The perception runs amok

A comical anti-war book, a science fiction parody which plays exclusively in the presence (or rather, in the present times ...) - Vonnegut draws in "Slaughterhouse Five" all registers of literary clichés through the mud and turns them in its opposite.

Ostensibly, it is about war experiences, which can not handle the narrator of the frame story, Yon Yonson - he experienced the bombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war. In the novel he finally writes, it's about the story of Billy Pilgrim, who also witnessed the bombing as a prisoner of war in Dresden - and survived. And actually, it's about how to see the world, the history of humanity, the essence of man. Not in vain the protagonist Billy Pilgrim is an optician who lives in a nigh grotesque optician milieu with the occupational order to correct the vision of humanity. Now one wonders to what standard these corrections must be based by definition - and if there is this standard at all, can give. This is exactly what is in fact the point which clearly sets Billys findings in question.

But what is it about this Billy Pilgrim about? It is reminiscent of a modern fool in Christ - even the adventurous costume in which he experienced war and captivity, is anything but soldierly. So a court jester was dressed from earlier times, who was allowed to say the only his king the truth. But since in the 2nd half of the 20th century no longer jesters are provided, they declared him sometime mad. The other characters in the novel, however, remain types, strangely colorless, no matter how vivid and poignant they may be portrayed. On me the novel therefore also looked like the novelization of a modern commedia dell'arte - funny, grotesque and cruel at the same time; a fool dance that tells a gruesome story using the means of comedy.

Formative in Billy's biography was the bombing of Dresden - so it seems. But in his short biography at the beginning of Chapter 2 is the not before: We learn here only of his capture by the Germans and an honorable discharge from the army - and from a nervous breakdown, with which it has its own explanation: Billy Pilgrim has its name not in vain, he is actually a kind of pilgrimage - but his pilgrimage does not lead him through space, but through time. A spaceship from Tralfamadore once kidnapped him in a civilization that lives in four dimensions, which therefore also the time "looks". Chronologically translucent processes are selectively displayed and repeatable for them - but not to change. Everything is as it is, once and for all. We know the future that is no longer the future. "So it goes" - "Things can go", this sentence runs like a leitmotif through the resignatives novel. Billy learns from the Tralfamadoriern this perception of the world and uses it from then on to associatively through time (s) move - or to flee from their own memories, or even in order to go through again: The bathroom door in his apartment leads to the latrines in the prison camp in 1944, and the return path leads back to the bedroom from 1953 ... In addition, this time travel is entangled with the pulp fiction of an unsuccessful science fiction author, and this interweaving of plot lines leaves the reader to the very end uncertain: Speaks declared insane Billy the truth, or are his time traveling associative streams of consciousness, influenced by the fantasy of a third-rate writer? Or, more generally, what test assessed Billy, what corrective glasses to perceive the reality he wants to miss the humanity? Is there this scale at all?

The novel's action, the adventures of Billy Pilgrim are at the center during the war, that is not in chronological order - because in Billy's perception there is no chronology, everything is everlasting present. "Slaughterhouse Five" portrays a kind of stream of consciousness, funny and cruel are on equal footing, the futility (and inevitability as Billy thinks) the war is being demonstrated by dramatically.

Whether war is actually an unalterable evils of mankind, no matter how many lives are destroyed by them directly or indirectly - this question can Vonnegut novel open.

"Slaughterhouse Five" is an exceptionally witty book about the sense or nonsense of life, a fascinating thought experiment, a disconcertingly authentic report on the impact of war on humans, which shows how to be close to comedy and horror together.