Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.Īnd what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?” Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. The friends of Seymour Lawrence call him “Sam.” And I say to Sam now: “Sam - here’s the book.” I was working on my famous book about Dresden.Īnd somewhere in there a nice man named Seymour Lawrence gave me a three-book contract, and I said, ‘O.K., the first of the three will be my famous book about Dresden.’ At the end of the first chapter, he describes finally putting the book together, and it is that description, more than anything else that happens to poor traumatized Billy throughout the rest of the novel, that makes Slaughterhouse-Five make sense to me. Vonnegut describes outlining “my famous Dresden book” over and over, revisiting his memories again and again and always finding them useless. Vonnegut was one of them, and for 20 years afterwards - he writes in the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five - he tried to write a book about it. They were sheltered from the firestorm in an underground meat locker, a slaughterhouse, and emerged only after the bombing was over. By either measure, it was a massacre.Īmong the few survivors were American soldiers who were being kept in Dresden as prisoners of war. Nazi reports said that 135,000 civilians died in the attack since then, historians have revised the death toll to 25,000 people. Slaughterhouse-Five draws on Vonnegut’s time as a prisoner of war in Dresdenĭresden was bombed by Allied forces on February 13, 1945. And it made me think that the most important part of Slaughterhouse-Five isn’t everything that comes after that famous line, “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” It’s what comes before. Rereading it as an adult, that’s all that I saw. (Poor Valencia, Billy’s fat wife, who never appears in the book without a candy bar in hand and whom “no one” but Billy would have married.) But I absolutely did not notice, or come even a little bit close to understanding, what is at the center of Slaughterhouse-Five, which is an attempt to talk about something which cannot be talked about. I probably did not notice the casual disdain that suffuses the book’s descriptions of women. Dutifully, I underlined the famous phrase “so it goes” as it was repeated again and again after every death in the book - from the death of a fizzed-out bottle of champagne to the deaths of people killed in a massacre - and with a puzzled eye I skimmed over Billy Pilgrim’s abduction by the Tralfamadorians, the little green aliens shaped like toilet plungers who see all of time at once. I read Slaughterhouse-Five for the first time the same way you probably did: in my 10th-grade English class, as part of a unit on motifs or something. March 31 is the 50th anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, one of the saddest, funniest, and weirdest books ever to become institutionalized on high school syllabi throughout the country. Five decades ago, Billy Pilgrim came unstuck in time and hurtled into the American canon.
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