When I read the title, Slaughterhouse-Five, an entire mess of images jump out at me from the cover page. If you analyze the cover... well, you don't really get anywhere with your imagination. I mean, it's red. The author's name, Kurt Vonnegut is very prominent on the cover. There's a skull with bones...Something that you'd probably see on a pirate ship's flag. The words, "dead men tell no tales" ring through my ears as I'm suddenly time-warped to my eighth grade field trip to Disneyland Park in Anahiem, California......
My friends and I have stood in line for two hours to get into the "Pirate's of the Caribbean" themed ride in Adventure land. Finally! We've managed to get all six of us in the same boat! So here we are, floating on the boat... We go down this huge waterfall and suddenly find ourselves in a cave filled with pirate booty. The words, "dead men tell no tales" are chanted by the animatronic pirates throughout the ride, haunting us until the very end of our journey out of the dangerous, stormy seas....
Similar to the time warping that I've expressed is how the tale of Slaughter House Five is conveyed through Vonnegut's writing.Throughout the entire book, the protagonist Billy can be considered to be a very passive character. He's given the gift of traveling through time. He is able to see things happening in his past and things happening in his future. The present setting where Billy recounts the events of his life is centered around the firebombing of Dresden, a time in which he was enlisted to fight as an American soldier.
One has to wonder if Billy is truly scared of everything happening around him. I mean, he seems VERY passive in everything, every event, and every action of the book. Perhaps his reaction is a result of the fact of knowing that he will be okay. He knows everything about his life at certain points to which he should not be able to know the outcome of an event, (such as the firebombing at Dresden). Would we possibly react differently to circumstances in the present if we knew our outcome of our futures? Billy knows that this is not where he will die. In fact, Billy knows far too much about his own life, and life, itself, on Earth.
Billy comes in contact with an extraterrestrial race, the Tralfamadorians, that explain certain truths about Earth. They explain how reproduction actually works. It involves multiple mates to conceive of a human child, including the mating of a few Tralfamadorian couples. When Billy and his wife are creating their child, he knows that the Tralfamadorians are also helping them conceive. The debate is simple. Do these Tralfamadorians actually exist? Or is all of the extraterrestrial, and time traveling experience a coping mechanism for Billy as he deals with the trauma of war?
I believe that all Billy claims in the book to be happening is all entirely true. Yes, even the alien part! One of the main characteristics of post modernism concerns the absence of meta-narrative. This means that there are actually multiple truths about the world. Vonnegut satirizes meta-narrative when he describes Christianity. Billy contemplates the "lynching" of the wrong man, Jesus Christ. How bizarre is it to have multiple followers believing the claims of one man, saying he is the son of the God of the human race? So why is it hard for people to believe in the existence of the Tralfamadorians? Perhaps they aren't the saviors of the world, but why couldn't it have been that God had made them to coexist with the humans as well?
Ultimately, I believe Vonnegut's book emphasizes the fact that in post modernist society, truth makes itself known to us through many forms as we experience life through a fractured identity.
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