Fifty years ago, Billy Pilgrim became unstuck in time, and a classic 20th-century novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, was born. Published in 1969, the novel catapulted the 47-year-old Kurt Vonnegut into the popular and literary mainstream by speaking directly and poignantly to the anxieties of the rising countercultural generation about technological progress, the Vietnam War, and nuclear holocaust. But as novelist and Iraq War vet Kevin Powers notes in his excellent foreword gracing Modern Library's 50th anniversary edition, the book still speaks about the horrors of war in a way that today's veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the rest of us, can understand and appreciate.
Re-reading it half a century after its publication, I was struck by the fact that in the very pages of the novel that cemented his literary reputation Vonnegut calls the book a big, fat failure.
He tells us as much in the first chapter, which, in fine postmodernist form, isn't about Dresden, or Billy Pilgrim, or Tralfamadore, but rather about how he came to write the book. Vonnegut says he originally thought writing about his wartime experiences would be an easy way to establish himself as a writer, “since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen.” More than 20 years and thousands of pages of false starts later, in a note of apology to his publisher, he concludes that the book he's handed over is such a jumbled and jangled failure because “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” Much later on, in chapter eight, he breaks the fourth wall (as he does frequently) to tell us:
There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.
Vonnegut even chalks it up as a failure as an anti-war novel. “Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?” a friend asks him. “What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.”
So how is it exactly that Slaughterhouse-Five—a book the author calls a failure—came to be regarded as one of the finest 20th-century World War II novels? I think we can answer that, first, by understanding and speculating a bit about how Vonnegut's masterpiece fit into his life, and, second, by looking at Billy, the Tralfamadorians, and their unusual views of time, and considering whether there is actually anything unusual about them at all.
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