You cannot read this book properly in a comfortable chair. You have to read it in a place that is slightly wrong — a place where you are a little too cold, or a little too uncomfortable, or a little too aware of being alive. Vonnegut wrote it that way. He wrote it from the bottom of a cellar in Dresden on the night of February 13, 1945, while the firestorm above him killed twenty-five thousand civilians, and he wrote it again, over the following twenty-three years, in the American Midwest, in whatever chairs he had — ice-storm Iowa and Cape Cod summers and the kitchen tables of his failing first marriage — and the book that came out the other end has the texture of a man who is not comfortable and does not expect the reader to be.
I read it the first time in the Marines, on a footlocker in a barracks in Okinawa in 1994, at nineteen. I had been told it was a funny war novel. It is not a funny war novel. It is a funny book about the impossibility of writing a war novel. The distinction is what the book is about, and I did not understand the distinction at nineteen, and I read the book again at thirty-three, on the porch of a house in Honolulu in the wet season, and I understood it better, and I have read it once more since then, in a cold room in Otaru through a long winter, and I understand it better still. The book keeps opening.
Here is what it is. Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist from Ilium, New York, has come unstuck in time. He experiences the events of his life in random order. He is at the same time a young American soldier captured by the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge, a prisoner in a Dresden slaughterhouse during the Allied firebombing, a middle-aged optometrist driving home from a Lions Club meeting, a specimen in a Tralfamadorian zoo on a distant planet, and a dying old man in a Chicago hotel room giving a lecture about the Tralfamadorian philosophy of time. All of this is happening simultaneously. The novel moves through it without transitions. The Tralfamadorians, Billy’s alien captors, perceive time as a single extended block — past, present, and future all equally real, all equally accessible — and they have no concept of causation or mortality because, to them, every moment is permanent. Billy adopts their view. The refrain of the novel — so it goes, repeated after every reference to a death, a hundred and six times across the book — is Billy’s acceptance of the Tralfamadorian consolation.
Vonnegut wrote the Tralfamadorian consolation and then spent the entire rest of the book undermining it. This is the craft move most first-time readers miss. Vonnegut is not endorsing the so it goes philosophy. He is reporting what a man does who has survived Dresden — the man invents a philosophy that permits him to carry the memory of twenty-five thousand incinerated civilians without going all the way mad, and the philosophy is a survivor’s coping strategy, not a metaphysics, and the novel knows this. The Tralfamadorians are not wise aliens. The Tralfamadorians are the shape of Billy’s PTSD. The moral weight of the book is not in the refrain. The moral weight is in the gap between what the refrain permits and what the firebombing actually was, and Vonnegut holds that gap open, on every page, without ever quite naming it, because the gap is the subject and naming it would close it.
The book’s first chapter is the most famous author-introduction in twentieth-century American fiction. Vonnegut, in his own voice, tells the reader that he has been trying to write this book about Dresden for twenty-three years and has been unable to do it, and that what you are about to read is the compromise he reached with his failure. He visits his old war buddy Bernard V. O’Hare in Pennsylvania. O’Hare’s wife, Mary, is initially hostile to Vonnegut because she assumes he is going to write a war novel that will glorify the war and make another generation of boys want to fight one. Vonnegut promises her he won’t. He tells her the book will be called The Children’s Crusade. He keeps the promise. The opening chapter is his contract with Mary O’Hare. The novel that follows honors it.
What works forever: the refusal to redeem the suffering. Most American war novels — For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Naked and the Dead, The Thin Red Line, The Things They Carried — redeem the suffering by granting it meaning. The meaning varies. Duty. Brotherhood. Masculine testing. Political witness. Vonnegut refuses all of it. Dresden, in Slaughterhouse-Five, is not meaningful. It is an event that happened, that should not have happened, that will happen again in some other form, and that cannot be made to mean anything by the people who survived it. The refusal to redeem is the book’s moral accomplishment. Every subsequent American antiwar novel is paying a debt to this refusal.
What has not aged perfectly: the Kilgore Trout science fiction sections. Vonnegut used Trout — a fictional hack science fiction writer who appears in several of his novels — to deliver satirical parables that break up the Dresden material. The parables were sharper in 1969 than they are now, partly because American pop culture has absorbed the Vonnegut voice so thoroughly that his particular brand of deadpan absurdism has become the ambient tone of late-night television and half the internet, and the original freshness is hard to recover. A reader encountering Trout for the first time now will recognize the voice from a hundred imitators. The imitators are not as good. The original is still worth the encounter.
The book is short. It is fast. It can be read in two sittings. It should not be. It should be read slowly, in a place that makes you uncomfortable, with time between chapters to sit with what just happened. The form is the argument. The pacing is the mourning.
Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007 at eighty-four, from head injuries suffered in a fall. He had spent the last decade of his life openly and unfashionably opposed to the Iraq War, which he saw as the same war his government had been fighting in various forms since 1945, and which he had been writing against since Slaughterhouse-Five. He knew the book had not stopped the war. He also knew it had gotten some readers to refuse to enlist. He considered this sufficient. So it goes, he said, for the last time.
A related vagobond.com piece: Travel Writing — Dangerous Business.
Readers and fans of Slaughterhouse-Five will really enjoy Blue Eyed Bastards — my coming-of-age novel about an American boy moving through the long aftershock of a war his country would not admit to. Same refusal to redeem. Different decade. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
