Forty-two years after publication, Vonnegut’s words retain their full wonder and provide a poignant commentary on the role of war and its outcomes. It may seem jumpy at times but this is just a result of the cyclical nature of the narrative. No loose end goes untied. His writing can be simple and clean or it can chock full of non-sequiturs and meandering pages. This has the ability to easily irritate an audience but if the faith is strong the redemption is there.  Slaughterhouse 5 is like a Picasso. It’s unconventional, in your face, and rough around the edges. It is also packed with meaning and life; an eternal piece of literature on the whole of war. If you didn’t like the book it’s probably because Vonnegut shoved ideas in your brain you now wish he hadn’t.

“’Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’ What he meant of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too. And, even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.”

Vonnegut makes a beautiful concession in his introduction and almost seems to succumb to defeat on page three. But by the end of the novel you see that he hasn’t been defeated. Although I’m not so sure he has won either. The nature of war is epitomized in this struggle and it’s one that Vonnegut teases out through the novel.

Billy Pilgrim is the product of a concoction of historical fiction, autobiography and weird science. He is a child, plane crash victim, optometrist, widower, soldier, student, father, and prisoner of war. Billy gets to be all of these things at once because he has surpassed the human limitation of time. He learned how to do this on Tralfamadore, an alien civilization that abducted him after the war.

The book focuses on Billy as an American during WWII and climaxes with the skinny, odd, scared-shitless, time traveler riding out the bombing of Dresden in an underground meat locker. It’s hard to develop opinions of Billy considering there is little to love…or hate. This is not to remark against his characterization by Vonnegut, far from it. His descriptions are so intricate, so woven into each other, that he becomes such a neutral character. At first glance he’s an offbeat coward that has no business being in Europe when he was. Yet simply because of his role in this despicable yet natural tragedy of war he’s made to be commiserated with. That’s what Slaughterhouse 5 does. It paints such a bleak ugly image of war that causes the reader to foam at the mouth and to want to decimate war by ripping off its limbs. It’s impossible not one’s own stake in war by the end of this novel.

It’s easy to find oneself a bit disoriented while chugging through the heart of the book. Time in the book is presented not in a human fashion, but in a Tralfamadorian one. The Tralfamadorians see time as one event, never to begin nor end but simply to exist. They see time as “humans might see a stretch stretch of the Rocky Mountains.” While a human sees time as that same mountain range but with said humans “head encased in a steel sphere which  could never take off. There was only one eyehole through which he could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe.” This recurring thought provoking concept is used not only as commentary but it is built into the structure of the story.

Vonnegut frequently introduces characters, ideas, or apparent non-sequiturs only to have those befuddling passages come full circle later. War and memory are incorporated into the cyclical structure of the book beautifully. Without a precise level of attention, many of these concepts can easily be looked over. The now piqued curiosity creates intrinsic motivation to pick the book up as soon as you have put it down.

“It is so short and jumbled and jangled, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre” Vonnegut declares to his publisher as the book begins. Maybe Vonnegut is being modest about his own abilities or maybe he’s right. After all he doesn’t say anything about a massacre. He shows you a massacre… and then lets you decide. War may or may not be eternal. Vonnegut provides arguments for both sides. Is conflict part of the human condition? Does this natural force have a simple solution like the rain has umbrellas? Slaughterhouse 5 speaks to this, a work that is eternal in itself.