Slaughterhouse Five

"So it goes."

After meeting a German a few years ago whose family survived Dresden, Slaughterhouse Five has been on my list of novels to read for quite some time. This person's great-grandfather and grandparent witnessed the firebombing of Dresden, experienced the senselessness, and destruction as an entire city was reduced to ashes. They had lost family like so many. In addition, the metafictional aspects of the story remind me of Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, one of my favorite books.

Vonnegut inserting himself into the story, the intertextuality with specific characters, books, alien races, photographs, and themes in his body of work is an impressive example of his ability to weave together people and themes in elaborate worlds. This is certainly one of the most interesting and creative works to tackle WWII, really all wars, in its grotesque, brutality. If any story merits the use of science fiction, certainly a bit of fantasy and freedom are required. Undoubtedly, the comparison to the Children's Crusade was warranted.

Like Cat's Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and Deadeye Dick, there are similar themes about human existence and war. But Slaughterhouse Five, like Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, takes it up a notch: Vonnegut uses pictures within the text as well as an overarching metanarrative with himself as narrator. Anyway, below are some of my favorite quotes that highlight the novel's themes, its black humor, and general darkness.

"Even then I was supposedly writing a book about Dresden. It wasn't a famous air raid back then in America. Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance. I didn't know that, either. There hadn't been much publicity."

"The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought."

"So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thoughts wars were partly encouraged by books and movies."

"People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore."

"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."

"He had a dirty picture of a woman attempting sexual intercourse with a Shetland pony. He had made Billy Pilgrim admire that picture several times." 

"The British had no way of knowing it, but the candles and the soap were made from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies and fairies and communists, and other enemies of the State."

"Rosewater was twice as smart as BIlly, but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways. They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes."

"So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help."

"That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book."

"Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves. Once this is understood, the disagreeable behavior of American enlisted men in German prisons ceases to be a mystery."

"Rumfoord was thinking in a military manner: that an inconvenient person, one whose death he wished for very much, for practical reasons, was suffering from a repulsive disease."