So It Goes

First things first, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I really liked this book. I’m a little bummed out with myself for not discovering Vonnegut sooner, he is an amazing author. Ok, so, about the book…


Fast-like-lightning overview: The novel is narrated by Vonnegut, more or less. The narrator appears as an extra in the novel a few times, but it is definitely a story about Billy Pilgrim. The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, has become “unstuck in time,” which means that the novel follows him backwards and forwards through time and space as he travels through his own life. To be honest, I cannot remember the order of events after that, and their order is of little importance. Here is the best chronology I can muster, though it is pretty much a clusterfuck of events in the novel. Billy is taken prisoner by the Germans during WWII and transported to a camp in an old cattle-processing plant (he is put in slaughterhouse number 5, get it?). The war ends eventually and Billy goes home. He becomes an optometrist, marries a not-so-attractive woman, and has two kids, a daughter and a son. His son is a screw up who eventually becomes a Green Beret. On the night of his daughter’s wedding, Billy is kidnapped by Tralfamadorians. The aliens put him in a zoo with a female porn star. Eventually they have a kid…maybe two. Not important. The Tralfamadorians are capable of seeing all time at once and travel through it at will. The even know how the universe will end, because they destroy it. So it goes (I’ll come back to this). At some point, the Tralfamadorians send Billy home. He is one of two people to survive a plane crash and is taken to a hospital in Virginia. His wife is in a car accident on her way there, but keeps driving without her car muffler. She dies of carbon monoxide poisoning outside the hospital. Then Billy decides to tell other people about the Tralfamadorians, so he goes on a radio show in New York. His daughter threatens to put him in a home. The novel is simultaneously more and less complicated than I made it, mostly because it doesn’t concern itself with chronology, and ends as it begins, with the narrator telling a brief story of his own. I guess that wasn’t really fast-like-lightning.

Now, about how awesome this book is. First of all, the aliens kidnap an optometrist and a porn star. I’m not sure I need to say much more. Secondly, this is some seriously dark humor. Every time someone dies, the narrator repeats the sentence “So it goes.” People drop like flies in this story, so it’s there a lot. It is written in very short, easy to digest sentences, which give the entire story a very matter-of-fact feel to it. This happened, no need being upset by it because it’s over. Or, this will happen, no need being upset by it either because there’s nothing you can do to change it. Which brings me to my next love, this novel stomps all over the idea of free will. The aliens (remember the aliens?) are aware of the fourth dimension in which, apparently, all events are always occurring. Time, according to them, exists on an endless loop; all events ever have already happened. I’m not explaining this right. Read the book, the Tralfamadorians explain it much better. But the point is that Earthlings are the only beings from anywhere ever (and the fourth dimension aliens would know) that have this convoluted idea of free will. Because we see time as linear and not circular, we humans think we can control events. Get it? Kinda neat to think about, eh?

This may or may not go without saying (I’m saying it anyway…I wonder what the aliens would think of that), but it is very much an anti-war novel. Billy Pilgrim is himself a pacifist. All of the deaths in the novel are equalized, which has the dual effect of making them all insignificant and all terribly dramatic. The liberal tree-hugging composting hippie in me totally digs it. And thinks you will to.