Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
The Destructiveness of War
Whether we read Slaughterhouse-Five as
a science-fiction novel or a quasi-autobiographical moral statement,
we cannot ignore the destructive properties of war, since the catastrophic
firebombing of the German town of Dresden during World War II situates
all of the other seemingly random events. From his swimming lessons
at the YMCA to his speeches at the Lions
Club to his captivity in Tralfamadore, Billy Pilgrim shifts in and
out of the meat locker in Dresden, where he very narrowly survives
asphyxiation and incineration in a city where fire is raining from
the sky.
However, the not-so-subtle destructiveness of the war
is evoked in subtle ways. For instance, Billy is quite successful
in his postwar exploits from a materialistic point of view: he is
president of the Lions Club, works as a prosperous optometrist,
lives in a thoroughly comfortable modern home, and has fathered
two children. While Billy seems to have led a productive postwar
life, these seeming markers of success speak only to its surface.
He gets his job not because of any particular prowess but as a result
of his father-in-law’s efforts. More important, at one point in
the novel, Billy walks in on his son and realizes that they are
unfamiliar with each other. Beneath the splendor of his success
lies a man too war-torn to understand it. In fact, Billy’s name,
a diminutive form of William, indicates that he is more an immature
boy than a man.
Vonnegut, then, injects the science-fiction thread, including
the Tralfamadorians, to indicate how greatly the war has disrupted Billy’s
existence. It seems that Billy may be hallucinating about his experiences
with the Tralfamadorians as a way to escape a world destroyed by
war—a world that he cannot understand. Furthermore, the Tralfamadorian
theory of the fourth dimension seems too convenient a device to
be more than just a way for Billy to rationalize all the death with
he has seen face-to-face. Billy, then, is a traumatized man who
cannot come to terms with the destructiveness of war without invoking
a far-fetched and impossible theory to which he can shape the world.
The Illusion of Free Will
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut utilizes
the Tralfamadorians, with their absurdly humorous toilet-plunger
shape, to discuss the philosophical question of whether free will
exists. These aliens live with the knowledge of the fourth dimension,
which, they say, contains all moments of time occurring and reoccurring
endlessly and simultaneously. Because they believe that all moments
of time have already happened (since all moments repeat themselves
endlessly), they possess an attitude of acceptance about their fates,
figuring that they are powerless to change them. Only on Earth,
according to the Tralfamadorians, is there talk of free will, since
humans, they claim, mistakenly think of time as a linear progression.
Throughout his life, Billy runs up against forces that
counter his free will. When Billy is a child, his father lets him
sink into the deep end of a pool in order to teach him how to swim.
Much to his father’s dismay, however, Billy prefers the bottom of
the pool, but, against his free will to stay there, he is rescued.
Later, Billy is drafted into the war against his will. Even as a
soldier, Billy is a joke, lacking training, supplies, and proper
clothing. He bobs along like a puppet in Luxembourg, his civilian
shoes flapping on his feet, and marches through the streets of Dresden
draped in the remains of the scenery from a production of Cinderella.
Even while Vonnegut admits the inevitability of death,
with or without war, he also tells us that he has instructed his
sons not to participate in massacres or in the manufacture of machinery
used to carry them out. But acting as if free will exists does not
mean that it actually does. As Billy learns to accept the Tralfamadorian
teachings, we see how his actions indicate the futility of free
will. Even if Billy were to train hard, wear the proper uniform,
and be a good soldier, he might still die like the others in Dresden
who are much better soldiers than he. That he survives the incident
as an improperly trained joke of a soldier is a testament to the
deterministic forces that render free will and human effort an illusion.
