Aliens, time travel, sex in outer space, and the sordid realism of war in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughter-House-Five”

  “Dresden was destroyed
                                                                   on the night of February 13, 1945…
                                                                  it was like the moon”

(Vonnegut 179).

“Slaughter-House-Five” is one of those intriguing novels that swallow you up into
themselves; a novel that sets you free only when that last word is read. Then again even the last word in this novel, is in itself a further invitation. “Poo-tee-weet?” (Vonnegut 215) is a question that plunges you back to the beginning, where the narrator, whom we have assumed to be Vonnegut himself, starts off his narration again with the simple answer that; “[yes] all this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true” (Ibid 1). As the narrator explains at the beginning, it has taken him “twenty-three years”, since having returned from the Second World War, to write “this lousy little book” (Ibid 2).

On a first level, in “Slaughter-House-Five” we have a writer who by way of introduction, explains to us the difficulties involved in trying to finally come to terms with the task of writing about his specific experience of the Second World War and more specifically about the aftermath of the American-led firebombing of Dresden as he saw it: an event that had been, although practically unknown to most Americans (for “there hadn’t been much publicity”), much worse “than Hiroshima” (Ibid10).

At a second level however, the author steps-back and tells the story of a peculiar almost impossible individual named Billy Pilgrim. This character, very much like narrator¹, is also captured by the Germans, is consequently sent to Dresden, only to live through the air raid that destroyed the city, and then is brought back home in one piece, albeit psychologically, after the war. The narrator primarily tells the story of Billy Pilgrim in the War, but on occasion will point out his own presence among the actions, times, and events surrounding his main character. Ex. “[at the Russian prison camp] An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains… That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book” (Ibid 125).

Unlike the author however, after a series of tragic occurrences in Billy Pilgrim’s life, Billy reveals to the world the valuable lessons (of life, death, time, space, religion and love) taught to him by an advanced species of extraterrestrial beings known as the “Tralfamadorians”. Billy also regularly gets “unstuck in time”: which means he is able to re-experience events in his past and future. These elements of fantasy might seem to have no connection to the sordid realities of war and massacres but as we will see, it is through these elements that Vonnegut questions the very deep-seated questions that plague humanity; a humanity that, especially after WWII, is most definitely coming to terms with itself. In this text, we will analyze how the elements of fantasy work in relation to the literary realism. In specific, we will analyze some of the most significant Tralfamadorian lessons that allowed Billy Pilgrim, and the narrator (and us by proxy), to step back and better comprehend our own histories and beliefs. Firstly and briefly however, we will have start with a working definition of Fantasy.

Elements of Fantasy involve reoccurring themes of “far-fetched” occurrences (such as “time travel” and “alien saucers and abduction”): elements which the average reader would not place in the realm of “the real”. What we find in this novel is perhaps a possible dialogical perception of these elements. In the first perspective, the usual alternate universe (where time-travel and alien-abduction) must be accepted by the reader as a premise to the story. In the second perspective, these elements are seen to serve as the building blocks of the writer’s intended satire (As in Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels”). Thus as a reader, we are constantly and intriguingly torn apart: between either engaging with the elements of fantasy, or with the very satirization of them.

As the narrator explains, Billy Pilgrim is abducted by the friendly Tralfamadorian beings whom incidentally have many great “wonderful things to teach Earthlings” (Ibid 26). There are many intriguing aspects of the Tralfamadorian way of thinking that were of great interest to Billy Pilgrim (for ex; their great interest for Charles Darwin, their lack of interest for Jesus Christ, their view on sexuality, the destruction of the universe etc.). Due to the scope of this text however, we have limited ourselves to the analysis of Tralfamadorian ideas of predestination and time, and their perception of death.
Billy is firstly taught about the nature of predestination and time. While being abducted, he asks his captors as to why they have picked him (“Why me?”). The answer off course comes in the form of a few rhetorical questions (“Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything?”) and a metaphor: “Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?... Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why” (Ibid 76-77). This last statement is consistent off course, with the Tralfamadorian view of time: whereby time “does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is” (Ibid 86). From this view then, it becomes evident to Billy (and to us), that it would be silly to think of the structure of the past as a series of events that could have been otherwise.

From this line of reasoning about the nature of time, it follows that death happens because it happens: it just is. We would have to further consider, as Billy does, that from the Tralfamadorian point of view, death is a not such a bad thing at all. In fact, “when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral¹” (Ibid 26). This way of thinking seems to help Billy invaluably in coping with all the death that he has been a witness to. His repeated use of the typical Tralfamadorian expression “So it goes”², indicates his ability to come to terms with the “state” of death. As we have seen thus far, the Tralfamadorians see time in its entirety: everything that is, is. Now, Billy is a mere mortal. However he is gifted with the gift of time-travel. He is thus able to follow the Tralfamadorians’ advice and selectively “ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones” (Ibid 117).

In Billy Pilgrim, we are faced with a Don Quijote-like character: a mad man interpreting his contemporary world through the lens of his madness… making us question all the meanwhile, the very fabric of our times. Billy’s experiences with the extraterrestrials can be attributed to hallucinations resulting from both an infatuation with a certain science fiction writer (Kilgore Trout) and a skull fracture suffered in a plane-crash. On a trip to a New York radio show, Billy discovers a “porno-literature” store that has some of the science fiction writer’s novels as window dressing (200). As Billy surprising finds here, Kilgore Trout has written many stories that come close to those he experienced³. Vonnegut allows us to alternatively laugh with and at Billy. It is also true that through the apparent madness of this character, Vonnegut is able to touch the very deep conflicting issues within our consciousness: the meaning of time, the nature of death, and existence itself. Vonnegut portrays an inspiring message of humanity, not without a lack of irony, through the intervention of extraterrestrials: “If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I’ve said… it is time for me to be dead for a little while— and then live again” (Ibid 143). It is thanks to the Tralfamadorians (or perhaps Kilgore Trout), that Billy is able to finally come to terms with the horrific terms of the war that he and the world had experienced: “Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on Tralfamadore” (Ibid. 198). “Slaughter-House-Five” itself is the story of a writer coming to terms with his own experience of the horrific event that was the bombing of Dresden. Vonnegut invites us to think, and cry, but most importantly to laugh with him, because after all: what is there left to do after having been a witness to a massacre? What else but to ignore the awful times, concentrate on the good ones, and laugh back at world’s insanity?

¹This sort of outlook on death, is off course influenced by the Tralfamadorian ability to perceive the fourth dimension and therefore understand that “all moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist” (Ibid 27).

²As in; “when Billy got his clothes back, they weren’t any cleaner, but all the little animals that had been living in them were dead. So it goes” (Ibid 90); or “They had a ghostly, opalescent similarity. The British had no way of knowing it, but the candles and the soap were made from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies and fairies and communists, and other enemies of the State. So it goes.” (Ibid 96)

³In the “tawdry bookstore” for example, Billy discovers a book that talks of extraterrestrials that incidentally also kidnap a human couple in order to put show them up in a museum in their home planet (Ibid 201).

Works Cited

Vonnegut, Kurt. “Slaughter-House-Five”. Dell Publishing. New York: 1991.