Slaughterhouse Failure

Slaughterhouse Failure
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“O peace! How many wars were waged in thy name”(Alexander Pope.) Kurt Vonnegut’s acclaimed novel, Slaughterhouse Five is a gripping book that follows the scattered like of Billy Pilgrim as he jumps through time and tries to understand how life is supposed to be viewed. The novel presents new and fascinating ideas about time and how life can be viewed. Vonnegut intended for the novel to be about the appalling world of war; Yet, when reading the book, it’s hard to tell if the book is supposed to be an anti-war novel, or a book about the life and time of Billy Pilgrim. Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war novel Slaughterhouse Five was a failure. The narrative of Billy Pilgrim and strangely relatable concept of Tralfamadorian time completely overshadow the hallowing imagery of war. However, Vonnegut intentionally did this to make the point that war is a failure, thus so is his book about war. There’s no doubt that Slaughterhouse Five is a failure, even the author himself admits it. When speaking about the novel in the introductory chapter, he says this: “This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt” (Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five, 28.) The pillar of salt is a reference to the story of Lot’s wife. A biblical story, about a family who was warned by God to flee the city they lived in before be punished the city and destroyed it. As they fled, God told Lot and his family not to look back. Lot’s wife did look back on the burning city where all the people she had grown accustomed to used to live. Then God punished her for looking back by turning her into a pillar of salt. Here Vonnegut is showing how he also looked back, instead of just moving on. He is explaining just how difficult it is to look back on the traumatizing horrors of war. Revisiting all those memories was so shocking that it made him paralyzed with fear, unable to move on, like a pillar of salt. As a pillar of salt, it’s extremely difficult to write a novel about war when you keep revisiting and reliving the experience. It’s almost impossible for the book to have been NOT a failure. There no doubt in the fact that Slaughterhouse Five is a brilliant novel with tons of horrid war imagery, however when reading the book, the focus shifts to a much more alluring subject. Vonnegut brings up the amazing concept of Tralfamadorian time, and Billy journey of being unstuck and time and trying to understand which part of time is really reality. It’s mystery and potential truth consumes the reader’s thoughts and absorbs their full attention while reading. The author introduces some out there yet relatable subjects like what Billy writes in one of his letter to the Ilium News Leader: “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist,” (33-34.) This ideal presents such an innovative way of thinking that while reading the book, the reader start to feel unstuck in time just like Billy. Vonnegut makes the readers feel unsure about their own reality and thus they become focused on reading to find out the resolution to Billy’s angst, just skimming over the severity of war. Similarly, when things happen to Billy, it seems as though is troubles are rooted not in the moments in time in the war, that are and will always be, but in the sense that being unstuck in time has completely manipulated how he views life. An example of this is when we find out that Billy often weeps to himself: “Nobody had ever caught Billy doing it. Only the doctor knew. It was an extremely quiet thing Billy did, and not very moist” (78). Although one of the primary ultimate points of this scene and the whole novel, is that war turns men into emotionally distress objects, the book portrays the fact that Billy’s internal struggle is a result of his alternate views of free will and time. It is undeniable that these components still make for a genius book that filled with amazing writing; however, they do not serve the purpose that Vonnegut wanted them too. Clearly Slaughterhouse Five is a failure, there’s no doubt about it. However Vonnegut intentionally made the novel a failure to make the point that “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre”(Vonnegut, 24), and thus is not a failure.