Review: Slaughterhouse 5: The Children's Crusade A Duty-Dance With Death
Slaughterhouse 5: The Children's Crusade A Duty-Dance With Death by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Billy Pilgrim is someone unstuck from time, and experiences it non-linearly, all the same time, travelling back and forth to his past and future, and is aware of all that has been and will be. He is indifferent to his actual life, with a successful career and family, and chooses to instead sleepwalk through it in daze of his past trauma.
Billy was a soldier who fought in the second world war. But he and many of his compatriots were essentially infants playing at a ‘children’s crusade’. That war, much like those before, was planned and orchestrated by the whims of old men, who sent out inexperienced young men to die. Much like the 12th century monks who gathered impressionable orphans off the street, trained them to be soldiers, and sold them for wars to be fought far away in Africa. Or in the current day, a generic African warlord, who takes children from their homes, indoctrinates them, drugs them and hands them a gun sends them out to kill...anyone.
In the first autobiographical chapter, the author is shown to have been trying to write a novel out of his experiences during the bombing of Dresden, but finding it difficult to put into words the atrocities which he witnessed. A friend asks him ‘are you writing an anti war novel? 'Might as well write an anti glacier novel’. For much like a glacier rolling down the mountain, war too is a beast which can never be permanently shackled, only kept at bay for brief intervals.
It was during the war that Billy first got unstuck from time, and began to perceive four instead of three dimensions. After the war, during his married life, he is abducted by the Tralfamadorians, an alien race, who much like Billy perceive four dimensions. They see all of it at once, including the good and bad times, and the time in the far future, when their world would come to an end. But much like Billy, despite their knowledge, they have no inclination to try and stop their inevitable demise, due to the way they perceive time and live their lives.
Billy knows how things are going to unfold in his life, including the exact moment of his death. But he is unable or unwilling to change it. This is because of his belief in absence of free will, as reinforced by the Tralfamadorians. Billy needs for existence to be preordained, and not subject to whims of free will. That way, he can shirk the responsibility of events which he witnessed and enacted during the war. He can deny the needless death and destruction of the city of Dresden and its gruesome aftermath.
After the war, Billy is one of the few who managed to make it big in his life. But instead of enjoying his new found fortune, he is plagued by the trauma of his past, and he may be suffering from some version of survivor's guilt. Whenever he feels stressed or inebriated in life, Billy randomly jumps through time to a different period in his life, most often his time as a soldier. In fact, on one instance, Billy considered his most peaceful moment in life to be right after the Dresden bombing, when he lay on the back of a wagon, taking an afternoon snooze.
Sometime after the war, Billy is ‘abducted’ by the Tralfamadorians and taken to their home planet, where he is held captive for nearly a year; though no time at all had passed on earth. This might be the indication that Billy was using the whole time travel and aliens to run away from his trauma, or even come to terms with it.
For during his ‘captivity’, he is treated as a well endowed perfect human specimen, and even gets as a companion one porn starlet from earth, who always craves for his love. He pleases her and makes her pregnant with a child. All these might be means by which Billy is trying to regain his dignity, which he lost during his period of captivity by the Germans.
As mentioned before, the Tralfamadorians, and their indifferent slightly nihilistic worldview, allows Billy to unburden himself from all the suffering he had to endure and witness. After all, if there is no free will, there was nothing he could’ve done, even if he wanted to, to stop these events.
The Tralfamadorians philosophy also allows him to deal with death and loss. They believe that death is merely another step in the grand scheme, and all those who have died are merely continued to exist in another plane. This way, he can protect himself from the grief he feels from the death of his loved ones, the deaths of his fellow soldiers, the innocents in Dresden, and gain a semblance of normalcy to not put a bullet in his mouth.
The nihilist philosophy comes into play when he asks the aliens, why he out of all other people was chosen. ‘There is no why’, was the answer. There is no grand scheme to which Billy is a part of, no higher purpose. Him being chosen, is as random as insects, who get trapped in amber. They don’t do so out of their free will, or for some higher purpose. They were merely at the right ( or arguably wrong) place and time. Once again reinforcing Billy’s belief that fate is absolute and free will is a myth.
Vonnegut doesn’t really attempt to paint a gruesome picture regarding the atrocities of war. He rather treats it in an indifferent and matter of fact manner. Yet, despite this, he communicates clearly, how much of a futile activity it is. How it devalues human life as mere statistics, and strips away all human morality and dignity. How it, much like the firestorm which ravaged Dresden, is an indiscriminate consumer of flesh. In Vonnegut’s immortal words ‘So it goes’.
But it’s not all doom, gloom and nihilism. If war, life, peace, death, suffering is all inconsequential, and inevitable, How is one to live life? Well the time sensitive aliens have a notion as to how.
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Billy was a soldier who fought in the second world war. But he and many of his compatriots were essentially infants playing at a ‘children’s crusade’. That war, much like those before, was planned and orchestrated by the whims of old men, who sent out inexperienced young men to die. Much like the 12th century monks who gathered impressionable orphans off the street, trained them to be soldiers, and sold them for wars to be fought far away in Africa. Or in the current day, a generic African warlord, who takes children from their homes, indoctrinates them, drugs them and hands them a gun sends them out to kill...anyone.
In the first autobiographical chapter, the author is shown to have been trying to write a novel out of his experiences during the bombing of Dresden, but finding it difficult to put into words the atrocities which he witnessed. A friend asks him ‘are you writing an anti war novel? 'Might as well write an anti glacier novel’. For much like a glacier rolling down the mountain, war too is a beast which can never be permanently shackled, only kept at bay for brief intervals.
It was during the war that Billy first got unstuck from time, and began to perceive four instead of three dimensions. After the war, during his married life, he is abducted by the Tralfamadorians, an alien race, who much like Billy perceive four dimensions. They see all of it at once, including the good and bad times, and the time in the far future, when their world would come to an end. But much like Billy, despite their knowledge, they have no inclination to try and stop their inevitable demise, due to the way they perceive time and live their lives.
- Past/ childhood, simpler time devoid of trauma
- WWII; unstuck in time. The horrors of war.
- Post war; PTSD and family life. Indifference to life.
- Accidents, personal loss, loss of purpose
- Finding new purpose, perceived insanity, death
Billy knows how things are going to unfold in his life, including the exact moment of his death. But he is unable or unwilling to change it. This is because of his belief in absence of free will, as reinforced by the Tralfamadorians. Billy needs for existence to be preordained, and not subject to whims of free will. That way, he can shirk the responsibility of events which he witnessed and enacted during the war. He can deny the needless death and destruction of the city of Dresden and its gruesome aftermath.
After the war, Billy is one of the few who managed to make it big in his life. But instead of enjoying his new found fortune, he is plagued by the trauma of his past, and he may be suffering from some version of survivor's guilt. Whenever he feels stressed or inebriated in life, Billy randomly jumps through time to a different period in his life, most often his time as a soldier. In fact, on one instance, Billy considered his most peaceful moment in life to be right after the Dresden bombing, when he lay on the back of a wagon, taking an afternoon snooze.
Sometime after the war, Billy is ‘abducted’ by the Tralfamadorians and taken to their home planet, where he is held captive for nearly a year; though no time at all had passed on earth. This might be the indication that Billy was using the whole time travel and aliens to run away from his trauma, or even come to terms with it.
For during his ‘captivity’, he is treated as a well endowed perfect human specimen, and even gets as a companion one porn starlet from earth, who always craves for his love. He pleases her and makes her pregnant with a child. All these might be means by which Billy is trying to regain his dignity, which he lost during his period of captivity by the Germans.
As mentioned before, the Tralfamadorians, and their indifferent slightly nihilistic worldview, allows Billy to unburden himself from all the suffering he had to endure and witness. After all, if there is no free will, there was nothing he could’ve done, even if he wanted to, to stop these events.
The Tralfamadorians philosophy also allows him to deal with death and loss. They believe that death is merely another step in the grand scheme, and all those who have died are merely continued to exist in another plane. This way, he can protect himself from the grief he feels from the death of his loved ones, the deaths of his fellow soldiers, the innocents in Dresden, and gain a semblance of normalcy to not put a bullet in his mouth.
The nihilist philosophy comes into play when he asks the aliens, why he out of all other people was chosen. ‘There is no why’, was the answer. There is no grand scheme to which Billy is a part of, no higher purpose. Him being chosen, is as random as insects, who get trapped in amber. They don’t do so out of their free will, or for some higher purpose. They were merely at the right ( or arguably wrong) place and time. Once again reinforcing Billy’s belief that fate is absolute and free will is a myth.
Vonnegut doesn’t really attempt to paint a gruesome picture regarding the atrocities of war. He rather treats it in an indifferent and matter of fact manner. Yet, despite this, he communicates clearly, how much of a futile activity it is. How it devalues human life as mere statistics, and strips away all human morality and dignity. How it, much like the firestorm which ravaged Dresden, is an indiscriminate consumer of flesh. In Vonnegut’s immortal words ‘So it goes’.
But it’s not all doom, gloom and nihilism. If war, life, peace, death, suffering is all inconsequential, and inevitable, How is one to live life? Well the time sensitive aliens have a notion as to how.
“Later on in life, the Tralfamadorians would advise Billy to concentrate on the happy moments of his life, and to ignore the unhappy ones-to stare only at pretty things as eternity failed to go by.”
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