Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

Vonnegut’s Postmodern Journey Through Time

Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is a postmodern American novel about World War II. The senselessness of war is a theme and part of what made it popular during the protest era of the Vietnam War (Vitale). The novel begins with an introduction by the author that explains why, and how, his war book came to be. This is not the last time Vonnegut inserts himself into his book––he is an unstable narrator that makes cameo appearances throughout the story, but the main protagonist is a man named Billy Pilgrim who became “unstuck in time” (Vonnegut 1). The story is told in a random series of vignettes as Pilgrim travels from one moment in his life to the next, and this fragmented style is common in postmodern fiction (Fatma 83). To simplify it, a linear telling of Vonnegut’s story would read:

Though it came late in the movement, Vonnegut’s anti-war World War II novel became a “postmodern tour de force,” partly because of his dark sense of humor and its popularity amongst teenage boys and college students with the most to fear from the Vietnam war draft (Kunze 43). Vonnegut’s unglorified treatment of WWII made Slaughterhouse-Five relevant to a new group of “babies” fighting a different war twenty years later. Vonnegut notes in the opening chapter of his book that “There would always be wars … and that they were as easy to stop as glaciers.” (3), and though “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre” (19), his novel inspires hope that people may hear his message and these glaciers will melt. His message resonated with Americans whose support of the Vietnam War had dissolved at this time, and while anti-war protests were organized across the country, students carried copies of his book on college campuses