Kurt Vonnegutâs Slaughterhouse 5 is seen as his best work and a modern classic although, having completed it, Iâm left wondering why. Blending science fiction with his memoirs Vonnegut has created a meta-fictional novel where time travel is a primary plot device; one that allows him the freedom to dismiss chronology in the telling of his tale.
Billy Pilgrim is a war veteran, having been a prisoner of war in a converted abattoir in Dresden. Years after the war he is involved in a plane crash which causes him to become âunstuck in timeâ; a strange condition that allows him to travel to any point in his life, or even to the planet Tralfamadore where the aliens that live there view life as a single representation of every moment. Through his frequent travels in time, Billy Pilgrim gets to relive many points of his life such as Dresden, his marriage, and even his death; all of these combine to show Billyâs attempt at making sense of the world, his fatalist conclusions permeating the novel.
The story of Billy Pilgrim doesnât start until the second chapter, the first, instead, being the authorâs apology for the novelâs mess (although he states you canât make sense of a massacre) and how, in his mind, the book came to be. The prose is minimalist and repetitive. Phrases appear regularly or statements reappear reworded. The use of âso it goesâ whenever something dies, be it a person or bubbles in champagne, is understandable, however, in its need to demonstrate death as something routine and cheap, it does become grating.
There are many characters in Slaughterhouse 5 although I donât feel that any of them were given much depth. People appear for a paragraph and then Billy Pilgrim is off on his travels before you have a chance to get to know them. Even Billy failed to hold my attention, possibly because we fail to really get to know him. The author spends time telling us about him rather than showing him doing anything which, I feel, cheapens the experience. His condition, that of being âunstuck in timeâ, leaves a nice ambiguity about the novel although itâs highly probable that his travelling is a delusional passage between memories brought on by the trauma of witnessing the bombing of Dresden.
Maybe the book is a product of its time or maybe thereâs something Iâm missing but Slaughterhouse 5 is not a novel Iâd recommend. Having no experience of Vonnegutâs other work I canât say whether this book, being part memoir, is a typical example of his canon. While the novel is understandably a mess, I canât help but feel that the prose and characterisation are lacking and what, on paper, sounds like a great idea has been put through a literary slaughterhouse. So it goes.
Slaughterhouse 5
Posted : 17 years, 5 months ago on 17 November 2006 12:280 comments, Reply to this entry