Slaughterhouse Five

SlaughterhouseFive or The Childrens' Crusade, a duty dance with death

Kurt Vonnegut's novel contrasting the concept of free will with that of being ordered to fight a war. "Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time." That means he knows his personal future, all the way to the end and a little beyond, and he cannot change it at all. Without FreeWill, he is condemned to witness a long slice of the terrors of the TwentiethCentury?, always knowing exactly what will happen next. Only in his unremembered dreams is he free, and even then he lays twitching & squirming, talking in his sleep. He talks only of giving up, quitting, & surrendering.

The novel is set in a German prisoner-of-war camp in a converted slaughterhouse outside of Dresden immediately prior to the firebombing of the city. Vonnegut was an actual prisoner in this camp and so can write with the force of personal experience of these events. The firebombing was punitive and of no military consequence, the same as the atomic bombing of Japan. And the event of the night of the bombing itself never appears in the book, only its vivid memory. -- PhlIp

I heard a theory that the military objective of the firebombing was as a warning from the British to Stalin that even though the Brits did not possess atomic weapons, they were still fully capable of destroying a city by conventional means. The idea was to give Stalin the hint not to try to take more territory in the aftermath of the fall of Germany than he did. -- Andy Pierce

"Poignant & hilarious. Threaded with compassion and, behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral statement." -- TheBostonGlobe?.

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre. Things like "poo-ta-weet?"

The birds show that life does exist after war, that life doesn't end after war, which is life's greatest enemy. Additionally, the term "so it goes" is a term used by Billy, who borrowed it from the Tralfamadorians, a race of green toilet plunger shaped aliens that can see the fourth dimension, which they say is time occurring and recurring endlessly and simultaneously. This is to say they can see others as long caterpillars with one end being a baby and the other an elderly version. Because they can view the fourth dimension, when someone "dies" they see that they are not dead, they are just not in the best state at that moment in time. Since they can see "time", they have already seen the end of their own race, which is they destroy themselves and the universe while testing new fuels for their space crafts. Additionally the Tralfamadorians are amused with humanity's "false" belief in free will, which they have only been able to find in the human race out of all the races they have studied. -- John Webber

All of that is Vonnegut's camouflage. -- PhlIp