The First Line

Favorite First Lines

Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse Five

Roy Blokker Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

With these eight words, Kurt Vonnegut begins his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse Five (first published in 1969). The character, Billy Pilgrim, is Everyman, the average Joe who normally would slip through life under the radar but who instead lives every moment of his life, from the instant of birth to the last gasp of death, simultaneously, and travels between them. By telling Pilgrims story, Vonnegut finds a way to talk about the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, in 1945, which he, as a prisoner of war, survived. In this way, Vonnegut follows his own advice: often a writer writes about one thing to talk about another. The first sentence sets the stage, opening with Listen, a powerful order. Vonnegut demands that we pay attention. He immediately gives us the protagonists name, Billy Pilgrim. We know from his last name that he is a traveler and from his first that he is unassuming. The next two words, has become, have their own power. The act of becoming implies change and growth. We are on an odyssey. We have no idea where we are going and what dangers we will face, but we have our guide, and the trek is his, the dangers are his.
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Then comes the kicker, unstuck in time. This puts us immediately into an unsettling reality. What can be more unsettling than being in free fall through all the moments of your own life? Billy Pilgrim is a traveler and our guide, but he has absolutely no control over the journey. Some think the novel actually beings with the lengthy introduction, which presents the reader with the history that frames the novel. In the introduction, Vonnegut outlines the circumstances that placed him in Dresden at that critical moment. It was seminal for him, as anyone reading his posthumously published Armageddon in Retrospect (2008) can easily understand. To have survived the firebombing that killed upwards of three hundred thousand people, mostly civilians living in a beautiful old city that was a nonmilitary target, only to be pushed into the cleanup, left Vonnegut deeply scarred and adamantly antiwar. Billy Pilgrim links each of us to the author with the best advice any writer can getshow, dont tell. The introduction to the novel begins with the sentence, All this happened, more or less. It is a strong line, one implied by the first word in the fiction that follows. But the introduction stands by itself and is an explanation for, not a part of, the novel. The novel also stands on its own, even if the reader skips the introduction. In fact, the introduction is background information. It is useful but we dont need it to enjoy and understand the text. For that, all we have to do is, Listen. Slaughterhouse Five made Vonnegut a mainstream star without him ever having to go mainstream. He loved to use science fiction devices to help his stories move along. Yet, he was less a science fiction writer than a social commentator. Some would argue that they are the same thing. We write about one thing to talk about something else. Like all good science fiction writers, Vonnegut asks us to suspend belief in one key elementin this case that a race of curious aliens have placed Billy Pilgrims life in constant fluxthen proceed with him toward his own vision of the truth. In Slaughterhouse Five, he suspends belief with the first line, Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time (emphasis added), at the same time commanding our
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attention with the word Listen. We know what follows will be a wild ride that will carry the ring of Truth.

Roy Blokker is co-author, with Robert Dearling, of The Music of Dmitri Shostakovich: The Symphonies. His work has appeared in Mothers Manual, Ideals, and Highlights for Children. His article, The Ethoxyquin Debate, for The Scratch Sheet, a magazine for Maine Coon breeders and fanciers, helped to influence major cat food manufacturers to go natural. Two new poems appeared in the May 2008 issue of The American Dissident.

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