Slaughterhouse Five By Kurt Vonnegut: An Analysis

In this passage of his novel Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut describes the Tralfamadorian approach to writing a book, which centers around their their ability to view all moments of time simultaneously and their perception of time as predetermined. It involves episodic storytelling in order to create a beautiful and meaningful holistic message about life. Since the Tralfamadorian believes time is predetermined, cause and effect become meaningless. Consequently too, no morals can be learnt from a story, since they seem to serve no purpose in a predetermined world. Vonnegut appears to use a similar template for Slaughterhouse Five, following the format by using asterisks or series of dots to indicate Billy’s timetravels between periods of

He strives to capture a “beautiful and surprising and deep” meaning in his book, yet, Vonnegut calls the book a “failure” from the very first chapter, because he has come up with nothing more intelligent and deep to say about war than Poo-tee-weet? (Slaughterhouse Five 28). Although that could be Vonnegut’s intention – to show that war is senseless and ugly. The Tralfamadorians say they only look at the the “marvelous moments” in life and ignore all the sad ones. To them, a good book is one containing only the happy moments. In contrast, Vonnegut created a ‘failure’ of a book since he is a ‘salt pillar’ – he is humane and looks back at the darker parts too, therefore this book cannot be considered ‘beautiful’. For example, after Mary O’Hare told him to write not of the glories of war, but about the ugliness of war, he decided to write Slaughterhouse Five as a ‘Children’s Crusade’. Kurt Vonnegut is intentionally writing this book in a ‘salt pillar’ manner to convey the surprising and deep message that war is the opposite of beautiful and surprising and deep. He uses this passage to tell us that we are human, not aliens. That we cannot set a blind eye on the atrocity of war