I was confused, though, as to whether we were supposed to think the aliens and the time travel actually existed in this story. “Well, here we are… trapped in the amber of this moment. This is driven even further home with the whole aliens-and-time-travel situation– Billy is at the mercy of a large force beyond his control, seemingly omniscient aliens who know things that he will never know and don’t care about the well-being of humans, or of anyone. The book outright says as much: “ One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.“ Billy, as well as all of the other men in his regiment and the people of Dresden, were simply cogs in a larger machine. War is treated as an inevitable event, and the unrelenting repetition of “so it goes” (which did get irritating after a bit) was there to reinforce the idea that we are all pretty much powerless to change anything. Predeterminism– the idea that all events are set in stone and you cannot change the future– fate, essentially, is a large theme of the book. There’s an Einstein quote that says, “People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” This book took that idea and made it crushingly depressing. The main character is the fictional Billy Pilgrim, a young American soldier, but Vonnegut pops in to break the fourth wall from time to time and say “I was there too”, and the novel opens with him talking about how he’s going to write a book about the war before the real narrative begins. It’s written as a kind of “story within a story.” He was assigned to live in a slaughterhouse–Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut had been captured during the Battle of the Bulge– Germany’s last-ditch attempt to regain their footing at the end of 1944– and was a POW in Dresden at the time of the Allied attack. The American and British governments claimed that the bombing was justified because Dresden was a communications hub. An estimate of 25,000 civilians were killed. The firebombing of the German city of Dresden by the Allies on February 13-15, 1945 is one of the most notorious events of the war Dresden had a large civilian population and no munitions factories, and by that point, Nazi Germany was already beginning to fall apart, so many questioned why it was necessary to completely destroy the city. Slaughterhouse-Five is based on Vonnegut’s own experience in WW2, specifically witnessing the bombing of Dresden. (Oh, so it’s one of *those* blurbs is it.) The History Behind the Book Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most. Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time, Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books.
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