Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut

I experienced this book through audio.  Ethan Hawke performed it.  In his droll, ironic tones, the story was lent a certain gravity that I might not have perceived on my own if I’d read the book myself.  It is the story of Billy Pilgrim and his experiences as a soldier in the Second World War, mostly centering on the bombing and destruction of Dresden.  But of course that’s not all.  Billy Pilgrim also happens to be a time traveler as well as a victim of kidnapping by aliens from a planet called Tralfamador.  I don’t really know how I should feel about all that, but I am glad that this is not just another morality story about the tragedy and uselessness of war much like so many other typical war stories out there.

Too young, scrawny, and sickly, Billy Pilgrim was glaringly unfit to be a soldier (who IS fit to be one, anyway?).  Trudging through the forests of Germany with a few other soldiers equally as hungry and poorly equipped for war as he, he makes the discovery of his ability for time travel.  He goes through the many stages of his own life, past and future.  His parents, his marriage, his children, his abduction by aliens, his plane crash experience, even his own death – he goes through them all.  He keeps coming back to his soldier days, though, and ironically enough, it is his other life/lives that put the horrors he went through in war into perspective instead of the other way around.  These people that he had met throughout his life – fellow soldiers, war survivors and veterans, optometrists, his family, aliens – they all seemed to pass by him like disjointed episodes as he jumped from one time to another.  Yet they all mattered and did not matter all at once; for as was repeated, everything is as it should have been and always will be. So it goes.

They kept repeating that:  So it goes.  Nothing could have changed anything, not even being abducted by aliens, not even traveling through time.  Does any of it make sense, does anything we do affect history, or destiny?  Maybe not.  Maybe there’s no need to.  We all will face fate one day.  Wars will always be what they are.  Life will always be what it is.  The Tralfamadorians’ advice goes:  dwell on the happy times. 

I liked this book very much.  I liked how anti-melodramatic it is – not one word here romanticized war.  Its alternate title is “The Children’s Crusade”, reiterating that ‘war is fought by babies.’  I liked the way Ethan Hawke read it – languidly and almost lazily with an ironic lilt that could sometimes be alternately witty and sarcastic.  This story gets into you.  The voice of Billy Pilgrim – his honesty, his good nature, his acceptance, his grief – gets to you.  I’m so glad I got to experience it.  Few other of its kind could be as timeless and provocative as this is.  I strongly recommend it.