Slaughterhouse-Five

It is a rare and splendid thing to head blindly into a book already knowing full well that you will enjoy every page of it. I've considered buying (or at least reading) this book for years now, and only two days ago did I decide to make the plunge. This was my first Vonnegut novel, although I have read and enjoyed a number of his short stories in the past. Fellow logger Sweeney, a Vonnegut veteran, has told me that this is probably Vonnegut's most bizarre and science-fictional book. With aliens and time travel in play, it was certainly at least a little bit surreal. But the time travel at hand here was not of the "we have to go back and change the past!" style; instead, it simply offered a nonlinear narrative as the protagonist, Billy, is "unstuck in time," perpetually living through and experiencing fragments of his life from birth until death. I liked that a lot. Not only did it allow Vonnegut to abandon chronological order much like Joseph Heller had done in Catch-22 years earlier, but it gave Billy an unnatural and inhuman sense of calmness. He knows everything that will happen to him, having already endured his own death a number of times, and as such, he is never anxious or excited in the least. His apathy feels entirely out of place and yet strangely appropriate when he is a prisoner of war, when he is abducted by aliens, and when he endures a plane crash, for example. Ultimately, Billy comes to realize after his time spent with the aliens, nothing is worth worrying about because everything that will happen has always happened. While reading, I couldn't help but think of Season 5 of Lost, in which the old "fate vs. free will" debate comes to a head as certain characters struggle to change the past. It seems Lost owes a lot of its ideas about this issue to Slaughterhouse-Five, even going so far as to borrow Vonnegut's phrase, "unstuck in time." The book offers an outlook on life and death that is both bleak and satisfying. By treating time as a fourth dimension, we can surmise that nobody who is dead is ever really permanently dead; they are alive and well, forever, at certain points in time. It's an interesting take. The whole thing also reminded me of Braid, the video game I played recently in which you must manipulate the flow of time to undo or correct all of your mistakes. Whenever Tim (Braid's protagonist) dies, you can simply reverse time in order to bring him back to life. And that seems to be what Vonnegut's aliens are saying too. In addition to all of the science fiction aspects of the book I've summarized so far, Vonnegut also makes clear his stance on war: what a waste. It was in this book that Vonnegut coined what is arguably his most famous phrase: "So it goes." Whenever a character dies, whether it be from battle, accident, or natural causes, Vonnegut adds in these three little words. In a book set largely during World War II, he ends up saying these words quite often. In fact, I grew sick of it almost immediately. But maybe that was Vonnegut's intent: make me annoyed by all the death by getting me to be annoyed by the words that follow. Classical conditioning, you know? Then again, probably not. Regardless, humor is prevalent in Slaughterhouse-Five, often occurring in the most random or inappropriate of places. At one point, for instance, Billy coughs, and Vonnegut explains that while doing so he shits his pants, due to Newton's law that every action must have an equal and opposite reaction, a law that is useful in rocketry. Later, as the American prisoners of war are stripped and made to clean themselves in a cold, communal shower, it is pointed out to the reader that all of the balls and penises in the room are shriveled because reproduction is not the main business of the evening. All in all, the book was a fantastic pleasure to read, which is just what I always knew it would be. I certainly look forward to more Vonnegut novels in my future. For now I should get back to the task at hand: not buying and reading new books, but instead, killing off every last book that I already own. So it goes.