Penyanyi : Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
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Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
I embarked on a re-read of Slaughterhouse Five with Greg of New Dork Review of Books for Book Riot's Vonnegut Day (here's the post we wrote together about the experience, if you're interested) and man. That is one bleak read, which explains why I loved it so hard in high school (I also lurved it this time because it's darkly hilarious which is my favorite kind of hilarious and his prose is deceptively simple. Like Hemingway, if Hemingway was a total smart-ass and also made pencil drawings of boobs).
The resemblance, she is uncanny.
For those of you who didn't go through the requisite Vonnegut-lurve as an adolescent like the rest of us did, let me catch you up to speed here: in Slaughterhouse Five, the main character Billy Pilgrim is an accidentally-time-traveling (maybe) veteran of World War II who was present at the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, and who was also kidnapped by aliens (maybe). The aliens who (maybe) take Billy teach him that all of time has already happened at the same time that it is happening and at the same time that it is always happening, so each moment is both inevitable and inalterable. Vonnegut drives this point home by stating "So it goes" (you know, that most popular of hipster tattoos) anytime a character dies. In the fist meta-chapter, Vonnegut gives us a semi-or-maybe-totally-autobiographical account of how hard it was for him to finally write a book about Dresden, saying that writing an anti-war book is like writing an anti-glacier book. An uphill battle with little to no discernable results.
So when I read this as a teenager, I took it very literally. Billy Pilgrim was a time traveling victim of alien abduction who was put in a zoo on another planet, and wars would happen because wars would happen because wars would happen because people are awful and do awful things and everyone sucks, let's drink some vodka and listen to Dashboard Confessional (before they [him] were cool). So that's one way to look at it.
Ten years later, I don't agree with my original interpretation (not just of the book, but of anything in life because everyone is wrong about everything at 16). There are a bunch of holes in the abducted-by-aliens sub-plot, and many of the things that Billy experiences while time traveling/space traveling show up in Kilgore Trout's sci-fi books, a detail I didn't notice or care about the first time around. I now think that Billy became "unstuck" in time as a way of escaping the moments he spent in Germany and the memories thereof (so they are essentially hallucinations), and that the alien view of time (the aliens also being hallucinations) is an excuse Billy (and the rest of humanity) tells itself in order to feel ok about something like genocide.
Having read a lot of Vonnegut's other work, along with many of his interviews and letters, I still think he found war to be an inevitability because life is a bitch and people can be awful. But I don't think he was taking "so it goes" so far into fatalism as to be interpreted as a call to do nothing about it- it's an acknowledgment and maybe even a warning that your efforts may come to nothing. So yeah, the book is bleak and cynical and maybe opposing something like war is similar to opposing a glacier, but that's no reason why we shouldn't do it anyway. The opposing, I mean, not the warring.
Gotta love a man who makes his own GIFs.
Four stars out of your mom, both for nostalgia and for all the rest of it.
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