25 Sept. 2013. Web. 25 Sept. 2013.
