The Pilgrim's Tale

There was an almost universal reaction in the house when I slapped down a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five on the arm of the sofa, and it went something like this: ‘Ooh, Slaughterhouse-Five!’ Everyone vaguely knows what it’s about – the destruction of Dresden, nominally – and everyone (including me) is vaguely aware of a nagging sense that they Should Have Read It By Now. It has also been on various English Lit syllabuses for a few years, which I think compounds the feeling of schoolboy guilt.

I said I vaguely knew what it was about, but I was surprised by just how little Dresden features in the story. The book has a conversational tone and a first-person introduction, which feels a bit like you’re being addressed by a grown up version of Holden Caulfield. Throughout Vonnegut’s prose there is a vein of laconic, sardonic wit which allows the reader to progress through the wretched life of the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, without becoming utterly miserable. Billy is absurdly tall, skinny, clumsy, fragile and utterly detached from the real world, but he has a ‘tremendous wang’ and ends up impregnating a famous movie starlet. So it goes.

‘So it goes’ is the narrator’s catch-all philosophy throughout. It is derived from Billy’s travels to the planet Tralfamadore (I told you it wasn’t really about Dresden) and his encounters with an alien species who see all instances of time simultaneously, in the same way that we can look across a landscape. What happens in any particular moment is unavoidable; we are all like flies trapped in amber.

And this is true most of all for Billy Pilgrim. He is shunted along from time and place to time and place, not unwillingly, but certainly not of his own free will. He tumbles through the plot just like Joe Christmas does in Faulkner’s Light in August. I think Billy’s name perfectly encompasses this as well. He is a pilgrim, bumbling along through life in an extraordinary way. His father tells him to call himself Billy, not any other variant of William, because there is something magic about the name. It certainly has a Peter Pan quality, somewhere between an ordinary kid playing in the suburbs and an all-American action hero. Billy Pilgrim. The ordinary American boy, the optometrist-turned-chaplain’s-assistant, as comically unsuited to war as he is to life in general. Billy Pilgrim, victim of, well, everything.

My main criticism of Slaughterhouse-Five would be the abrupt way in which the novel ends. For a book which everybody thinks is about Dresden, it spends a long time getting there and very little time in that charred, otherworldly landscape. Perhaps the point is that the reader is shunted around the place just like the protagonist. Billy’s journey is far from linear, but fortunately Vonnegut’s repetitive use of language is a useful crutch. Familiar themes surface and re-surface in peace and war alike, from simple descriptive phrases to the sinister opalescence of wartime candles made from the rendered fat of human beings. This repetition is paradoxically both reassuring and disorientating. We share Billy’s disconcerting journey until one morning the war ends, and so does the book. And although the ending of the novel is abrupt, it happens exactly as the narrator tells us it will in the first chapter, which is in itself is a baffling experience. So it goes.