Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

 

By total accident I finished Slaughterhouse 5 on Veterans Day, so it especially sank in as a great anti-war novel. This was my second reading of the book by Kurt Vonnegut and yet another exercise in rereading books that I only read in my youth to make me look cool.

The story is told by a US serviceman who was a prisoner and survivor of the bombing at Dresden, though he is primarily narrating the life and times of Billy Pilgrim; who himself was there at Dresden. We watch Billy's life in fragments, because as an alien abductee he learned to time travel. From the sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout to the alien Tralfamadorians, Billy learns that our conception of time is self limited, and to really experience time is to be in all moments at once.

So suffice it to say that Slaughterhouse 5 certainly made me feel like I looked cool, and more importantly that I thought about things in a cool way. I read it in college, and was taken by a lot of the overt text. Back then, the book actually didn't register as a work of anti-war to me, instead I would quote the lines about never dying, riff on the conceptions of time, and would talk about some of the fun sections like when they play the war movies backwards and they look like a massive clean up operation. I approached the novel as though it were written by Kilgore Trout; which is to say I ignored subtext and took it on the nose.

What started as a reread quickly transformed into a realization. Over a hundred-thousand killed at Dresden, most of whom were civilians, and this was America's heroic war. Vonnegut writes the tragedy as inescapable; while time travel is real in the universe of this novel it cannot change the course of things that happen. For all the niceties of the Tralfamadorians who believe no one is ever truly gone and Vonnegut's famous refrain "so it goes", every portrayed death in this novel is still shattering. Because the reader knows this is not how you really experience time, it is only how you experience novels. 

The "cool way of thinking about time and our existence in it" was a parody; that we cease to exist when we die is the reason why horrific acts like Dresden are considered crimes. Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 is concise, it is itself a Slaughterhouse of a book; an efficient conveyor of death. Even the much vaunted "so it goes" after every death starts to sound mechanical. There are no truly great lines of dialogue or even entirely compelling characters (Billy Pilgrim himself is hardly endearing in any meaningful way), but as a work of fiction it is moving and impactful. 

As you travel through time with Billy and the Narrator, you move through a perverse range of settings; war torn Germany to pleasant, upper class American Suburb to a human zoo on an alien planet. You start to get the sense that Vonnegut, despite the misery and death, is having fun. A true "comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable" type of novel. I'm grateful I returned to it, I probably will again and again.