Analysis

Kurt Vonnegut has written the novel Slaughterhouse 5, based around his experiences in the war and in the city of Dresden. Although the main character, Billy Pilgrim, is quite a simple-minded and dull person, he encounters many things in his life that are exciting, dangerous and out of the ordinary. Billy leads a relatively normal life, except that he can travel backwards and forwards in time, visiting different moments in his life. He claims to have been taken to a planet named Tralfamadore where he learned many lessons about life and time that he took back with him to earth and lived by.

This could be perfectly true, or Kurt Vonnegut could have just been exploring the effects of war on a man, showing how his experiences meant he suffered trauma later on in his life and found a way to block out this trauma by giving himself a logical (in his mind) explanation for his feelings. Billy Pilgrim may have just needed a reason for everything he suffered; that it had to happen because it had always happened that way (something he learned on Tralfamadore). The time travelling he experienced could have just been a subconscious trick of his mind, flashing back to different times in his life, an improvement on the last one he had been experiencing.

Kurt Vonnegut was trying to communicate through this novel that reality and free will should not be taken for granted. Whether Billy Pilgrim was just imagining the things he saw or not does not change the outcome of the story at all. His reality was warped but he believed it to be true, thus making it, in some senses, true anyway. The Tralfamadorians question the idea of free will, saying that all events happen because they have to happen, because they have always happened. Slaughterhouse 5 is an anti-war book and the author clearly has a very strong point of view about this. The author himself crops up in a few places as a minor character throughout the book, which shows the connection between the author and the story. This also shows that Billy is in fact connected to reality, but also shows his struggle to fit in with normal human society.

Kurt Vonnegut states that his anti-war book is a failure because it failed to discourage war. Vonnegut uses a satiric tone throughout the book which makes parts of it humorous and displays Billy’s feelings towards war and time, and that he just doesn’t seem to care about life anymore. With all the tragic events that happen in Billy Pilgrim’s life, as well as the quite amazing, unbelievable ones, the book tells that at the end of the day, something as illogical and horrific as war cannot be affected by one man. His insignificance after all that has happened reiterates the Tralfamadorian belief that we should just ignore the bad parts of life, as they cannot be tampered with or changed anyway.

Slaughterhouse 5 contains quite a few important morals and views that can be interpreted whichever way you see fit, and although confusing at time, this novel is a must-read!