Books |
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
By
Published: May 20, 2009
Category:
Fiction
Kurt Vonnegut was born on November 11, 1922, exactly four years after the end of World War I. On Mother’s Day in 1944, while he was home on leave from the Army, his mother killed herself. A year later, Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden when Allied bombers firebombed the city, killing 135,000 people — more dead than from the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. And just for icing on that tower of irony: Decades later, his sister Alice died from cancer just hours after husband died in a train crash.
From those facts alone, you could imagine going through life with a permanent smirk and a never-ending shrug. Or just taking to bed.
Instead, Kurt Vonnegut wrote a series of books that have established him as a national treasure, a 20th Century Mark Twain. His vision is all-seeing, but his touch is gentle. He leaves religion for suckers, but he preaches the gospel of love and forgiveness. He has taught writing at prestigious institutions, but his own work is shot through with characters and themes from science fiction, a lowbrow genre. And although he doesn’t write lurid sex or racy dialogue, his books have a nasty habit of being banned — in the early ‘70s in North Dakota, they actually burned copies of “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
Well, that’s just some of the title. The rest:
“The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a Fourth-Generation German-American Now Living in Easy Circumstances on Cape Cod (and Smoking Too Much) Who, as an American Infantry Scout Hors de Combat, as a Prisoner of War, Witnessed the Fire-Bombing of Dresden, Germany, the Florence of the Elbe, a Long Time Ago, and Survived to Tell the Tale: This Is a Novel Somewhat in the Telegraphic Schizophrenic Manner of Tales of the Planet Tralfamadore, Where The Flying Saucers Come From”
Yes, you could see how just that would upset someone with a strict regard for titles and subtitles. Or even for plots, which are not Vonnegut’s apparent strength: Vonnegut likes to set up a situation and then digress. He does what you’re never supposed to: talk directly to the reader. He introduces characters from his own life — in the books, he is sometimes a character named “Kurt Vonnegut.” [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
So it really won’t help you if I relate what happens in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” I mean: Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time. A hundred words (or more) won’t clear that up. And even judicious quoting won’t convey the charm of Vonnegut to those who haven’t read him. And if I tell you the “message” of this book — “Be kind. Don’t hurt. Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot’s wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them” — I’m not going to advance your understanding much.
But there is one passage in “Slaughterhouse-Five” that is widely quoted, and it’s the sort of thing only Kurt Vonnegut would write. Maybe if you’ve missed this masterpiece, maybe these words will convince you to try “Slaughterhouse-Five.” If not, as Vonnegut says often in these pages, “So it goes.” Anyway, here:
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. . . .The bombers opened their bomb-bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and snipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
Lovely thought. Lovely man. Books like no other.
