American Wars in Fiction and Song

Chapter 2

The narrator bids us listen and declares that “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” Billy travels randomly through the moments of his life without control over his chronological destination. Born in 1922 in Ilium, New York, Billy grows up a funny-looking weakling. He graduates high school and trains to be an optometrist before being drafted. After his military service in Germany, he suffers from a nervous collapse and is treated with shock therapy. He recovers, marries, has two children, and becomes a wealthy optometrist.

In 1968, Billy survives a plane crash in Vermont; as he is recuperating, his wife dies in an accident. After returning home, Billy goes on a radio show in New York City to talk about his abduction by aliens in 1967. His twenty-one-year-old daughter, Barbara, discovers his proselytizing and brings him home, concerned for his sanity. The following month, Billy writes a letter to his local paper about the aliens.

The day the letter is published, Billy is hard at work on his second letter to the Ilium newspaper about lessons he learned when he was taken to the planet Tralfamadore. He is glowing with the expectation that his letter will console many people by explaining the true nature of time. Barbara is distraught by his behavior. She arrives at his house with newspaper in hand, unable to get Billy to talk sense.

Billy describes his entry into the army, his training as a chaplain’s assistant in South Carolina, and his dazed trek behind enemy lines after the disastrous Battle of the Bulge in World War II. After the battle, Billy falls in with three other American soldiers, two of whom are scouts and capable soldiers. The one who is not, the antitank gunner Roland Weary, is a cruel, insecure man who saves Billy’s life repeatedly in acts that he thinks will make him a hero.

Billy first time-shifts as he leans against a tree in a Luxembourg forest. He has fallen behind the others and has little will to continue. He swings 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. Messily drunk, he passes out and wakes up again behind enemy lines. Roland Weary is shaking him awake.

The two scouts decide to ditch Weary and Billy, much to Weary’s chagrin. All his life people have ditched him. He has imagined 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

The narrative device of spastic time leads to a logical and emotional instability in the novel, likening our experience as readers to the experience Billy has in attempting to make sense of his life. We can thus understand how Billy feels as he skips uncontrollably through his life. By telling the beginning, middle, and end of the story right away, Vonnegut departs from the familiar literary signposts of cause and effect, suspense and climax. We do not see Billy as everyone else in his life sees him; rather, instead of seeing his life in a linear progression, understanding it moment by moment, we see the entirety of his life come together to define him. In other words, we can better understand and sympathize with Billy’s dazed wandering through the totality of events that make up his existence.

Slaughterhouse-Five questions the possibility of human dignity in a century marked by unprecedented massacres and technological advancements in the machinery of mass murder. The initial stages of Billy’s war experience reveal a man denied dignity. He lacks the proper accoutrements of a soldier, including military attire and loyal companions who would give their lives for him. Instead, Billy wears an absurd outfit and falls in with Roland Weary, who grudgingly saves Billy only to feed the delusional fantasy of his own heroism.

Weary, like the medieval crusaders and the Three Musketeers whom he idolizes, believes he is acting in dignified and exalted accordance with God’s will. We see, however, that he actually has no more dignity than Billy. Vonnegut indicates here that war is war and death is death. Wars that seem like they are waged for religious or pious reasons seem to trickle down to pride, which is what motivates Weary despite the rhetoric about crusades and piety. The novel thus indicates one of war’s most tragic ironies: that there can be no heroes without villains and victims, which makes even the most glorified aspects of war useless in the face of death.

Even as the chapter begins, with a matter-of-fact rundown of Billy’s life story, Vonnegut confronts us with a litany of ironic deaths, each accompanied by the rhetorical shrug “So it goes.” Billy’s father dies in a hunting accident right before Billy ships overseas for combat; Billy is the only survivor in a plane full of optometrists when they crash into a mountain in Vermont; Billy’s wife dies of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning on her way to visit him in the hospital after the plane crash. These deaths lend weight to the declaration in Chapter 1 by filmmaker Harrison Starr that an antiwar book is as ineffective as an anti-glacier book. An overarching irony inSlaughterhouse-Five is that death does not discriminate. We already know that Billy will survive war and a plane crash, despite the fact that he is ill suited to a life of danger and hardship.

Chapter 3

Weary and Billy’s captors, a small group of German irregulars, take their valuables and discover an obscene photograph in Weary’s pocket. As Billy lies in the snow, he sees an image of Adam and Eve in the polished boots of the commander. Weary must surrender his boots to a young German soldier, whose wooden clogs he receives in exchange. The two Americans are brought to a house full of other captives. Billy falls asleep and wakes up in 1967, in the middle of administering an eye examination. We learn that he has been falling asleep at work lately. He finishes with the patient and tries unsuccessfully to interest himself in an optometry article.

Billy closes his eyes and is once more a prisoner. He is roused and ordered to move. He joins a steady stream of POWs marching in the road outside. A German war photographer stages a capture scene of Billy emerging from a bush, surrendering to armed Germans. Billy slips back into 1967. He is driving on his way to a Lions Club luncheon through Ilium’s black ghetto, still smoldering from recent riots, and then through a section gutted for urban renewal. The destruction he sees outside the car reminds him of the scene after the firebombing of Dresden. He drives a Cadillac with John Birch Society bumper stickers. His son, Robert, is a Green Beret in Vietnam. His daughter, Barbara, is about to get married. He is quite wealthy.

At the Lions Club meeting, a marine major speaks about bombing in North Vietnam. Billy has no opinion on this subject. He has a plaque on his office wall that helps guide him through such listlessness. It reads: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.”

After the luncheon, Billy returns to his stately home. He lies down for a nap and finds himself weeping. A bed vibrator called “Magic Fingers,” purchased to help Billy fall asleep, jiggles him while he weeps. He closes his eyes and is back in Luxembourg, marching. The wind makes his eyes water. Weary marches ahead of him, his feet raw and bloody from his ill-fitting clogs. The prisoners march into Germany and are taken to a railroad yard. A mentally unstable colonel who has lost his whole regiment asks if Billy is one of his men. The colonel, who likes to be called “Wild Bob,” tells Billy, “If you’re ever in Cody, Wyoming, just ask for Wild Bob!” The soldiers are sorted by rank and placed in crowded boxcars. They must take turns sleeping and standing, and they pass a helmet as a chamber pot. Billy is separated from Weary. His train does not move for two days. When the train begins to roll toward the interior, Billy travels to the night he is kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians.

Analysis

Although the Serenity Prayer, inscribed on the plaque in Billy’s optometry office, is an optimistic statement, it is undermined by the text’s comment that “[a]mong the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.” Such a comment plays up Slaughterhouse-Five’s suggestion that any attempt to change life is futile—that prayers and the invocation of supposed higher beings cannot alter Billy’s immutable past, present, and future. Though Billy enjoys the illusion of free will, since his existence is characterized by all the components seemingly necessary for happiness—a family, a comfortable home, and a successful business—life is still meaningless for him. What he does not understand until his abduction by aliens in 1967 is that he has no more chosen a wife or a career in optometry than he has chosen to be born a weakling. Vonnegut wryly lists the past, the present, and the future as if they were small and inconsequential items on a long laundry list detailing everything that neither Billy nor God can change.

At this point in the novel, Billy shows signs of the strain that comes from the hopelessness of war. He lacks the ability to control his time-tripping, and he is often overcome by quiet bouts of spontaneous and unexplainable weeping. Additionally, he suffers from severe sleep disorders: he falls asleep in the middle of examining patients, but once he is in bed he needs the help of a Magic Fingers vibrator to fall asleep. Historically speaking, the trauma of war frequently causes mental disorders in soldiers who return from the front. This was true of soldiers who participated in World War II as well as in other conflicts. Their symptoms, evidence of mental illness, are typically characterized as post-traumatic stress disorder. The mental problems that Billy manifests thus lend an undercurrent of unreliability to his perspective.

But the prospect that Billy is mentally ill should not compel us to dismiss the events and stories in the novel as the ramblings of a madman. Insanity extends beyond Billy himself, infiltrating the world in which he lives. For instance, Vonnegut appears intermittently as a character, not only in Billy’s war experiences but also on the night of Billy’s abduction by aliens. Billy’s hallucination of the image of Adam and Eve in the boots of his commander does not spring wholly from his brain; earlier, the commander himself invokes Adam and Eve as he holds up his boots to demonstrate their high polish. It becomes clear, then, that characters’ psychologies and mental states overlap in a realm of dementia. It is impossible to ridicule Billy’s thoughts or words as insane ramblings, since his world contains such illogical and unexplainable events. Furthermore, the anonymous narrator, who at times sounds like Vonnegut himself, may be a participant in this frenzy of insanity, blurring the boundaries between reality and fantasy.