The Slaughterhouse Five or the Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

By: Vaishak Sreekumar

The author is a first-year master’s student at Jindal School of International Affairs. He can be reached at 24jsia-vsreekumar@jgu.edu.in

Slaughterhouse-Five is an anti-war book as much as it is about a time-travelling optometrist kidnapped by aliens. Imagine your life being saved by a place used to store dead bodies as the world around you burns. This is the experience of the book’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. He was held prisoner in a slaughterhouse called “Schlachthof-fünf” (Slaughterhouse five) 60 feet beneath the ground as the city of Dresden, Germany was burned to the ground by the Allied forces. 

Slaughterhouse 5 written by American author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr is an attempt to talk about the Allied firebombing of Dresden in February 1945. This led to the death of around 25000-35000 people, mostly civilians as the city of Dresden had no major military instalments and was left largely undefended. The following firestorm and the destruction it caused to a town once known as “Florence on the Elbe” made it one of the largest and most controversial bombings carried out by the Allied forces. Critics often argue that it can even be construed as a “war crime” as the city had no strategic significance and led to the death of a large number of non-military personnel. 

The alternate title “The Children’s Crusade” comes about from a conversation the narrator has with a War buddy’s wife in the first chapter. She is mad at him for writing a war book because the media always portrays the wars as being fought by grizzled men in their 30s and 40s often played by the likes of “Frank Sinatra” or “John Wayne” but the real soldiers are often children. Conscripts who are 18,19,20 forced into fighting wars they have nothing to do with, standing at the cusp of life being forced to take away lives or give their own. Hence the book is called ‘The Children’s Crusade’ because it was always the children who won or lost in the war. 

The book attempts to talk about all this but never looks at it directly. It is somewhat autobiographical because the author Kurt Vonnegut Jr like the protagonist was present at Dresden as a prisoner of war during the bombing. In a few instances, the narrator even points to himself within the story and where he is concerning the protagonist. Yet he never details the event, he treats Dresden like the sun you can’t look at directly but knows that it’s had its effects. After the bombing, Dresden is described as the “face of the moon” cratered, hot and difficult to look at. The novel is about Dresden as much as it is about the psychological impact of time, death and uncertainty.  

The protagonist Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time and is then abducted by aliens (Tralfamadorians) who display him in their alien zoo. These aliens exist in a 4th dimension and experience all time at once, hence having no significance for life or death and the strange human concept of free will. But the protagonist argues that aliens had no role in him being unstuck in time, they merely helped him understand it. He had been able to skip between and travel to any point in his life (often unwillingly), since the time he was hiking through a forest during the war in 1944. Whether these dissociative episodes are symptoms of PTSD and hallucinations that are brought on by a sense of guilt or the reality is left to the reader to decide.  

The novel is supposed to be a serious work but is also fundamentally absurd, there are parts of it that are extremely morbid and difficult to read but are also viscerally funny and contain sentences that make you laugh out loud. The disjointed, non-linear and magical narrative of the book makes it one of the most honest retellings of the war. This book is about how a person who has experienced trauma would tell you about the war. It is an anti-war book because it shows you what war does, it never tells you that the war is bad or the soldiers are bad but shows you how confusing and devastating war can be. Both to a City like Dresden and to a man like Billy Pilgrim. 

The novel is simple, unadorned and unsentimental; in stating the obviousness of war it forces the reader to become less passive.  It shocks readers not by saying that death is bad but that it is a matter of fact. Whenever somebody dies in the novel, whether it be the prisoner of war dying from gangrene, the 25000 people of Dresden burning alive or the soldier shot for trying to steal a teapot; it is always followed by the phrase ‘so it goes’. This harkens back to the Tralfamadorian concept of time, anyone is being dead and being born at the same time, hence either moment holds no particular significance.  

“Even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death” 

Billy Pilgrim's being unmoored in time also gives him some special abilities. Like watching a War film backwards, where people come back to life, warplanes extinguish fires by retrieving bombs which are then taken back to factories to be disassembled by industrious Americans so that the bombs may never hurt anybody ever again. Billy is a passenger in his time travels, he has no control over what part of his life he is travelling to, just like he has no control over what happens in his life once he gets there. So, it goes. 

The author also uses the non-linear structure of the book to induce contrast and subvert expectations. The ennui-filled life of American suburbia is constantly contrasted with the POWs in WW2. The 100 American prisoners were transported in trains, ate nothing, slept in their excrement and were treated like cattle on the way to the slaughterhouse, where everyone died except them. This is a guilt that Billy Pilgrim carries for the rest of his life. There is a contrast between the slaughterhouse and the zoo. Billy Pilgrim is barely a man in the War, he is barely human, constantly emasculated, hungry, and given women’s clothes to wear. In Tralfamadore Billy is a prime specimen of humanity kept for all to adore, given a famous actress as a wife, with whom he instantly produces a child and is whole on all accounts.   

Slaughterhouse- five made me appreciate honesty in content, craft and character. Honesty is not in telling the facts or laying out the statistics but in the honesty of experiences put through a sublime craft that can inspire unique and original understanding. 

At its core Slaughterhouse Five asks the question, what is an anti-war novel? Can there even be one? How much can something like a novel do against wars? It answers these questions in its non-linear fashion in the first chapter of the book – 

“It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is except for the birds” 

The views expressed in this article are those of the author (s). They do not reflect the views or opinions of Diplomania or its members.