Slaughterhouse-Five Chapters 1 - 2
In his distinctive narrative style, Vonnegut presents his personal encounter with the Dresden firebombing during World War II, an event he experienced as a prisoner of war. He asserts that the majority of the ensuing narrative is factual, especially the segments concerning warfare. Vonnegut, with financial support from the Guggenheim Foundation, revisits Dresden in 1967 alongside his wartime comrade, Bernhard V. O’Hare. En route to the Dresden slaughterhouse that once served as their prison, they engage in a dialogue with their taxi driver about life under communism. Vonnegut dedicates Slaughterhouse-Five to this man, Gerhard Müller, and to Mary, O’Hare’s wife. Müller later sends a Christmas card to O’Hare, expressing his desire for global peace.
Vonnegut shares his unsuccessful endeavors to pen his Dresden experiences in the twenty-three years since the war. He takes pride in the story outline he sketches in crayon on the back of a wallpaper roll. Each character is represented by a different crayon color, with a line tracing their journey through the story’s timeline. The lines eventually intersect an area of orange cross-hatching, symbolizing the firebombing. The survivors emerge from this area and halt at the point marking the POWs’ return. Despite this detailed outline, Vonnegut struggles with his writing. He initially aspired to create a masterpiece about this significant subject, but the horrific destruction he witnessed proves elusive in his writing attempts. His antiwar sentiments further complicate the process, as a filmmaker friend points out that a book against war would be as effective in preventing war as a book against glaciers would be in stopping their movement.
Vonnegut recounts his postwar experiences, including his time as an anthropology student at the University of Chicago, a police reporter, and a public relations officer for General Electric in Schenectady, New York. In the postwar years, he encounters a lack of awareness about the extent of Dresden’s devastation. When he seeks information from the U.S. Air Force, he learns that the event remains classified as top secret. In 1964, Vonnegut visits Bernhard V. O’Hare in Pennsylvania, accompanied by his young daughter and her friend. He meets Mary O’Hare, who is appalled by the prospect of Vonnegut depicting himself and his fellow soldiers as heroic men rather than the “babies” they were. Vonnegut solemnly promises not to glorify war and pledges to title his book The Children’s Crusade. Later that night, he reads about the Children’s Crusade and the earlier bombing of Dresden in 1760.
While teaching at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Vonnegut secures a contract to write three books, with Slaughterhouse-Five being the first. He explains its brevity and disarray by stating that there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.
On his journey to Dresden, Vonnegut spends a night in a Boston hotel, where his perception of time becomes distorted, as if someone were tampering with the clocks. He reads about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Gideon Bible by his bedside and likens himself to Lot’s wife, who disobeyed God’s command and looked back at the burning cities, turning into a pillar of salt. Vonnegut reflects on his book as an inevitable failure and decides not to look back anymore. The narrator urges us to listen and announces that “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” Billy randomly traverses through the moments of his life, lacking control over his chronological destination. Born in 1922 in Ilium, New York, Billy grows up as a peculiar weakling. He graduates high school and trains to be an optometrist before being drafted. After his military service in Germany, he suffers a nervous breakdown and undergoes shock therapy. He recovers, marries, has two children, and becomes a prosperous optometrist.
In 1968, Billy survives a plane crash in Vermont; while he is recuperating, his wife dies in an accident. Upon his return home, Billy appears on a New York City radio show to discuss his 1967 alien abduction. His twenty-one-year-old daughter, Barbara, discovers his proselytizing and brings him home, worried about his mental health. The following month, Billy writes a letter to his local newspaper about the aliens. The day the letter is published, Billy is engrossed in writing his second letter to the Ilium newspaper about the lessons he learned when he was taken to the planet Tralfamadore. He is radiant with the anticipation that his letter will comfort many people by elucidating the true nature of time. Barbara is distressed by his behavior. She arrives at his house with the newspaper, unable to make Billy speak sensibly.
Billy narrates his induction into the army, his training as a chaplain’s assistant in South Carolina, and his disoriented journey behind enemy lines following the disastrous Battle of the Bulge in World War II. After the battle, Billy joins three other American soldiers, two of whom are scouts and competent soldiers. The one who is not, the antitank gunner Roland Weary, is a cruel, insecure man who repeatedly saves Billy’s life in a bid to become a hero. Billy experiences his first time-shift as he leans against a tree in a Luxembourg forest. He has fallen behind the others and has little will to continue. He oscillates through the extremes of his life: the violet light of death, the red light of pre-birth. He is then a small boy being thrown into the deep end of the YMCA swimming pool by his father, a proponent of the “sink-or-swim” method.
Billy time-travels to 1965. He is now forty-one years old and visiting his mother in a nursing home. He blinks and finds himself at a Little League banquet for his son, Robert, in 1958. He blinks again and opens his eyes at a party in 1961, cheating on his wife. In a state of messy drunkenness, he passes out and wakes up again behind enemy lines. Roland Weary is shaking him awake.
The two scouts decide to abandon Weary and Billy, much to Weary’s dismay. All his life, people have abandoned him. He has envisioned himself and the scouts as the Three Musketeers, and he blames Billy for breaking them up. Billy is suddenly giving a speech in 1957 as the newly elected president of the Ilium Lions Club. He is then back in the war, being captured by Germans along with Weary.
Analysis
Chapter 1 of Slaughterhouse-Five reads more like a prologue than an integral part of the narrative. Vonnegut’s autobiographical musings, which seem to exist on a different plane from the rest of the novel, reveal his deep personal connection to the story. He discusses his writing process, indicating that this chapter was likely written after the rest of the novel. His decision to include this meta-narrative within the story itself underscores the intertwining of his life with the narrative.
Vonnegut becomes a character in his own story, weaving his authorial presence into the narrative fabric. The phrase “So it goes,” first uttered by Vonnegut after recounting a death, recurs throughout the novel, serving as a mantra of resignation and acceptance. This phrase blurs the line between fact and fiction, history and fantasy, lending an air of authority to the characters’ sense of resignation.
Vonnegut’s intricate narrative structure, symbolized by the wallpaper roll on which he outlines his story, only emerges once he abandons his initial, aesthetically pleasing outline for a more chaotic representation of his war experience. This fragmented structure, mirroring the circularity, confusion, and fatalism of his war experience, persists throughout the novel as Billy Pilgrim drifts through time. Time, and its aberrations, play a pivotal role in Vonnegut’s narrative. The circularity of time is exemplified by a lumberjack song, and the seemingly endless wait in a Boston hotel room. The revelation of the novel’s closing words at the end of Chapter 1 introduces the concept of cyclical time, crucial to Billy Pilgrim’s experience.
The narrative device of erratic time creates instability in the novel, mirroring Billy’s struggle to make sense of his life. By revealing the beginning, middle, and end of the story upfront, Vonnegut eschews traditional literary structures, allowing us to see Billy’s life in its entirety, rather than in a linear progression.
Slaughterhouse-Five questions the feasibility of human dignity in a century marred by mass murder. Billy’s war experience reveals a man stripped of dignity, lacking the trappings of a soldier and the companionship of loyal comrades. Instead, he is saved by Roland Weary, who is motivated by pride rather than piety, underscoring the tragic irony of war: the inescapable presence of villains and victims. Vonnegut confronts us with a series of ironic deaths, each followed by the phrase “So it goes.” These deaths underscore the futility of an antiwar book, highlighting the indiscriminate nature of death. Despite his ill-suitedness for danger and hardship, we know that Billy will survive both war and a plane crash.
