Slaughterhouse-five

Kurt Vonnegut

As many post-modernist writers, Kurt Vonnegut uses in his novel different stylistic and
structural innovative techniques: point of view, combination of genre, intertextuality and post-
modern themes. This is an anti-war novel, written in the form of a science fiction.
The plot of Slaughterhouse-Five can be difficult to follow if you're looking for the standard
beginning, middle, and ending. That's because the protagonist of the book, Billy Pilgrim, is
unstuck in time. He experiences his life out of order, and the easiest way for Vonnegut to
demonstrate that is to show us the disordered life that Billy experiences. Slaughterhouse-Five’s
subtitle “The Children’s Crusade” refers to the youthfulness of the soldiers who fought in World
War II.
Vonnegut is the narrator of Slaughterhouse-Five. From the very first chapter, Vonnegut
establishes himself as a character in his own novel, and he explicitly details his plans for the
story to come. Vonnegut explains that he was actually a prisoner of war during the Dresden
bombing, adding a layer of truth to his later descriptions of Billy Pilgrim in Dresden. Besides the
first and last chapters in which he speaks autobiographically, Vonnegut only periodically inserts
himself into Billy’s story. He chooses to reveal his presence most often through the repetitive
phrase “so it goes” after every mention of death. This commentary blurs the distinction between
Vonnegut as the narrator, a character, and the author. The phrase “so it goes” appears after every
mention of death and mortality. This seemingly flippant phrase reflects a Tralfamadorian
philosophy that comforts Billy Pilgrim: while a person is dead in one particular moment, they are
still alive and well in all of the other moments of their life, because all of time exists at once.
The narrator’s tone is familiar and ironic, and he uncovers touches of dark humor and absurdity
that do not diminish the lyrical and emotional power of the material. His portrayal of Billy is
intimate but ambivalent, and he occasionally emphasizes the diction of reported speech
(prefacing a passage with “He says that” or “Billy says”) to draw a distinction between reality
and Billy’s interpretation of events.
The book and the title itself gestures toward a number of important texts and historical facts.
These are called inter-textual references. The title is composed of three parts, which contains
three allusions. The first part, Slaughterhouse five, alludes to the bombing of Dresden, bombing
cannot mean anything else but slaughter. The second part, the children's crusade, refers to a
pointless sacrifice of innocents sent to war. The third part is a quote from a French writer, who
said that all art depends on a dance with death. In this case, neither the narrator’s or Billy's dance
is voluntary, instead it is a duty dance with death.
The destructiveness of war as a theme is evoked in subtle ways. Billy is quite successful in his
post war era from a materialistic point of view. The bird which says “poo-tee-weet" works as a
symbol in the novel, pointing to the lack of anything intelligent to be said about the war, since no
words can be used to describe the horror of the Dresden firebombing. Other symbols in the novel
are the colors blue and ivory, which are used to describe Billy’s bare feet. These cold, corpselike
hues suggest the fragility of the thin membrane between life and death, between worldly and
otherworldly experience.