"Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut

The following are excerpts from a review on Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children's Crusade. I was having such a hard time putting in words just how I felt about this book, and when I came across this I had to share! Each paragraph hopefully gives you a better understanding of K. Vonnegut's frame of mind when he wrote this. My hope is for us to discuss these themes as well as the book itself. I encourage you, as you read this book, to become Billy Pilgrim. Everything about him is so real and human.

"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." - Robert Scholes

There are no villains or heroes in Vonnegut's books. According to Ernest W. Ranly, all the characters are "Comic, pathetic pieces, juggled about by some inexplicable faith, like puppets," (Riley 1974 p.454). If there is no-one to take the blame for the bad happenings in the book, it can only mean that the villain is God Himself ("or Herself or Itself or Whatever" - from Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus, 1990). God Almighty had to be the one who put us into the amber, who had created us the way we are.

Another obvious theme of the book is that death is inevitable and that no matter who dies, life still goes on. The phrase "So it goes" recurs one hundred and six times: it appears every time anybody dies in the novel, and sustains the circular quality of the book. It enables the book, and thus Vonnegut's narration, to go on. It must have been hard writing a book about such an experience and it probably helped the author to look upon death through the eyes of Tralfamadorians:

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes,' (ibid p.27).

As you noticed, the book has different messages; everybody may see something else as its main meaning. I think that Vonnegut wanted to tell us, the readers, that no matter what happens, we should retain our humanity. We should not let anybody or anything reign upon our personalities, be it a god, be it a politician or anybody else. We should be ourselves - human and humane beings.

I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction. The sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar, I read. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. So it goes.

Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them. And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes, (Vonnegut 1969 p.21-22).