“All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.”
The idea of free-will has been a historically controversial dilemma of philosophy since 300 B.C.E. For most, free-will is an intrusively introspective concept that many find to be too dense to articulately navigate and comprehend. As humans, we find comfort in the established structure of our everyday lives and operate in hopes of finding the quintessence of what makes us feel alive. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut dismantles the reader’s understandings of free-will and self-determination in this seemingly “anti-life” novel, outlining an American soldier’s return to civilian life, while coping with the mortality of war and PTSD from his experiences in the firebombing of Dresden, Germany during World War 2. As a person and writer who suffers from PTSD due to violent trauma, this novel’s structure and central themes were profoundly transformative when I first read it. For those struggling with mental health or existentialism, this book could either open doors with amelioration, or shatter ambition with dread.
Framed as an anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse-Five observes Billy Pilgrim, a man “stuck in time” as a result of his PTSD, following his traumatic experiences as a solider during World War 2. The events and experiences of Billy throughout the novel occur nonlinearly, in that the timeline ignores a traditional past-to-present format. This formatting can deter those who prefer a more comprehensively linear timeline, as piecing together the events of the novel can only be done in retrospect, rather than cumulatively, which can be challenging for a first-time reader. Where one chapter, Billy is in the midst of his service in World War 2, the next chapter transitions to 20 years in the future, neglecting the moments that occurred on the pages prior.
Through being able to instantaneously “time travel” to various moments of his past, present, and future life, Billy visits a myriad of settings and circumstances that allow for Vonnegut to brilliantly highlight various thematic vulnerabilities within his character. The setting of the novel is executed in an unorthodox manor, as Billy travels from 1940s Germany, to outer space in an alien UFO, to present-day 1960s New York, and so forth. In doing so, Vonnegut exemplifies the analogous relationship between life and the passage of time in the form of cyclical, determined motion, rather than forward, linear progression. For example, while prisoner to the aliens that abducted him, they describe time to Billy by saying, “All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is”. Whereas this describes a different understanding of our fundamental perception of time, it also illustrates an internal struggle that Billy grapples with throughout the novel. He cannot change his past, and subsequently grapples with the justification of his feelings in the present. As explained, the themes that Vonnegut includes have a unique double purpose, as they are not only an outward lesson to the reader, but also a peephole into the internal chaos that Billy has experienced throughout his life.
One of the central themes that Vonnegut explored thoroughly within Slaughterhouse-Five is the concept of time occurring all at once, and our inconsequential role in determining our own fate in the universe. This theme serves as the apathetic engine piloting the hollow shell of Billy, as he revisits moments of his life in search for an understanding of his own mortality through different vicissitudes, from his time as a German POW, to being held hostage in a voyeuristic extraterrestrial zoo. The frequent altering of settings allows Billy to dissociate from his suffering in the present, but in the process, relive the sufferings of his past and future, each time revealing more about his mental atrophy. Vonnegut repeatedly hammers in the chilling message of the insignificant significance of death in relation to the motion of the universe, with each passing character death, trivial or not, following the same stoically delivered line from Billy: “so it goes”.
Having survived the actual firebombing of Dresden during World War 2, Vonnegut’s illustration of Billy’s “time travel” is not to be taken literally, or at least not at face value like that of Zemeckis’ Back to the Future. Billy, following a return to normalcy from World War 2, suffers from PTSD flashbacks, therein resulting in his concept of reality to be skewed by his inability to maintain his own sanity in the present.
The University of Florida’s Department of Clinical and Health Psychology outlines the tribulations of one’s PTSD flashbacks, citing “Ordinary events can serve as reminders of the trauma and trigger flashbacks or intrusive images. A person having a flashback, which can come in the form of images, sounds, smells, or feelings, may lose touch with reality, and believe that the traumatic event is happening all over again. While not uncommon for a soldier returning from war to experience these symptoms, by hyperbolizing the nature of Billy’s flashbacks, such as being spontaneously abducted by aliens, Vonnegut acutely focuses on the internal struggles of a person with PTSD, rather than observing it from a point of clinical, outward objectivity.
Throughout Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut writes with an ambiguity and a level of conscious suspicion to his own writing though – a story as bizarre as his own could not simply be told in a cohesive manor, and thus is framed around a universe of absurdities to match that lens. With that being said, this novel can be read and interpreted as sci-fi entertainment, just as much so as it could be read to be factually informative and valuable. The interpretation is left at the hands of the reader, which compliments the reach at which the novel has to those potentially unfamiliar with the topics highlighted above, such as trauma and existentialism, but does not exclude those who want to approach it from a more dense, philosophical angle.
This novel panders to the intrepid-minded, however, as the titanic roles of both the universe and time are teased to serve as antagonists, rather than concrete ideas. The absurdity is evident, but the individual magnitude of consequence that Vonnegut appoints to each of those themes respectively, drastically affects how Billy is able to function in each iteration of his life, figuratively or not. That said, Vonnegut makes it pertinently known that our role in the universe is the passenger, not the driver, and that death and humanity are trivial in the passing of time. For instance, Billy keeps a framed prayer on his office wall that reads: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference”. It is through these subtle reminders that Vonnegut periodically injects, that reminds the reader that the universe is always one step ahead of Billy, and subsequently whoever is reading the novel.
The novel does not read kindly to the faint-hearted, as Vonnegut consistently illustrates various details of war and mortality that are undoubtedly as unnerving as they are gruesome. From vividly describing dismembered body parts, to the tragic motions of death (or lack thereof in this case), Vonnegut does little to shy away from the cringe-worthy details – squeamish readers beware! Further, the exploration of religiously challenging themes can come across as offensive to those who identify as non-secular, and thus should approach this novel with interpretive caution.
As mentioned previously, having survived the actual bombing of Dresden, Vonnegut parallels his experiences to that of Billy’s. In turn, this allows for him to accurately depict PTSD, not from a sterilized matter-of-fact view, but rather a cryptic, yet autobiographical perspective from the brain of someone experiencing it first-hand. This notion, in return, compliments Vonnegut’s ability to accurately depict a life of PTSD to an audience that may not understand it, as to a neurotypical person, this kind of psyche could be completely alien. To his merit, this makes Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five a roller-coaster at its worst, and a transcendental piece of informative philosophy at its best.
