Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (May 2018)
I’d originally read Vonnegut’s 1969 time-bending (and apparently somewhat autobiographical) account back when I was in high school. As it tends to be the case with great books I read so long ago, I realized recently that I had no recall about anything from Slaughterhouse-Five. So, as I’ve done lately with some other books I haven't read in over a decade, I decided to go back and reread it.
This book is often describes as an ‘anti-war book’ (according to the back cover: "Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the world’s great antiwar books"). This, I suppose, was true enough – the book didn’t really advocate for war, but then again, what book does? I think I was expecting the antiwar message to come through a little more directly but this turned out not to be the case.
I suppose the book – and its message – was better off for it. The book that simply criticizes war and points out its horrors as a warning to the coming generation is an important book, no doubt about it, but perhaps an easy one to write. Slaughterhouse-Five took a slightly different approach by essentially saying – look, people are generally going to do what they have to do, one way or the other, and if there is a war on those things they end up doing are going to be pretty horrific.
One up: I can’t speak to the effectiveness of any specific approach to delivering the antiwar message. However, the books that glorify elements of war or the movies that star famous or glamorous actors probably don’t offer much in terms of helping this message.
One down: One thing I do recall from high school was a mock debate in my sophomore year history class. We were divided into different teams and asked to discuss the merits of using nuclear weapons.
What I don’t remember from that class was how we discussed the alternatives. I’m fairly certain that whatever went into the real-life version of this debate back in 1945, the death toll was probably not high among the discussion topics. This is because by August 1945 the death toll from non-nuclear bombing missions was comparable to the eventual tally from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The fire bombing of Tokyo (the incident that most closely resembled the firebombing of Dresden that was the central historical event of Slaughterhouse-Five) resulted in around 100,000 deaths - roughly the same figure cited for Hiroshima and possibly twice the death toll at Nagasaki. When framed in this way, the death toll might have been an argument against the nuclear weapon for those who believed it wouldn’t have taken as much life as another fire bombing.
Just saying: I borrowed a trick from how I read essay or short story collections by marking down pages seventy-one and seventy-two for a reread. In this section, Vonnegut describes what a war movie looks like when watched in reverse – guns suck bullets out of broken bodies, fighter jets whisk dangerous weapons away from war zones, and soldiers turn in their neatly folded uniforms before reverting back to children.
I marked down the passage because I’d found it almost moving on my initial read. The second time completed the process. Ten years from now when I think about what I recall from Slaughterhouse-Five, I'm sure to go back to this section that is so central to Vonnegut's main message.
