So It Goes

Slaughterhouse-Five is Kurt Vonnegut’s accepted masterpiece. A best-seller when it came out in 1969, it’s still widely-read, makes lists of all-time best books, is taught in schools, and it’s frequently banned by bumptious authorities—in 2024 it was pulled from school libraries in Texas and Florida.

Vonnegut’s sixth novel in 17 years, it drew attention to a writer who’d been growing with each book. For those 21 years and more Vonnegut had been trying to find a literary form for his experience in World War II, when he witnessed the firebombing of Dresden. As it happened, when Slaughterhouse-Five was published it caught the spirit of an age ready for anti-war stories.

It’s a mosaic of a text, with short chapters subdivided into shorter sections, sometimes only a paragraph long. The first chapter presents itself as non-fiction, a memoir in which Vonnegut recalls old jobs and visiting with a friend and revisiting Dresden, and also talks about how and why he came to write the novel. Vonnegut’s ability to fuse opposing tones into something profound was perhaps never so visible as in this book, and it only builds from this opening chapter.

The rest of the novel gives us the story of Billy Pilgrim, a chaplain’s assistant in World War II who becomes unstuck in time, is captured by the Germans, is sent to Dresden as part of a POW work crew, lives through Allied bombers firebombing the city, survives the war, gets psychiatric help, reads some books by science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout, marries, becomes an optometrist, has kids, is abducted by aliens who perceive the universe as a four-dimensional whole instead of a sequence of linear time, is returned to Earth, survives a plane crash, travels to New York, tries to describe his alien experiences on the radio, is patronized by his children, and is eventually assassinated in the future world of 1976. Little of that happens in order.

Being unstuck in time, pieces of Billy’s life that should be widely separated run up against each other. It’s something like the operation of memory, but more complex. Despite all the jumping-around in Billy’s long life, the story remains clear. You know what happens to him when. But the skipping about in time puts the different eras and aspects of his life in ironic contrast with each other.

Billy’s experience as a prisoner of war is central, the book always circling back to those months, and that sequence of events is largely presented in chronological order. The book also provides wider, if scrambled, context for his wartime ordeals by giving us glimpses of what happens after. We follow Billy’s life in two different ways.

If it took Vonnegut many years to come up with this structure, it may be that he needed to live those years to figure out what it was that he had to do. Billy’s story is dominated by the War, but it’s also about how the events of the war fit into the overall shape of his life, and how wartime trauma informs or is overcome by the other things that happen to him.

I think Vonnegut also needed to write his earlier books to get to the point where he was able to write Slaughterhouse-Five. That’s not just because the emotional power of the book needed a master’s level of craft prose that can be dry but rich, rhythmic but complex, emotional but meditative, funny but sad. And it’s not just because he was able to build up characters and symbols in previous books—most notably Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians. It’s because over the course of those books Vonnegut developed ways to depict time and reality, and the way memory fits into an unfolding life.

He also developed themes about his perception of World War II, how he made sense of it, and what he wanted to say about it. Slaughterhouse-Five is a book in which predestination’s a given. Billy moves back and forth in his timeline but can’t change anything. He can’t be smarter or nicer. He can only be who he is.

The mechanism of moving in time is underplayed because Billy can’t do anything differently despite his knowledge of times to come. The absurdity of time travel becomes part of the absurdity of reality and history. Vonnegut’s aware that he’s describing an atrocity against Nazi Germany, itself guilty of unimaginable atrocities. That’s not irony or drama, that’s just his experience. What can you do but acknowledge the weirdness of it all?

Vonnegut cross-examines himself in many ways through the book, even appearing as a minor character in one chapter during Billy’s time as a prisoner, and that self-lacerating honesty’s easy to admire. He finds ways to describe the terror of war, speaking through masks, and drawing on different incidents in different ways—things don’t just happen in the book, they’re foreshadowed, and referred to obliquely, and then finally occur with the feel of a jigsaw piece snapping into place.

The book’s structure and emotional power makes it easy for critics to celebrate. That was especially true in 1969, when the anti-war theme and the sub-theme of war as something inflicted on the very young resonated in a country that was divided over a completely different war. The methods Vonnegut evolved to express his personal experiences and perception of reality spoke to the society the progress of time had created around him.