Slaughterhouse Five

I first read Slaughterhouse Five for an assignment in high school. Afterwards, the only parts that stuck with me were the time travel and the aliens. I was actually confused the first time I saw it referred to as an anti-war book, because I honestly didn't remember there being anything about war in it at all.

The fact that I read it as part of a literature on war assignment didn't quite register with me. Most of the other kids read Catch-22 or The Things They Carried or A Farewell to Arms. My teacher actually recommended that I read Slaughterhouse Five; I don't think it was on the approved reading list. So I read it, and I do remember liking it. Some of the philosophical musings about time and free will stuck with me, even if the war bits didn't. The only part of the book that I really remembered was this passage describing Billy's limited perspective of time:

The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were looking across a desert at a mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clear. They could look at a peak or a bird or a cloud, at a stone right in front of them, or even down into a canyon behind them. But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole through which he could look, and welded to that eyehole was a pipe.

This was only the beginning of Billy's miseries in the metaphor. He was also strapped to a steel lattice which was bolted to a flatcar on rails, and there was no way he could turn his head or touch the pipe. The far end of the pipe rested on a bi-pod which was also belted to the flatcar. All Billy could see was the little dot at the end of the pipe. He didn't know he was on a flatcar, didn't even know there was anything peculiar about his situation.

The flatcar sometimes crept, sometimes went extremely fast, often stopped - went uphill, downhill, around curves, along straightaways. Whatever poor Billy saw through the pipe, he had no choice but to say to himself, "that's life"

Despite my lack of memory, this book is very much concerned with war. Specifically, it revolves around the bombing of Dresden. And though Billy is unstuck in time and travels between his childhood, adulthood, and time on Tralfamadore seemingly at random, his time as a prisoner of war is presented linearly. We follow him along the battle field, in a train, for a night at a temporary prison camp, and finally to Dresden for the fire-bombing and its immediate after-math. Because of the framing of the story, the entire journey seems both pointless and inevitable. Ultimately, it's a pretty pessimistic view of the human condition. But Vonnegut does accomplish his goal of writing a book about war without glorifying it in any way.

The image that sticks with me the most is Billy arriving in Dresden. When he was first captured, the Germans gave him a new coat. It's too small and lined with fur, and he ends up using it as a muff instead of a coat. His original boots fell apart, so he stole the pair from the prisoners' performance of Cinderella. They've been painted silver. Lacking a real coat, he also requisitioned a light blue curtain to wrap around himself in an effort to keep warm. It's a bizarre, almost comical image while also being incredibly sad. No one knows whether to take Billy seriously or not. I think it does a pretty good job of distilling the whole damn war to a single costume