It’s Just Fiction, Isn’t It?

Disease. Starvation. Bombs. Death. Slaughterhouse-Five is filled with the harsh realities that come with war. The reader is taken a journey through WWII with Billy Pilgrim, an American soldier. And the details aren’t skimped upon. The story is set up with a fictional frame, allowing a barrier between the grotesque and reality. Surely the reader can handle war then. Even I got lost in the story from time to time.

Except that throughout the book, there is a factor which reminds the reader that while Billy Pilgrim is fictitious, the war wasn’t. The narrator has inserted himself into the story:

“Moments later he said, ‘There they go, there they go.’ He meant his brains. That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.” (125)

In chapter 5, one of the first interjections by the author pokes through. While the author is supposedly the narrator from the first chapter who intended to write a story, the reader can infer this to be Kurt Vonnegut’s words. He has been in the war as a solider, and survived the bombing of Dresden. While Billy may not be real, the conditions and overall events that occur may truly have happened. There may have been a point in the war where Vonnegut was in a latrine, crapping his brains out. A scary thought.

Later on in the book, in chapter 6, the narrator speaks again:

“Somebody behind [Billy] in the boxcar said, ‘Oz.’ that was I. That was me. The only other city I’d ever seen was Indianapolis, Indiana.” (148)

The narrator gives his first impression on the large city of Dresden as the American prisoners of war are brought in. It’s one more marker to bring the reader back to reality. This isn’t fictitious. People really died during the bombing of Dresden. People witnessed it. The reader is repeatedly reminded of these facts.

War stories are often glorified, and Vonnegut/the author wanted to avoid this. But instead of writing it from his true perspective, he chose to write it from the standpoint of the character of Billy Pilgrim. I wonder then, if Vonnegut wrote through a character in order to distance himself from his own recollections. It’s easier to write a tragic story when the story didn’t happen to yourself. Billy uses “time travel” in order to cope with the horrors he went through. Vonnegut may write in 3rd person as his own coping mechanism. The reader must be reminded that this story is true, but Vonnegut may need to for himself too. It’s his attempt at reliving what he went through without sinking low into his memories.

If the reader looks at this story out of a fictitious frame, the reading becomes even darker. It makes reading about death easier. But one can’t forget that these deaths really happened. So it goes.