mythology: they “explain” things through images and stories.
Others see the Tralfamadorians as the “gods” in Billy’s fantasy
universe: they guide and protect the creatures in their charge. This
makes them a big improvement over the “gods” Vonnegut sees as the
rulers of the modern world- technology, which dehumanizes people,
and authoritarian cruelty, which destroys people in the name of the
“survival of the fittest.”
The Tralfamadorians give Billy a philosophy through which he finds
peace of mind. They also give him Montana Wildhack to mate with, and
that brings him true happiness as well.
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MONTANA WILDHACK
Billy’s lover in this alien zoo is a curious combination of
ingredients. On the one hand, she is the compliant sex kitten that
bored, middle-aged males dream about in erotic fantasies. She is
beautiful (and naked), and makes the first sexual advances- though
shyly, of course.
On the other hand, Billy requires more from his dream woman than
mere sexuality. His entire Tralfamadore fantasy is his attempt to
reinvent the human race, with himself as the new Adam and Montana as
the new Eve. And so he makes her loving as well as sexy, understanding
as well as seductive, and a good mother to their child as well as a
good lover to him. In Billy’s ideal Creation, both must be able to
behave as decently as he believes Adam and Eve really wanted to
behave.
For all of her prodigious virtues, Montana Wildhack comes off as
rather bloodless compared to the real-life women in the book, such
as the annoying Valencia, the prickly Barbara, or the fiery Mary
O’Hare. But then Billy prefers fantasy to real life. It’s a lot safer.
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ELIOT ROSEWATER
One of the richest and smartest men in America, Eliot Rosewater is
also one of the most disillusioned. His faith in American
righteousness in World War II was shattered when he found that he
had killed a German fireman who was trying to put out a fire that
American bombers had started.
He tried drinking, but that just ruined his health without
alleviating what he saw as the alarming unfairness of the modern
world. So he committed himself to a mental hospital. There he meets
a kindred spirit in Billy Pilgrim, who comes to share with him the one
consolation Eliot has found in life: the peculiar wisdom in the
science fiction of Kilgore Trout.
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KILGORE TROUT
The science fiction writer Kilgore Trout has great ideas for novels.
(The Gutless Wonder is about a robot with bad breath; in The Gospel
from Outer Space Jesus is a nobody until God adopts him.) But his
prose style is frightful. After thirty years and more than
seventy-five novels, Trout has only two fans, Eliot Rosewater and
Billy Pilgrim, and even they are appalled by his writing.
Kilgore Trout is a manic version of Kurt Vonnegut, who also wrote
science fiction and for years suffered from an indifferent public.
Vonnegut uses Trout’s books to make fun of many of the values
Americans hold dear. At the same time, he gets in a few good swipes at
the pretensions of his own profession.
In Slaughterhouse-Five (as in the two other Vonnegut novels in which
he appears) Kilgore Trout plays a small but important role. His
books offer Billy inspiration for therapeutic fantasies, and he
personally gives Billy the courage to face his Dresden experience.
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HOWARD W. CAMPBELL, JR.
Campbell is an American Nazi propagandist who writes a scornful
account of the behavior of American POWs in Germany and who shows up
at the slaughterhouse in Dresden to recruit candidates for his Free
American Corps. He tries to bribe the Americans by promising them a
terrific meal, but Edgar Derby puts Campbell in his place by calling
him “lower… than a blood-filled tick.” Campbell only smiles.
In an earlier book, Mother Night, Vonnegut told Campbell’s whole
story- he’s really an American spy who delivers coded messages to
the Allies through his racist radio broadcasts. But in
Slaughterhouse we see him only in his “official” role as the Nazi he
pretends to be.
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MARY O’HARE
Vonnegut dedicates this book to a real person, Mary O’Hare, the wife
of his old war buddy Bernard V. O’Hare. He first meets her when he
tries to get Bernard to reminisce with him about their war
experiences, with the idea of generating material for his “famous book
about Dresden.” This makes Mary angry. She cares deeply about life-
she’s a nurse- and to her, all war does is kill people. She is
strong-minded and courageous enough to tell off an almost perfect
stranger when she thinks he’s wrong.
Vonnegut admires Mary O’Hare and wishes more people were like her.
He believes that if enough women like her told off enough “old
farts” like him, enough people might see the absurdity of war and we
wouldn’t have wars any more.
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BERNARD V. O’HARE
When Vonnegut visits Bernard O’Hare after the war, O’Hare appears to
be little more than a henpecked husband, and acts embarrassed when
Vonnegut tries to get him reminiscing about the war.
But O’Hare had refused to pick up souvenirs in Dresden, so even then
he must have hated the war and the “profit” some people made from it
(his buddies with their “trophies,” Vonnegut with his book). He’s a
gentle man who reproaches no one: when Vonnegut asks why Mary is
mad, O’Hare lies to spare Vonnegut’s feelings. And even though he
disapproves of Vonnegut’s project, he is kind enough to leave a book
about Dresden on the nightstand for him.
O’Hare is a great friend, and Vonnegut obviously likes him a lot.
He’s the only war buddy Vonnegut has kept in touch with, and
together they return to Dresden in 1967.
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KURT VONNEGUT
The author himself appears in Slaughterhouse-Five, mainly in the
first chapter, where he struggles vainly to get a handle on writing
his Dresden book. His breakthrough comes when Mary O’Hare reminds
him that it’s really babies who fight wars, not grown men. From that
moment on everything goes right for the author.
Vonnegut also pops up here and there in Billy Pilgrim’s POW story,
but he’s really just reminding you that what those American
prisoners of war saw and did really happened- and that he was there at
the time. In the last chapter he tells about his return to Dresden
as a tourist in 1967 with Bernard O’Hare.
OTHER ELEMENTS
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SETTING
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There are three main settings in Slaughterhouse-Five.
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1. War-ravaged Europe, through which Billy travels as a POW and ends
up in Dresden.
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2. Peacetime America, where Billy prospers as an optometrist and
pillar of society in Ilium, New York.
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3. The planet Tralfamadore, where Billy and his fantasy lover
Montana Wildhack are exhibited in a zoo.
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Each setting corresponds to a different period in Billy Pilgrim’s
life, and the story jumps from one setting to another as Billy travels
back and forth in time.
The physical contrast between the devastation of Europe and the
affluence of postwar America is tremendous. It’s ironic that Billy,
who suffered extreme privations as a prisoner of war, is made to
feel no better by the material wealth he later acquires as a
successful optometrist in Ilium, N.Y.
Ilium is the classical name for Troy, one of the richest cities in
the ancient world. In The Iliad, the Greek poet Homer (ninth century
B.C.) tells the story of the Trojan War, in which Troy was
eventually destroyed by the besieging Greeks. Some readers believe
that Slaughterhouse-Five is Kurt Vonnegut’s Iliad, for Troy was
reputedly as beautiful as Dresden was before it was bombed.
Billy begins to be happy about life only in an artificial but cozy
habitat on another planet. Tralfamadore is an invention of Billy’s
imagination, a paradise in which he, as Adam, and a new Eve (the
former pornographic movie star Montana Wildhack) can start the human
race over again. Within the dome that protects them from the poisonous
atmosphere of Tralfamadore, Billy and Montana are tended and watched
over by a new set of gods, the wise and kindly Tralfamadorians.
But notice that in each of the novel’s main settings Billy is
confined: first as a POW, then as a prisoner of the meaningless
contraptions of modern life, finally as an exhibit in an alien zoo.
And throughout the book Vonnegut portrays Billy as a prisoner of time.
Billy cannot change the past, the present, or the future, no matter
how much he moves around from one to the other. The persistent image
of a bug trapped in amber is Vonnegut’s clearest expression of this
idea.
THEMES
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Slaughterhouse-Five is first and foremost about war and how human
beings cope with it. In treating this subject, Vonnegut explores
several major themes, but no single one of them explains the whole
novel. You’ll find that some of the following statements ring more
true to you than others, yet you can find evidence in the book to
support all of them.
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WAR IS ABSURD
Vonnegut attacks the reasoning that leads people to commit
atrocities by drawing character portraits (Roland Weary and
Professor Rumfoord) and by quoting from official documents
(President Harry Truman’s explanation of the reasons for dropping
the atomic bomb on Hiroshima). And he gives you a look at the ruins of
Dresden so you can see the “ground zero” consequences of what he calls
the military manner of thinking- which rationalizes a massacre by
saying it will hasten the end of the war.
But more important than this generalized condemnation, Vonnegut
focuses on the enormity of war and its disastrous effect on human
lives, even long after it is over. Billy Pilgrim’s problems all stem
from what he experienced in the war. The hobo freezes to death in
the boxcar; Roland Weary dies from gangrene in his feet; Edgar Derby
is shot for stealing a teapot; the harmless city of Dresden is
bombed into the ground: it shouldn’t be possible for such things to
happen, Billy feels. And yet he was there and saw them happen with his
own eyes. His science fiction fantasies and time-traveling are his
attempt to cope with the psychological damage the war inflicted on
him. The fact that he succeeds (by going senile) is perhaps the most
absurd thing of all.
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AUTHORITY IS TO BLAME FOR ATROCITIES
To Vonnegut, both the boss and the underling escape guilt when an
atrocity is committed: the boss’s hands are clean because others did
the dirty work, and the underling was only following orders. He
maintains that this was just as true of the Allies as it was of the
Nazis in World War II. The Nazis built the death camps, and the Allies
bombed Hiroshima and Dresden.
Vonnegut believes that a great evil of authoritarianism is the
assumption of righteousness, the claim that “God is on our side.” In
other writings he expresses regret that the Nazis were so plainly evil
because that just made it easier for the Allied authorities to claim
that anything they did to defeat the Nazis was justified.
To Vonnegut this is the same kind of authoritarian arrogance that
led the Nazis into evil acts in the first place. There is no moral
justification for atrocities, Vonnegut says, even though some
defenders of the Dresden bombing maintain that it did accomplish its
goal: to end the war sooner by demoralizing the enemy.
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MODERN LIFE IS MEANINGLESS
Billy Pilgrim’s indifference to life comes as much from his
peacetime experiences as from anything that happened to him in the
war. During the war he could at least tell whether he was alive or
dead. But his postwar life is empty in spite of his material wealth
and the respect of his peers.
Vonnegut highlights this apparent contradiction by having Billy find
peace and happiness only through fantasy (or senility). Vonnegut seems
to say that in real life, life doesn’t work.
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ART VS. REALITY
Vonnegut spends a good deal of time in Slaughterhouse-Five talking
about fiction. In Chapter 1 he shows how a writer distorts reality
by forcing it to fit into the mold of a “good story.” In Chapter 5
he discusses the good and bad effects fiction has on our understanding
of life. In Chapter 9 he pokes fun at the pretensions of writers and
critics who take fiction too seriously. And the “fragmented style”
in which Slaughterhouse-Five is written may be an attempt to
reinvent the novel. As Eliot Rosewater says, fiction just “isn’t
enough any more.”
Part of the difficulty lies in the nature of art itself. Art selects
and orders its material, and the final product is a coherent whole.
But life is messy and redundant: it can’t be contained in the neat
formula of a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. In the case
of such a horrifying event as the Dresden massacre, art has nothing
intelligent to say.
Some readers believe that Vonnegut overstates the problem in
Slaughterhouse-Five, that the book itself is the solution. just as
Billy Pilgrim reinvents his life so he can cope with it, Vonnegut
reinvents the novel so that it can cope with the absurd and often
monstrous events of the modern world.
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TECHNOLOGY DEHUMANIZES PEOPLE
Machine imagery abounds in Slaughterhouse-Five, and wherever it
turns up, it means bad news for human beings. Obviously, without
sophisticated technology, the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima
would not have been possible. But Vonnegut portrays even peacetime
technology as making people into robots whose lives revolve around
tending and improving machines. Billy’s father-in-law, Lionel
Merble, for example, is turned into a machine by the optometry
business.
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There are several additional themes that Vonnegut only touches on in
Slaughterhouse-Five, but which are given fuller treatment in his other
books.
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FREE WILL VS. DETERMINISM
At first the heroes of almost all Vonnegut’s novels believe in
free will. (Free will is the idea that human beings make choices and
decide their own destinies, that their actions make a difference in
shaping their futures.) But inevitably Vonnegut’s heroes discover that
their choices were manipulated by outside forces, that their fates
were predetermined all along. Billy Pilgrim is Vonnegut’s most passive
hero. He finds happiness and peace of mind only after adopting the
deterministic philosophy of his imaginary masters, the
Tralfamadorians.
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DARWIN VS. JESUS
Vonnegut feels that Charles Darwin legitimized cruelty with his
theory of natural selection. Although Darwin limited his theorizing to
biology, other thinkers like the English philosopher Herbert Spencer
(1820-1903) applied this theory to social matters, and took Darwin’s
idea that the strong are favored in natural survival one step further,
implying that only the strong should survive. It is this version of
“social” Darwinism that Vonnegut disapproves of. In contrast, although
he has been an atheist all his life, Vonnegut has always admired the
Christian virtues of pacifism, tolerance, and love.
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ORGANIZED RELIGION
Vonnegut doesn’t have much good will toward organized religion.
For him it is no different from any other form of authority, and
therefore it is capable of the same or greater evils. How many
atrocities have been justified by the claim that “God is on our side”?
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DEATH
People are dying constantly in Slaughterhouse-Five, and of course
the destruction of Dresden brought death on a massive scale.
Vonnegut follows every mention of death with that familiar phrase, “So
it goes.” In this way he attempts to find a saner attitude toward
death by emphasizing that death is a common aspect of human existence.
Billy Pilgrim finds consolation in the Tralfamadorian notion that
people who are dead in the present remain alive in the times of
their past. Perhaps the author is saying that we too should be
consoled: the dead still live in our memories.
STYLE
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On the second page of Chapter 5, a Tralfamadorian explains the
nature of novels on that planet:
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“Each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message- describing a
situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not