Slaughterhouse Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut

Max S. Scheinin writes:

Kurt Vonnegut's novel is part satire, part drama and part war story. Revolving around Billy Pilgrim, an intellectual weakling whom Vonnegut describes as looking like a Coca-Cola bottle, the novel flashes back and forth between Billy's war experiences and his later life. At first glance, the events appear totally non-linear, but the true intention of the book - to describe the firebombing of Dresden during WW2 - is in fact quite straightforward. We follow the war tale up until Billy is held prisoner in a slaughterhouse in Dresden, an "open city" which nobody expects will become a casualty of war. What confuses some readers is that the story is interspersed with memorable moments from before and after the experiences it chronicles. To justify this structure Vonnegut creates a science-fiction backdrop, in which Billy is transported throughout moments in his life, opening up room for philosophical questions like "What is the true nature of time?" and "Can parallel moments exist?". (There is some very subtle hinting that Billy and Vonnegut - who includes himself in the story - are one and the same.)

When Dresden is finally destroyed, with Billy and his comrades among the few survivors, there is a feeling of heartbreaking calm - our hero's own war is finally over. (To see this structure - and this kind of moment - committed to film, check out Lone Star or The Sweet Hereafter.) But my favorite scene in the book - the one which I've asked Theo to excerpt - is that in which an elder Billy, calmly knowing and accepting that he's about to be abducted by aliens, goes downstairs to watch a war movie on TV. He becomes "slightly unstuck in time" and sees the action backward, so that he understands why war is peace in reverse. There's a lot in this wonderfully rich book which I haven't touched upon - the supporting characters, the sheer brilliance of the three words "So it goes" - but if Slaughterhouse Five could only be remembered for one thing, I would hope it'd be for the scene below.

(pp. 53-55)

Billy Pilgrim padded downstairs on his blue and ivory feet. He went into the kitchen, where the moonlight called his attention to a half bottle of champagne on the kitchen table, all that was left from the reception in the tent. Somebody had stoppered it again. "Drink me," it seemed to say.

So Billy uncorked it with his thumbs. It didn't make a pop. The champagne was dead. So it goes.

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this :

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.