Slaughterhouse-Five

“All this happened, more or less.”

The opening line of the novel establishes the theme of the unreliable narrator. Both Billy Pilgrim and the narrator are present for the bombing of Dresden, and both are traumatized by their experiences. Memories and reality are tricky, fragile ideas in the novel, but the broad strokes of the events are declaratively true. Just like there is no official version of the story of Dresden, the narrator must piece together what he can remember from his painful past. The events of the book occur more or less as he says, but their essence rather than their specific details is the important focus of the story. 

“So it goes.”

The phrase “so it goes” is repeated throughout the novel. Billy learns the phrase from the Tralfamadorians, and it teaches him about their view of the world. They view death as an inevitable and unavoidable event which is not marked by tragedy because everything that happens was destined to happen. They expect and understand events in a different way, so Billy and the narrator use the phrase to convey the frequency and meaningless of death and violence throughout the story.

“When a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past.” 

Billy does not necessarily die; he lives everything at once just like the Tralfamadorians. As a result, he begins to conceive of death differently. Billy knows that a version of him is alive somewhere at all times because he travels back and forth between these iterations of himself. His death at the hands of Paul Lazzaro is only a bookend to one version of himself. The other moments of Billy’s life continue, and he is still alive somewhere at some time. 

“Weary was filled with a tragic wrath.” 

Roland Weary is a pathetic bully who is obsessed with inflicting violence on others to deal with his own personal self-loathing. He chats incessantly about violence and harming others, but this obsession is part of his own personal tragedy. Weary is caught in a cycle of violence in which he takes the pain inflicted on him and inflicts it on others. The cycle is like the cycle of Billy’s dislodged place in time. Weary is caught in a loop from which he can never escape. His wrath is underpinned by a tragedy which keep him locked in the same impossible, unsatisfying place for the rest of his life. 

“Billy Pilgrim tried hard to care.”

Billy Pilgrim is disconnected from the world. He is a moral person who does not like violence, but he cannot engage with the world. This disengagement is not due to a dislike of the world. He tries to involve himself and tries to care, but he cannot do so. Billy knows how events transpire, and he knows that humanity is capable of great violence. His experiences in Dresden and on Tralfamadore leave him severed from society in an irreparable fashion. 

“Billy was a dumper.”

Billy’s role in the United States Army is like his role in the rest of society. He is on the lowest rung and is respected by nobody, at least until he becomes rich and successful. The Army makes this marginalization explicit by turning Billy into a “dumper.” In a carriage filled with prisoners, he is one of the men assigned the task of throwing all of the waste out through the window. The job is filthy but necessary. Although Billy receives no appreciation for his contributions, he is expected to carry out the chore regardless. Billy is a dumper in the carriage, in the Army as a whole, and in his life more generally.

“Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything?” 

Billy’s early interactions with the Tralfamadorians expose him to the vast difference in the way they conceive of all of existence. They make clear to Billy that there is nothing special about him, nothing special about them, and nothing special about anything. They all simply carry out the tasks that they were always destined to carry out in the same dispassionate way that they will eventually destroy the entire universe. Billy is given knowledge far beyond the realm of human comprehension, but the end result makes it clear that he is insignificant and worthless. 

“All time is all time.”

Billy struggles to come to terms with the nature of time as the Tralfamadorians perceive by it. They do not experience time as a linear path but something which is constant and happening all at once, as well as having already happened. “All time is all time” (47) because there is no need to break it up into smaller, consumable pieces. Billy struggles to come to terms with the Tralfamadorian view of time and is stuck with abstract, seemingly contradictory phrases which stick in his mind. 

“The people in it certainly had their ups and downs, ups and downs.”

Billy is given a book titled Valley of the Dolls to read while he travels to the alien planet. He enjoys the book and notes that the characters “had their ups and downs, ups and downs.” The comment reveals Billy’s dense mind and his limited capacity to understand the subtleties of a text. He gleans an entirely surface level appreciation of the plot based on the title. A valley is quite literally a series of “ups and downs,” which is the totality of Billy’s understanding of the text. He struggles to understand the subtext of the book in the same way that he struggles to relate to other people. 

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

Billy and Eliot Rosewater both find solace in science fiction books. The books by Kilgore Trout imagine strange futures which typically fail to resonate with a wider audience. The books do not sell well but strike a chord with a select few individuals who become obsessed. The books help Billy and Eliot to reconfigure their understanding of a world which is driven mad by war. The books are coping mechanisms which provide the traumatized men with the comforting idea that there are alternative ways to view existence.

“I, Billy Pilgrim, the tape begins, will die, have died, and always will die on February thirteenth, 1976.” 

Billy predicts his death at the hands of Paul Lazzaro with terrifying specificity. His recording reiterates the nature of his death, in that he internalized the Tralfamadorians’ conception of the world. The people who listen to his tape may be shocked by the accuracy with which he predicts his murder, but the real intention of the tape is to share the Tralfamadorians’ view of time. Billy states that he “will die, have died, and always will die.” He alters the focus of the recording, shifting attention away from the murder itself to try and convince people that time is not a linear path. Billy’s attempted legacy is not to turn himself into a prophet or a god; it is to change the way people think about time.

“You needn’t worry about bombs, by the way.”

An English officer assures the American prisoners that they will not need to “worry about bombs” in Dresden. Billy knows that this is patently untrue, as does the audience. Billy’s lack of agency becomes clear in these moments. He knows that the comment is heavily laden with irony, but he also knows that there is nothing he can do to stop the bombing or stop himself from going to Dresden. Billy is caught in a position where he knows something terrible will happen and that he can do nothing to stop it. Moments of dramatic irony, in which the audience knows something the character does not, become infused with a bleak frustration that the future is already written. 

“Here was light opera.” 

Prior to the bombing, the residents of Dresden escape relatively unscathed in the war. The parade of pathetic Americans marched through their streets becomes a form of light entertainment rather than a traumatic reminder of the conflict. That the people can treat this parade as "light opera" reinforces the earlier remarks about the city not being bombed or attacked thus far. The irreverent attitudes of the people also become a bleak reminder that they will all soon be dead. There is a contrast between the Dresden residents enjoying the parade and the relentless bombing which most will not survive. 

“Everything was pretty much alright with Billy.”

Billy demonstrates his passive nature by the way he reacts to a plane crash which kills his father-in-law and many of his colleagues. He spends time in a hospital but everything remains “pretty much alright” with him. While events with would traumatize other people, they are merely added to the list of extraordinary and disturbing events which make up Billy’s life. Everything is pretty much alright with Billy because he is caught in a loop of knowing what will happen and being unable to stop it. He accepts his fate, for better and worse.

“All the real soldiers are dead.” 

As World War II comes to a close, the men who are left fighting are shadows of their former selves. Billy is told that “all the real soldiers are dead,” and he struggles to disagree. Everyone he meets in the final days of the war is damaged in some fashion. Lazzaro is a psychopath, Weary is a bully, and Billy himself is deeply damaged and disconnected. Any soldier who shows humanity or skill is shot or has their spirit destroyed. The traumatic events of the war destroy the idea of a real or good soldier once and for all. The men who are left are the real products of the war. They are shivering, broken ghosts who shuffle from one tragedy to the next. 

“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.” 

The narrator acknowledges that his book contains no heroes. The lack of drama and characters illustrates the themes of the story. The book portrays trauma and horror and the impact these can have on the psyche of a person and a society. There is nothing charming, heroic, or engaging about the characters because they operate in a world that cannot abide heroes, charm, or engaging personalities. The war and Dresden in particular reveal the rotten core at the heart of society. 

“The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn.”

The fires which burn down Dresden do not discriminate. The petty grievances and personalities which dot Billy’s path through the war thus far are obliterated by the raging fires. The prisoners cower in their shelter and huddle together. They are no longer individuals but a teeming mass of generalized terror. As the world outside burns itself to death, they are left alive. The soldiers who killed and tortured on both sides are allowed to survive while the civilians are left to burn. The uncaring, undirected nature of the fire reveals that morality and actions do not matter as everything organic burns. 

“The idea was to hasten the end of the war.”

The glib reasoning for the firebombing of Dresden and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan are provided by external sources in the book. The narrator uses the words of historians or reports other people’s reasoning to explain why the Allied forces committed horrific acts. Billy acknowledges this reasoning and grasps why people make this argument, but his experiences in the war tell him that what happened in places like Dresden did nothing to end a war that was already almost over. Instead, the bombing was an act of viciousness which can never truly be understood by people who were not there. 

“He knew very little about her, except that she was one more public demonstration that he was a superman.”

Bertram Rumfoord is so self-centered that he treats his young wife as an item of clothing. She is a sign to the rest of the world that he is young and vigorous in spite of his apparent age. He does not particularly love or care for her, but he appreciates what their marriage says about him. Rumfoord is more in love with his own self-image than he could ever be with any woman. In that respect, the confident, arrogant historian is wildly different than Billy Pilgrim.

“Robert was clean and neat.”

Robert Pilgrim grows up to be a “clean and neat” (97) soldier. He is decorated for his valor in the Vietnam War. Robert’s achievements as a soldier stand in stark contrast to those of his father. Billy achieved nothing but survival in Germany and was forever scarred by his experiences as a soldier. Robert seems to find purpose and strength from the slaughter of war. The father and son are wildly different people, which only adds to Billy’s sense of disconnect from the world. 

“I know. I’m not complaining.”

Rumfoord’s insistent defense of the bombing of Dresden suggest an insecurity in his attitude toward the attack. Billy insists that he understands why the bombing was carried out, but Rumfoord persists. The historian tries to justify the bombing to himself as much as to Billy, who is detached enough from the world that he does not care about petty justifications. Billy knows that the bombing was always going to happen. The minor details are trivial to Billy while Rumfoord’s entire career is built on glorifying the military history of the people who carried out the bombing. Rumfoord must believe that the bombing was justified; otherwise his life’s work is a lie. 

“They’re playing with the clocks again.” 

The aliens play with the clocks in the humans’ habitat in the zoo as a distraction. The clocks represent the passage of time which is entirely irrelevant to the Tralfamadorians. Playing with the clocks is an attempt to elicit a reaction from the humans, like a person dangling a piece of string in front of a kitten. The Tralfamadorians see humans and their conception of linear time as a comical distraction. 

“He left me his guns. They rust.” 

The narrator speaks about is father and reveals the disconnect between the generations. The guns are what he has left to remember his father. The weapons are a legacy passed down from one generation to the next, but the narrator has no interest in maintaining this legacy. He has seen horrific violence to the extent that he is completely severed from his father’s passive interest in guns and the violence they represent. The narrator has seen what guns can do in war so he cannot conceive of them as a pastime or a family heirloom. He allows them to rust in the hope that he can find a more peaceful form of existence.