Slaughterhouse Five / Kurt Vonnegut

Genre: Sci-Fi Main characters: Billy Pilgrim Summary:Billy Pilgrim (predestined name?) has a problem: he has come unstuck in time. Where other people live their lives linnearly, one moment chronologically following the others, Billy’s life is a jumble of completely random moments, birth and death included, which he lives through over and over again.

Billy Pilgrim seems to be rather unlucky – for example he ended up in war with no official equipment, or once made a prisoner he’s the only one given a totally unfitting coat – or, even more important, he is the one guy the Tralfamadorians chose to take with them for their Zoo. He is a nice person but a bit confused at times about when and where he is – which kinda annoys the people around him. It’s interesting to see how resigned he is to the current version of events and how he makes no move to change them, though at least in theory it wouldn’t have been hard – for example he shouldn’t have gotten in that plane he knew he was going to crash. On the other hand his whole theory is based on the fact that those moments always exist and always will exist just the way they are, no change being possible. I wonder if he ever tried though, at least at first (we have no idea how many times Billy has gone through particular moments before the book opens, however we do know that it has been quite a while, as he’s already seen his death more than once).

I have to admit I knew very little to nothing about the bombing of Dresden and it was a bit sad for me, reading about that beautiful and still intact city (one of the last in that condition too) being completely destroyed in a single afternoon. Not to mention that, according to this book, the number of casualties was almost double than Hiroshima’s. All civilians too. War is so evil.

What I liked most: I found very interesting all the references made to the people of the Tralfamadore. For example look at how they see death:

‘The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
‘When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “so it goes.”‘

As a sidenote, I was convinced for quite a while that the narrator was a Tralfamadorian too, because of the way he kept saying “So it goes” each and every time he mentioned something death related – even after a phrase like “The champagne was dead”. Afterwards my guess was that the “so it goes” was a verbal tic of the narrator himself (remember that Billy had met him while in the war) and that the Tralfamadorians were all an invention built on this and on Kilgore Trout’s book about the two people kidnapped by aliens and placed in a Zoo, an invention meant to sort of make some sense of Billy’s own “time-challenged” existence. It does sound a bit far fetched and it probably is, but did you notice how the whole Tralfamadorian philosophy matches Billy’s own experience – the moments in time that continually coexist, being visited and revisited forever (the only problem of this theory of mine is that it doesn’t explain how Billy became unstuck in time in the first place – nevertheless we can probably blame a sort of an accident and move on :P ).

Speaking of Tralfamadorians, I have also found interesting the way they see the things around them

Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don’t see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millipedes with babies’ legs at one end and old people’s legs at the other,’ says Billy Pilgrim.

or the way their books are

Billy couldn’t read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could at least see how the books were laid out-in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. Billy commented that the clumps might be telegrams.
‘Exactly,’ said the voice.
‘They are telegrams?’
‘There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you’re right: each clump of-symbols is a brief, urgent message describing a situation, a scene, We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.’

I have also found interesting the storyline of one of Kilgore Trout‘s books, one called The Gospel From Outer Space. It was a book about a visitor from outer space that came to the Earth in order to make a serious study of Christianity, to see how people can behave so bad when their religion explicitly tells them not to. His conclusion was that it’s all due to the fact that the main message of the Bible is “Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected.“:

The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:
Oh, boy-they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!
And that thought had a brother: ‘There are right people to lynch.’ Who? People not well connected.

So what did our alien friend do? He rewrote the Bible, making Jesus a perfect nobody but keeping all his actions and teachings. And in the end people crucify him just for fun, being certain that nothing would happen to them as Jesus had absolutely no important connections, right?

And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!

What I liked least: it’s not an actual flaw but I was curious about how and why did Billy get back to Earth, leaving Montana behind too. The Tralfamadorians sending him back for any reason is both a bit far fetched (why would they have done that) and the only possibility (as Billy couldn’t have traveled all those billion miles by himself) – which all sort of supports my theory that the Tralfamadorians didn’t actually exist.

Recommend it? Yes, especially to sci-fi and/or time travel fans :) :)

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