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Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. describes Slaughterhouse-Five as “a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from.” (title page) In the “telegraphic” technique, as it is described by a Tralfamadorian, a book is laid out “in brief clumps of symbols” and “each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message – describing a situation, a scene.” (p. 88) The manner of this Tralfamadorian tale is precisely what Vonnegut labels it: schizophrenic, a withdrawal from reality. Vonnegut uses this telegraphic schizophrenic structure to show how Billy Pilgrim, a World War II veteran, has been forged into acceptance of war by his own fear of confronting war’s evil reality. Bill Pilgrim’s flying saucers are a product of his own mind cast adrift on the tide of society’s refusal to confront the reprehensibility of war and left grasping for refuge in distorted application of science fiction.

Billy Pilgrim’s war-time experience begins when he is sent to the European theatre of World War II as a chaplain’s assistant. He arrives while his new regiment is fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, and losing. The regiment is scattered, and Billy, having seen only a small sample of the atrocities of war in his three days of combat experience, is taken prisoner by the Germans. He is placed on a crowded train to a prison camp, and is already severely disturbed emotionally, taking no action even toward self-preservation without being forced to by his comrades. On his first day at the prison camp, Billy suffers a nervous breakdown and is hospitalized. In the hospital, another patient introduces Billy to the science fiction of Kilgore Trout, an author of Vonnegut’s creation, and Billy finds solace in Trout’s Tralfamadorian tales. Billy is then moved to a prison compound in Dresden, Germany. He is, in Dresden, imprisoned and protected in a meat locker of a slaughterhouse, when the city is bombed, killing over 100,000 civilians. When Billy emerges from the meat locker, he is forced to dig through the rubble to find bodies. The war soon ends, and Billy is honorably discharged.

The real time of the novel begins in 1967, when Billy, at 43, is a “senile widower.” (p. 23) He is working on a letter to his hometown newspaper, the Illium News Leader, writing of his fantasies of Tralfamadore, which he believes to be reality. He is unaware that these fantasies are based on science fiction novels he has read by Kilgore Trout. Billy “travels in time,” reflecting on his past – his childhood, his unsatisfying marriage, his successful optometry practice – on his fantasies about being kidnapped by extraterrestrials and exhibited in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore, and on his imagined future fame for imagined future lectures teaching Tralfamadorian lessons to earthlings. These reflections constitute the bulk of the novel. After writing the letter, Billy goes to New York City to try to appear on a radio talk show, and he succeeds long enough to convince the host, the radio audience, and the reader, that he is mentally disturbed. After the talk show, he walks to Times Square, where he stops by an adult bookstore and finds books by Kilgore Trout that cause him to comprehend his neurosis.

The atrocities of war Billy Pilgrim experiences, particularly life as a prisoner of war, hideous deaths in combat, and the firebombing of Dresden, combine their effects and lead Billy to an escapist psychology. Billy becomes “unstuck in time.” (p. 43) That is, he daydreams, randomly recalling episodes of his past or dwelling on a fantasized future. His first experience of coming “unstuck in time,” which illustrates the “telegraphic” technique, occurs at the Battle of the Bulge just before his capture. Billy has been separated from his regiment and now lies in the snow, unable to find the energy or the motivation to seek safety. Expecting to die of exposure, Billy lets his attention swing through the whole of his life, forward into death and backward into pre-birth, stopping occasionally to recall a past childhood trauma here, a hypothetical enactment of an encounter with his mother on her deathbed there, and various other parcels of memory and concoction elsewhere in time. He is brought back to reality when a war buddy finds him – a war buddy who “kicked and shoved Billy” (p. 48) – and manages to awaken him from his dream state and to save him from a cold death. (pp. 43-48) Billy relishes his newfound “unstuckedness” in time as an escape from present problems, and he learns to exercise this technique to flee misery, boredom, and danger throughout his life.

Much of Billy’s daydreaming “time travel” concerns a personalized reconstruction of events from his favorite stories by Kilgore Trout, putting himself and his favorite pornographic celebrity in the places of Trout’s characters. In his letter,

He said … that he had been kidnapped by a flying saucer in 1967. The saucer was from the planet Tralfamadore, he said. He was taken to Tralfamadore, where he was displayed naked in a zoo, he said. He was mated there with a former Earthling movie star named Montana Wildcat. (p. 25)

Vonnegut’s use of the phrase “he said” three times in four sentences emphasizes Billy Pilgrim’s departure from reality. For the reader, Tralfamadore is a fictional planet of Trout’s and Vonnegut’s creation, but for Billy, Tralfamadore is real. It is a secure place to spend unpleasant earth-time. On Billy’s Tralfamadore, time is seen as a whole – all at once – rather than as a sequence of events. From this point of view, there can be no cause and effect, but only existence, because, “all moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.” (p. 27) On Tralfamadore, Billy is asked what he considers the most valuable thing he has learned there. His misinformed reply is “How the inhabitants of a whole planet can live in peace!” (p. 116). He is informed by a Tralfamadorian that:

Today we [have a peaceful planet]. On other days we have wars as horrible as any you’ve ever seen or read about. There isn’t anything we can do about them, so we simply don’t look at them. We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments. (p. 117)

With these words Billy Pilgrim’s idealism is crushed for good. He believes the Tralfamadorians explicitly that nothing can be done about war, or about anything else. He develops a dependence on this notion to reconcile his past involvement in war, taking, when he can, the Tralfamadorian advice to “ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.” (p. 117)

Billy Pilgrim applies his Tralfamadorian insight to his own life, adopting as his motto this quote of Camus, which he hangs conspicuously on his office wall: “God grand me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom always to tell the difference.” (p. 60) Billy’s resource is the serenity Camus describes; it is the only quality which allows him to release himself from the indignation he would otherwise feel for his undeserved suffering in a war that, as a chaplain’s assistant, he had not even been fighting.

Why then, does Billy go on to suffer another nervous breakdown, to continue hallucinating Tralfamadorian encounters, and to imagine earthly fame for imaginary lectures about those encounters? Billy’s serenity is not complete because it is falsely based. He derives comfort not by accepting the things he cannot change, but by forgetting them. When Billy has his second nervous breakdown, suffering what appears to have been a mild heart attack, he realizes that “he had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was.” (p. 173)

The black imagery Vonnegut gives of Billy’s war experience would seem to justify Billy’s decision to forget it. Describing the “mopping up” after the bombing of Dresden, Vonnegut tells of the personal ramifications of going into holes dug in the rubble to carry out bodies:

There were hundreds of corpse mines operating by and by. They didn’t smell bad at first, were wax museums. But then the bodies rotted and liquefied, and the stink was like roses and mustard gas…. [A stranger] Billy had been working with died of the dry heaves, after having been ordered to go down in that stink and work. He tore himself to pieces, throwing up and throwing up. (p. 214)

The description is revolting, as Vonnegut means it to be; it describes the loathsomeness of war. But contrary to a justification of forgetting, this type of dark picture is reiterated until it becomes obvious that Vonnegut is not suggesting that we follow the advice of the Tralfamadorian by forgetting the bad times and remembering the good. Vonnegut is instead bringing the bad times solidly to our attention, and he does this with a purpose. It is only by recognition of the appalling nature of war that we can muster the foundation of moral indignation from which to begin to end it.

Billy Pilgrim has kept secret from himself the atrocity of the war he has experienced. The price he has paid to keep that atrocity secret is surrender of courage, justified by the Tralfamadorian notion – the opposite of wisdom – that neither the past, the present, nor the future can be changed. The internal conflict between Billy’s unconscious memories of man’s inhumanity to man and his conscious awareness of the implications of the motto he keeps in his office strips him of the ability to make any change at all. The horrible self-perpetuating nature of war is that individuals train themselves to ignore war's heinousness, rather than to confront it. If individuals remain too weak to make that confrontation, war will recur indefinitely.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. begins to dig into the corpse mines and to expose war in its detestable ugliness, and where Vonnegut gouges deepest, we yet hear the echo of the dying hobo’s refrain, “You think this is bad? This ain’t bad” (p. 79) to remind us that the surface is only barely scratched.

¹ Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. A Fourth-Generation German-American Now Lining in Easy Circumstances on Cape Cod [and Smoking Too Much], Who, as an American Infantry Scout Hors de Combat, Witnessed the Fire-Bombing of Dresden, Germany, “The Florence of the Elbe,” a Long Time Ago, and Survived to Tell the Tale. This is a Novel Somewhat in the Telegraphic Schizophrenic Manner of Tales of the Planet Tralfamadore, Where the Flying Saucers Come From. Peace. New York: Dell, 1969.

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BILLY WON’T BE A HERO