Slaughterhouse Five, pages 154-181

In my opinion, these chapters possess very important details that reveal the author’s purpose in writing the novel. I don’t believe Slaughterhouse Five was designed to be an anti-war book because, according to the Tralfamadorians, nothing in time can ever be changed (which means that wars cannot be prevented). The fourth dimension is like a book: the story is already written, and the only thing we can do is flip the pages back and forth to land at whatever event we want to get emerged in. Like George Orwell’s and Aldous Huxley’s books about utopias and dystopias, Slaughterhouse Five is trying to create awareness of our current situation as individuals. After all, our identities are the only things that remain permanent after times of crisis. Kurt Vonnegut, by means of Billy Pilgrim, attempts to illustrate how the loss of identity can lead to a miserable and pathetic existence, where possibly Billy attempts to escape reality by escaping the present and traveling in the past and future. “One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters… She asked Billy Pilgrim what he was supposed to be. Billy said he didn’t know.” (pages 159 and 164).

Another detail that caught my attention is the author’s manifestation of himself through another character in the novel, the science fiction writer Kilgore Trout. “Most of Trout’s novels, after all, dealt with time warps and extrasensory perception and other unexpected things.” (p. 175). Vonnegut, or Trout, is the author of both the book about Dresden and Slaughterhouse Five. He is also simultaneously a character in both books. Normally authors include themselves in their works directly by narrating events in first person or indirectly through the use of an omniscient narrator. In this case, however, Vonnegut represents himself as an individual who feels like a failure in life, as someone even more pathetic than Billy Pilgrim.

The Febs are also a symbol throughout the novel. These individuals connect Billy to the bombing of Dresden and to time travel with Trout. This leads me to think that, maybe, the fourth dimension and time travel are a byproduct of war. It is possible that Billy’s reactions to the many deaths he’s seen are manifested by his indifference to death as a concept. The Tralfamadorians and the “so it goes” may be a product of Billy’s mind, which tries to create a defense mechanism to relieve himself from the horrors of war.

The war made such a huge impact on Pilgrim that the bombing of Dresden is the only event throughout the novel that Billy merely remembers, but does not travel to. “He does not travel in time to the experience. He remembered it shimmeringly…” (p.177). I also noticed that dogs are still being mentioned permanently. Billy’s awareness of dogs is finally concluded in the instance where Trout asks Billy if he’s ever placed a mirror under a dog. Billy responds that he hasn’t, to which Trout replies, “The dog will look down, and all of a sudden he’ll realize there’s nothing under him. He thinks he’s standing on thin air. He’ll jump a mile” (p. 175). I believe that the dogs represent us, humans, and that the mirror is a reflection of our lives. Once we look deeply into it, we’ll be alarmed at what we find, and will “jump a mile”, or try to escape our existence, something that Billy does while traveling through the fourth dimension. This ties itself to the theme of the novel I mentioned at the beginning of this entry: the preservation of individuality.

Before I’m through, I would also like to highlight the fact that the bombing of Dresden (February 13, 1945) and Billy’s death (February 13, 1976) occur on the same day, 31 years apart. Is this just a coincidence, or is it supposed to embark a hidden meaning?