Slaughterhouse Five – a few thoughts

Finished it a few hours ago and want to parse it out into specific thoughts I have about it:

– I’ve seen this sentiment already while perusing through reviews of this book, but the passage about Billy watching the WW2 movie and seeing it backwards is *haunting*. “It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.” That is going to stick with me forever. I am telling you, that genuinely stunned me when I read it. Had to put the book down.

– I have increasingly become convinced since finishing it that the Tralfamadorians aren’t real, within the confines of the book. I understand that the time travel/Tralfamadorians is a PTSD allegory, but while reading I assumed that, again, within the confines of the book, this portion was to have actually happened. I don’t know that it’s a meaningful distinction, but like I said, just getting some thoughts out. My reasoning for this is: he first becomes “unstuck in time” while already clearly suffering from intense traumatic experiences. He ostensibly was intensely interested in mentally escaping at this time. He first becomes vocal about this after the crash. After the crash, he goes to New York where he sees the idea from the book (the author that he read so much of while he was in the mental ward at the veteran’s hospital) of aliens keeping two humans to watch. He also sees Montana nude here. This is very shortly after the crash where he suffers brain damage and had just lost his wife. I guess what I’m saying is, if you laid out the series of events and looked at them without narration, it seems as if he had already been presented with the ideas of the Tralfadorians and everything else before speaking about it. I want to again make the distinction that I don’t think this matters at all for what the book is trying to convey, and I think it’s an incredibly interesting premise.

– I actually didn’t find this book to be particularly funny. I thought it was overwhelmingly haunting. This could be a first time read thing, but I just couldn’t find room for humor when it was all so depressing. I was engrossed in this book by the end. I don’t think I put it down for the last 150 pages. But man. Everything that Billy had to go through. Billy is presented on the surface as a passive, meek sort of character but as you go along you just see an utterly broken human being. Even the little things like when his mom visits him and he covers his head. That hit so hard for me personally. I went through addiction while living with my mom and at one point was so ashamed that I did the same thing. The amount of shame you have to feel to hide yourself like that. Another little thing is about him having the serenity prayer in his office. For those who don’t know, the serenity prayer is commonly used in addiction groups (AA, etc.). It is well known among broken people who have hit rock bottom. I just felt so damn bad for Billy. Witnessing the firebombing of Dresden, the effects of it after, and so on.

– The time travel concept was touching. What I took away from it is that the past and future can be pulled into the now in your mind, so you can always experience them in a sense. And you and other people you know will always be here in the present because of it.

Yeah, I don’t know. I thought the book was brilliant and poignant. It’s going to stick with me for a while.