Kurt Vonnegut weaves ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’, a novel of non-linear mosaic set in anecdotal style, as a narrative of confronting personal horrors as well as an imploration to mankind to address its own absurdity in the horrors of war. It is a concatenation of self-reflexive footnotes with the protagonist Billy Pilgrim’s adventures in factual reality and intrusions from fictional realm intercutting as workings of a troubled mind. Vonnegut resurrects mythical/ historical episodes like destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, enslavement of children at Children’s Crusade, the 1760 devastation of Dresden, Nazi violence on Jews, atomic bombing of Hiroshima, napalm bombings and daily body count from Vietnam, assassination of Kennedy and Luther King Jr. in order to arrive on death, senseless cruelty and injustice of the Dresden bombings by Allied forces. The act of absolution by literary devices is attained by exorcising traumatic encounters vis-a-vis hallucinatory travels both in time and space, complemented by satire through exaggeration and ridicule, and hearkening science-fiction motifs. Lines are blurred as to what constitutes the author’s justice towards personal memory and fictionalized incidents of self, or the projected self in the protagonist, as at the onset itself he writes “all of this happened, more or less”; followed by a submission which reads that the “war parts, anyway, are pretty much true”.
It is the unbearable reality of wartime which pushes boys to commit crimes beyond their age and reason, motives beyond their pale, which they justify along the heroics of ‘The Three Musketeers’. Being ‘listless playthings of enormous forces’, the soldiers perform the ‘duty-dance of death’, enforcing personal and collective tragedies. They enter the ‘morphine paradise’ while responding to authority’s call of self-righteousness – commit atrocities defeat the greater evil or massacres end war sooner – who bear no responsibility for committed acts.
The good and justly heroic accounts of war embodied in glamorous enactments a la Frank Sinatra or John Wayne do not fit the writer’s menu; as he delivers scathing subversion of mass media dissemination and patriotic discourses. Tralfamadorians get puzzled as to why humans ask ‘why’ things happen and their belief in free-will. Human acceptance of inevitability and obvious drawing towards fatalism meets ridicule form Vonnegut as he observes the ritualistic nature of humans, to be a “bug trapped in amber”. Alternatively, it can be said that his criticism of human tendency to escape from threatening reality is satirically portrayed by slipping into dream worlds, pretending nothing can be done about it.
Billy relapses into Tralfamador, in an assemblage of recurring imagery, as his post-war life is void and the fruits of modern existence are lost on him. Vonnegut highlights contradiction as Billy finds solace in senility and the opposition between Earthlings and Tralfamadorians as fact and fiction. The recurrent mention of Adam and Eve hints at the chasm of purity to which a return seems necessity after the ravages of war, as is the wonder of what the birds sing to after a massacre. In biographical tone, Vonnegut states his pacifist stance as the narrator advises his sons not to comply by ‘massacre machinery’ ever. While being interesting specimens at Tralfamadorian zoo, Billy and Montana copulate to produce offspring, thus balancing the human drive to destruct itself with the drive to continue the race. The slaughterhouse where Billy is kept as a prisoner in Dresden becomes an image of human beings dehumanized by war, hanging like butchered animals on hooks. It stands as a metaphor for human existence in which suffering and death are commonplace. Through the ever-recurrent “So it goes”, Vonnegut expresses resignation at the face of death, every death that takes place, and ridicules it to point of being immaterial, hinting at inanity and helplessness in the face of annihilation of life-force.
It is the unbearable reality of wartime which pushes boys to commit crimes beyond their age and reason, motives beyond their pale, which they justify along the heroics of ‘The Three Musketeers’. Being ‘listless playthings of enormous forces’, the soldiers perform the ‘duty-dance of death’, enforcing personal and collective tragedies. They enter the ‘morphine paradise’ while responding to authority’s call of self-righteousness – commit atrocities defeat the greater evil or massacres end war sooner – who bear no responsibility for committed acts.
The good and justly heroic accounts of war embodied in glamorous enactments a la Frank Sinatra or John Wayne do not fit the writer’s menu; as he delivers scathing subversion of mass media dissemination and patriotic discourses. Tralfamadorians get puzzled as to why humans ask ‘why’ things happen and their belief in free-will. Human acceptance of inevitability and obvious drawing towards fatalism meets ridicule form Vonnegut as he observes the ritualistic nature of humans, to be a “bug trapped in amber”. Alternatively, it can be said that his criticism of human tendency to escape from threatening reality is satirically portrayed by slipping into dream worlds, pretending nothing can be done about it.
Billy relapses into Tralfamador, in an assemblage of recurring imagery, as his post-war life is void and the fruits of modern existence are lost on him. Vonnegut highlights contradiction as Billy finds solace in senility and the opposition between Earthlings and Tralfamadorians as fact and fiction. The recurrent mention of Adam and Eve hints at the chasm of purity to which a return seems necessity after the ravages of war, as is the wonder of what the birds sing to after a massacre. In biographical tone, Vonnegut states his pacifist stance as the narrator advises his sons not to comply by ‘massacre machinery’ ever. While being interesting specimens at Tralfamadorian zoo, Billy and Montana copulate to produce offspring, thus balancing the human drive to destruct itself with the drive to continue the race. The slaughterhouse where Billy is kept as a prisoner in Dresden becomes an image of human beings dehumanized by war, hanging like butchered animals on hooks. It stands as a metaphor for human existence in which suffering and death are commonplace. Through the ever-recurrent “So it goes”, Vonnegut expresses resignation at the face of death, every death that takes place, and ridicules it to point of being immaterial, hinting at inanity and helplessness in the face of annihilation of life-force.
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