Not since Slaughterhouse-Three has master of horror Kurt Vonnegut come out with something so diabolical.
Kidding.
I had been curious about "Slaughterhouse-Five" long before I read it, flipping through a few pages while browsing at Barnes & Noble or even watching about ten minutes of the 1972 movie- only ten minutes because it's a very confusing plot if you don't know what's going on from the beginning. I'd read reviews or descriptions saying that it was, in a nutshell, a humorous anti-war book with touches of science fiction and philosophy. But what finally prompted me to pick it up and read it was a recent episode of LOST in which one of the characters becomes "unstuck in time", an idea borrowed directly from Vonnegut's book.
Becoming unstuck in time is exactly what happens to Billy Pilgrim. The idea behind it is that while we imagine time to be a linear sequence of events, we are actually just living out moments in a cycle to be repeated over and over again. Billy Pilgrim, instead of living his moments consecutively, jumps from one to another at random- at one point he is a young man in World War II, and the next he is an married and attending his daughter's wedding.
While Pilgrim is jumping about in time I thought a lot about how fate and free will would be affected by time being a cycle, going in a loop. If everything returns from whence it came, do we have any choice about where we're going? Can we affect it? Billy Pilgrim can't, and he seems to accept it pretty easily. As he goes from watching the horrors of the Dresden fire-bombing of WWII to more relaxed years of old age and family life and even his death, he seems to just be along for the ride.
Death, in fact, is probably the most interestingly handled idea in the book. After every mention of death- from the death of a dog, to genocide and mass murder, to individual deaths of soldiers, to even the main character's own death- is the phrase, "So it goes." Every death in the book seems even and inevitable, and with that simple phrase, okay.
The book's strong anti-war message is probably best described in a part of the story when, due to his unfixed position in time, Billy Pilgrim watches a war movie in reverse. It is the most direct imagery in the book, and it was also beautiful, in a way. If you only read a small part of this already short novel, I'd recommend that one.
Kidding.
I had been curious about "Slaughterhouse-Five" long before I read it, flipping through a few pages while browsing at Barnes & Noble or even watching about ten minutes of the 1972 movie- only ten minutes because it's a very confusing plot if you don't know what's going on from the beginning. I'd read reviews or descriptions saying that it was, in a nutshell, a humorous anti-war book with touches of science fiction and philosophy. But what finally prompted me to pick it up and read it was a recent episode of LOST in which one of the characters becomes "unstuck in time", an idea borrowed directly from Vonnegut's book.
Becoming unstuck in time is exactly what happens to Billy Pilgrim. The idea behind it is that while we imagine time to be a linear sequence of events, we are actually just living out moments in a cycle to be repeated over and over again. Billy Pilgrim, instead of living his moments consecutively, jumps from one to another at random- at one point he is a young man in World War II, and the next he is an married and attending his daughter's wedding.
While Pilgrim is jumping about in time I thought a lot about how fate and free will would be affected by time being a cycle, going in a loop. If everything returns from whence it came, do we have any choice about where we're going? Can we affect it? Billy Pilgrim can't, and he seems to accept it pretty easily. As he goes from watching the horrors of the Dresden fire-bombing of WWII to more relaxed years of old age and family life and even his death, he seems to just be along for the ride.
Death, in fact, is probably the most interestingly handled idea in the book. After every mention of death- from the death of a dog, to genocide and mass murder, to individual deaths of soldiers, to even the main character's own death- is the phrase, "So it goes." Every death in the book seems even and inevitable, and with that simple phrase, okay.
The book's strong anti-war message is probably best described in a part of the story when, due to his unfixed position in time, Billy Pilgrim watches a war movie in reverse. It is the most direct imagery in the book, and it was also beautiful, in a way. If you only read a small part of this already short novel, I'd recommend that one.
1 comment:
I have to admit a major shortcoming - I have never read this. I did get the chance to see it at Second City once though, so that makes me appropriately cultured, right? I mean seeing the movie is the same as reading the book - so seeing the play is even a step above that being as plays are so much more than movies....
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