“You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those glamorous, war loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.” . . . “If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne. . . I’ll call it The Children's Crusade.’”
Kurt Vonnegut's writing can be described as: all over the place, random, nonsensical, but throughout every random anecdote, profound wisdom plays a most important role. Imagine you’ve stepped in mud, but upon closer inspection, you come to find that it’s, no, not mud, but diamonds that have been crushed to a paste.
Kurt Vonnegut's approach to writing is undoubtedly different than most writers; it's unchronological because it reflects the minds of his characters, who are flawed. A flawed character, or any person really, cannot easily express something as complex as war, through anecdotes or even truth at times. Thus, at a glance, his stories may seem to be a random cacophony of murk, but really, when another author may try to present to you a giant diamond, what’s the point? What can you do with a rock that size? Vonnegut’s answer is to give you a mess, and trust that you can see it’s true value. Equal to the whole diamond, but in a much more accessible form.
The casual reader of Slaughterhouse Five will never truly grasp what is going on, thanks to our main source of information, Billy Pilgrim. By the end of the novel, we come to assume that when Pilgrim’s airplane crashed into the side of Sugarbush Mountain (in which he suffers a cranial injury) during recovery he reads a book by Kilgore Trout and assumes parts of the characters experiences as his own. Upon reflection that was carefully planned by the author, readers are left to question whether or not Billy’s point of view is completely false. Kurt Vonnegut brilliantly uses Billy’s newfound knowledge to explain issues about war that don’t make sense to those that haven’t experienced it (and even to those who have experienced it). Billy’s point of view however, is that of a man who has been abducted by aliens. The aliens in reference are known as Tralfamadorians; they are described as plungers with gloves as a head with a singular eyeball on the palm. This leaves readers with two options; take Billy’s point of view as the truth and nothing but the truth, making the book, in turn, a science fiction novel. Or you have the option of reading a story from the vantage point of an unreliable narrator.
I love this book. Every short story that is woven by Mr. Vonnegut ends with a moral or a powerful statement, and by the end of the novel, all of the amazing lessons you've learned culminate to nothing. In turn, this quite effectively adds to the overwhelming theme of the book which is: there is no point. There’s no point for war, because all justifications of it are by extremely flawed beings. Vonnegut expresses this sentiment in chapter eight when an American Nazi announces this: “White is for the race that pioneered the continent, drained the swamps and cleared the forests and built roads and bridges. Red is for the blood of American patriots which was shed so gladly in years gone by.” This statement is meant to be ironic; that being said, there is undoubtedly someone who genuinely subscribes to that particular character's ideals, which highlights exactly why barely anything we've led ourselves to believe as humans makes much sense.
An issue that is touched on in many occasions in Slaughterhouse-Five is religion, one of the most amazing phenomena in the universe, or the most phenomenal ploy humans have ever played on themselves. Vonnegut intelligently touches on religion on page 34 of his book “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly to cry at his funeral. All moments past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.” This is Vonnegut's way of expressing the futility of mourning for someone when you should be cherishing everything that they were and always will be; It’s a beautiful point of view that we rarely see.
