The Great American Doom Comedy

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Dies, Part 104
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” One of literature’s most consequential opening lines.

Like many Americans, I encountered this novel in high school American Literature class, one of the rare books by a living or recently-living author that the standard curriculum will allow. But I didn’t understand it then. Reading it concurrently with the nationwide sweep into Operation Desert Storm, the novel’s most important themes went right past me. As often happens with literature, the messages consumed in youth only resonated with age.

Kurt Vonnegut inserts himself into the story through the thin camouflage of Billy Pilgrim. (Vonnegut’s use of characternyms is often high-handed.) Like Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim is a draftee fighting in Europe against the Nazis. Like Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim gets captured by Germans already functionally in retreat, and held in a converted hog abattoir, the titular slaughterhouse. Like Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim survives one of World War II’s most horrific episodes, the firebombing of Dresden.

Unlike Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim suffers a syndrome where he experiences time out of sequence. This means he has become the first human ever to know what effects his choices will have before making them. Where most officers in World War II gave orders, and soldiers followed them, completely blind to their context in history, Billy Pilgrim understands exactly what knock-on effects every choice he makes will have.

But he’s still helpless to stop them.

Vonnegut bookends this novel with two metafiction chapters in which he, as himself, discusses writing this novel. He explains his desires to de-romanticize World War II, and particularly the destruction of Dresden. But he cautiously avoids discussing the times in which he wrote: this book dropped in 1969, as the government publicity machine misused heroic myths of World War II to keep public approval for the Vietnam War on life support.

Alone and unique among humanity, Billy Pilgrim has the ability to understand what will eventually happen with every choice he makes. But in practice, that doesn’t mean much. He increasingly realizes that history unfolds because it has to unfold, that things happen because the moment is shaped that way. The longer he goes, traveling between discrete moments of “the present,” the more fatalistic he becomes, a mere passenger in life’s great train wreck.

Kurt Vonnegut

Perhaps this explains why this novel remains a staple of high school AmLit courses, because Vonnegut deliberately keeps his themes close to the surface. And his first theme is that life isn’t like a novel. Billy Pilgrim isn’t a protagonist, a hero carrying the action and changing his world; he’s carried along by life’s deterministic forces, changing himself to fit the moment. We are all doomed to accept the great social machine, Vonnegut insists; only the fortunate few ever understand how.

Facing life without sequence, Billy Pilgrim (it’s difficult to identify him without full name) experiences everything simultaneously. War and captivity; later life and adult career; the outer malaise and inner torments of old age. Everything happens to him at once. From this he learns life’s most important lesson, that free will is an illusion. Though he has the illusion of choice, he remains tied to every previous choice that he made, or that life thrust upon him.

To Vonnegut, the universe is a machine, a clockwork mechanism playing to an inevitable end. Nothing could’ve ever been different, because the machine runs, it doesn’t vary from its system. Right and wrong, moral and immoral, are categories humans create because we cannot see the mechanical actions unfolding around us. And few among us will have even the most salutary ability to change the machine—which, he implies, is winding down.

Like his protagonist, Vonnegut is deeply pessimistic. He watches fellow soldiers tramp into conflict, thinking themselves doing God’s work. But all of them, John Wayne heroes and shabby mavericks, officers and soldiers, they all die. Billy Pilgrim’s doomed army unit, his doomed marriage, and his doomed outlook for American history, all fold together into the realization that, like Sartre’s characters in hell, we’re all marching toward disappointment and death together.

That’s heavy to lay on high school juniors desperate to complete AmLit. But, like William Faulkner or Harper Lee, we don’t expect kids to read Vonnegut because they’ll understand him. We expect them to read Vonnegut because, as adults, we’ll recognize the parallels between real life’s moral ambiguities, and what we read at seventeen. Because, like Billy Pilgrim, we’re all doomed to face our respective Dresden. And if we’re lucky, maybe we’ll get out alive.