*N.B. this contains a couple of spoilers but definitely not enough to ruin the book for you.*
Thumbing through the books my moderately small local library had to offer, automatically skipping the so-called “chick lit” and fantasy sections, and meandering to the shelf that fell under the broad title of ‘fiction:’ the kind of title I like. To me, fiction symbolises the books which cannot be pigeonholed, the books that are novel and largely unpredictable, the books that don’t make you cringe with their banal prose or exceptionally large plot holes… those books are precisely the kind of books that I like.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 epitomises this philosophy:
Is it autobiographical? Semi-autobiographical? Historical fiction? Comedy? Science fiction?
Answer: It is both all and none of the above. Despite” officially” (read: according to the publisher) being a semi-autobiographical account of Vonnegut’s time as a prisoner of war during the British bombing of Dresden in WW2, it is so much more than that.
To run the risk of sounding incredibly clichéd, the structuring of the novel is a revolution comprised of fragmented and disjointed narratives and parts that make up the whole – the whole being the life of our protagonist Billy Pilgrim. This structure inevitably drives the plot and leads to the beautiful conclusion (of course, in the typical style of the book, the conclusion comes right in the middle) that: “All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.”
This quotations justifies this structure and embodies the entire characterisation of Billy; whilst both beautiful and uplifting, it also exposes his restrictions as a narrator: because of the continuing existence of his wartime experience, he cannot bring himself to tell the full story. Instead, he gives us snippets in the form of anecdotes and caricatures. This is a man who is evidently suffering from some form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, who cannot bring himself to re-live those experiences. To counteract this he describes himself as a time-traveller: continually impermanent, his lack of definitive physical presence is a sure side effect of war. The subtle nod to the inescapability of wars past, present and future is, of course, demoralising, but it is completely necessary, as was the notion conveyed by Billy that war – be they your wars or not – manifests itself inside of you and becomes a volcano, largely dormant but prone to astonishing eruptions, for the rest of your life.
Vonnegut presents himself as a tertiary character in the novel with just the occasional one line interjection, one from “the man writing this book.” This convention is something I had never come across before and it allowed for so much dispute over which characters Vonnegut has written himself into, then edited down, shearing off this-or-that personality trait, trying on costumes in human form.
The amount of subtext in this relatively short book is staggering, but the speculation that comes with it ensures that this is a book that will go on being discussed, dissected and debated for decades to come.
Words by Beth Chaplow