Kurt Vonnegut is the unfortunate victim of being held captive as a prisoner of war. As an American soldier near the end of World War II, he is captured by German soldiers; this set in motion the dehumanizing events that would forever linger in his memory. Twenty-three years later, after a painful gestation, he can articulate his feelings of horror, guilt, and despair about his experiences in the war. In the end, he produced his most popular, critically acclaimed work, Slaughterhouse-Five.
After returning home from World War II, Vonnegut is determined to write about his experiences, presenting the world with his thoughts on the timeless chaos of the war and answering the searing question of why man destroys and kills. Vonnegut subjects himself to the long and painful process of uncovering what he has attempted to push out of his consciousness since being held a prisoner of war and witnessing the firebombing destruction of Dresden. He feels that there is no reason he should have survived the war and sets out to compose an anti-war novel. Vonnegut masterfully constructs a cyclical narrative that follows the fictitious protagonist Billy Pilgrim through his realizations about imagination, reality, life, and death. Billy Pilgrim reorganizes his life by using the device of time travel as he jumps chaotically around the periods in his life with no continuity from the past to the present, to reality, to a science fiction world, and somewhere in between.
I believe that the absence of chronology and the harsh realities of being held a prisoner of war in World War II depicts Vonnegut’s personal struggle to articulate a reality beyond human imagination. The events of Billy Pilgrims’ life are conveyed in a disorderly, unnatural order to emulate the irrationality and chaos of war. This structural dysfunction is a means of expression for Vonnegut.
“Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He walked through a door in 1955 and came out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in-between” (Vonnegut 23). Billy Pilgrim never knows where he will go next. There is no past, no present, and no future, but each trip is wrapped around Dresden like a vine, refusing to release its grip on the events that took place there. The chaotic events of war employ the same uncertainty on soldiers in combat or captivity. Destruction and devastation can come at any time; they could be lurking around any corner.
This restructuring of the reading experience allows readers to come as close as humanly possible to experiencing all of its desperate episodes at once. Employing a brief and non-chronological structure ensures that the impact of the atrocity is not gradually cumulative or progressive like a traditional linear storyline; but instead, all events must be considered in relation to one another as a whole. It also represents the inability to live a normal life after experiencing the debilitating mental effects of war. We learn of the events that will unfold in the novel after reading the first chapter; we know how the story begins and ends. Next, we are served the remaining chapters in chaotic bits and pieces to fully appreciate the irrationality and chaos about the war that Vonnegut is attempting to convey. “Soldiers in terror of their lives, confused, hyper-alert, often speak of time speeding up or slowing down--becoming weirdly elongated or even missing as they pit their rational senses against an avalanche of stimuli” (Shields 253).
The horrific realities of being held a prisoner of war seem to be in charge of sending Billy Pilgrim stumbling randomly through different periods of time. One minute he is squeezed into a dark, overcrowded boxcar with other prisoners; the conditions are unsanitary; there is no food or water, and death is everywhere he turns; there is no escaping it. He has no idea where they are being taken; uncertainty screams at every creaky turn of the steel wheels on the tracks. Billy Pilgrim closes his eyes and is next stumbling into the future, finding himself unable to sleep on his daughter’s wedding night; he rises from bed, already knowing he is about to be kidnapped by a flying saucer. While waiting to be kidnapped, he settles in to watch the late movie. He becomes even more unstuck in time as he sees the film about American bombers in WWII play backward. “The formation flew backward over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes” (Vonnegut 74). The movie plays backward in his mind back to when the earth was only as pure as Adam and Eve. Yet, in reality, he is in the boxcar headed to Dresden, and the firebombing has not happened yet.
Merriam-Webster defines war as “a state of hostility, conflict or antagonism, a struggle or competition between opposing forces” (Merriam-Webster). Our body has internal defenses set up to protect us from all of these unpleasant situations. Stress can lead us to feel out of control and confused, just as Billy Pilgrim has no control over his chaotic time travel. His conflict, hostility, and struggle is time. “The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, not only with the electric clocks but also the wind-up kind. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again. There was nothing I could do about it” (Vonnegut, 20). Billy Pilgrim is helpless in time.
Billy Pilgrims’ time travel is equivalent to the way memory and imagination work in our lives. Memory is a passage of time travel into the past; imagination ferries us into the future. By structuring the topography of the novel in a scattered, disjointed manner, Vonnegut can directly describe his subjective, internal experience of the passage of time, which is entirely different from the objective, external time of clocks and calendars. Vonnegut attempts to come to terms with what he witnessed during his time in World War II through this structure. Only Vonnegut knows for sure if he can put the demons that haunt him to rest. He certainly did create a firestorm of his own within the literary critics of the world. People will be dissecting his work for years to come.
Works Cited
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-five, Or, the Children’s Crusade: A Duty-dance with Death. New York: Dell, 1991. Print.
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