Summary
The narrator bids us listen and declares that “Billy Pilgrim
has come unstuck in time.” Billy travels randomly through the moments
of his life without control over his chronological destination.
Born in 1922 in Ilium, New York, Billy grows
up a funny-looking weakling. He graduates high school and trains
to be an optometrist before being drafted. After his military service
in Germany, he suffers from a nervous collapse and is treated with
shock therapy. He recovers, marries, has two children, and becomes
a wealthy optometrist.
In 1968, Billy survives a plane
crash in Vermont; as he is recuperating, his wife dies in an accident.
After returning home, Billy goes on a radio show in New York City
to talk about his abduction by aliens in 1967. His
twenty-one-year-old daughter, Barbara, discovers his proselytizing
and brings him home, concerned for his sanity. The following month,
Billy writes a letter to his local paper about the aliens.
The day the letter is published, Billy is hard at work
on his second letter to the Ilium newspaper about lessons he learned
when he was taken to the planet Tralfamadore. He is glowing with
the expectation that his letter will console many people by explaining
the true nature of time. Barbara is distraught by his behavior.
She arrives at his house with newspaper in hand, unable to get Billy
to talk sense.
Billy describes his entry into the army, his training
as a chaplain's assistant in South Carolina, and his dazed trek
behind enemy lines after the disastrous Battle of the Bulge in World
War II. After the battle, Billy falls in with three other American
soldiers, two of whom are scouts and capable soldiers. The one who
is not, the antitank gunner Roland Weary, is a cruel, insecure man
who saves Billy's life repeatedly in acts that he thinks will make
him a hero.
Billy first time-shifts as he leans against a tree in
a Luxembourg forest. He has fallen behind the others and has little
will to continue. He swings through the extremes of his life: the
violet light of death, the red light of pre-birth. He is then a
small boy being thrown into the deep end of the YMCA swimming
pool by his father, a proponent of the “sink-or-swim” method.
Billy time-travels to 1965. He
is now forty-one years old and visiting his mother in a nursing
home. He blinks and finds himself at a Little League banquet for
his son, Robert, in 1958. He blinks again and
opens his eyes at a party in 1961, cheating
on his wife. Messily drunk, he passes out and wakes up again behind
enemy lines. Roland Weary is shaking him awake.
The two scouts decide to ditch Weary and Billy, much
to Weary's chagrin. All his life people have ditched him. He has
imagined himself and the scouts as the Three Musketeers, and he
blames Billy for breaking them up. Billy is suddenly giving a speech
in 1957 as the newly elected president of
the Ilium Lions Club. He is then back in the war, being captured
by Germans along with Weary.
Analysis
The narrative device of spastic time leads to a logical
and emotional instability in the novel, likening our experience
as readers to the experience Billy has in attempting to make sense
of his life. We can thus understand how Billy feels as he skips
uncontrollably through his life. By telling the beginning, middle,
and end of the story right away, Vonnegut departs from the familiar
literary signposts of cause and effect, suspense and climax. We
do not see Billy as everyone else in his life sees him; rather,
instead of seeing his life in a linear progression, understanding
it moment by moment, we see the entirety of his life come together
to define him. In other words, we can better understand and sympathize
with Billy's dazed wandering through the totality of events that
make up his existence.
Slaughterhouse-Five questions the possibility
of human dignity in a century marked by unprecedented massacres
and technological advancements in the machinery of mass murder.
The initial stages of Billy's war experience reveal a man denied
dignity. He lacks the proper accoutrements of a soldier, including
military attire and loyal companions who would give their lives
for him. Instead, Billy wears an absurd outfit and falls in with
Roland Weary, who grudgingly saves Billy only to feed the delusional
fantasy of his own heroism.
Weary, like the medieval crusaders and the Three Musketeers whom
he idolizes, believes he is acting in dignified and exalted accordance
with God's will. We see, however, that he actually has no more dignity
than Billy. Vonnegut indicates here that war is war and death is
death. Wars that seem like they are waged for religious or pious
reasons seem to trickle down to pride, which is what motivates Weary
despite the rhetoric about crusades and piety. The novel thus indicates
one of war's most tragic ironies: that there can be no heroes without
villains and victims, which makes even the most glorified aspects
of war useless in the face of death.
Even as the chapter begins, with a matter-of-fact rundown
of Billy's life story, Vonnegut confronts us with a litany of ironic deaths,
each accompanied by the rhetorical shrug “So it goes.” Billy's father
dies in a hunting accident right before Billy ships overseas for
combat; Billy is the only survivor in a plane full of optometrists
when they crash into a mountain in Vermont; Billy's wife dies of
accidental carbon monoxide poisoning on her way to visit him in the
hospital after the plane crash. These deaths lend weight to the declaration
in Chapter 1 by filmmaker Harrison Starr
that an antiwar book is as ineffective as an anti-glacier book.
An overarching irony in Slaughterhouse-Five is
that death does not discriminate. We already know that Billy will
survive war and a plane crash, despite the fact that he is ill suited
to a life of danger and hardship.
