This post is part of a series on Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. For an introduction and link to other posts, refer to this Introduction.
A Personal History, More or Less
One of the most cliché pieces of advice you can give an author is “write what you know.” That doesn’t make it bad advice though — almost everyone follows it on some level, and Vonnegut is no exception. Many of the events the protagonist Billy Pilgrim and, to some extent, the narrator experience are lifted directly from Vonnegut’s life, while others are presumably entirely fictional. In this post I want to establish that Vonnegut’s experiences serving in World War II are at the heart of the novel and so should be understood to shape not just the literal events that Billy Pilgrim experiences, but also the themes and messages readers are meant to glean from the text.
Of course, for anyone who has read the novel, it’s pretty clear from the first lines that the story is meant to convey some sort of truth:
All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyways, are pretty much true.¹
This passage sets the stage for the rest of the novel. The war parts, which follow Billy Pilgrim, are largely told as Vonnegut experienced them, while the more science fiction elements may sacrifice historical truth in favor of a more abstract truth (a running theme in this series). To give a few specific examples of similarities between Vonnegut and Billy:
- Both came from relatively humble origins — Billy the son of a barber from Ilium, New York and Kurt the son of hardware store owner from Indianapolis, Indiana
- Both interrupted their education to join the Army — Billy the Ilium School of Optometry and Kurt Cornell’s biochemistry program
- Both served Europe and fought in the famous Battle of the Bulge
- Both were subsequently captured by Germans and transported by boxcar to Dresden
- Both lived in a slaughterhouse in Dresden, helping to make syrup for pregnant women
- Both were present for the Allied attack and survived by hiding in a meat locker
- Both were made to help clean the rubble of the destroyed city after the bombing
- Both were eventually released and made their way back to Allied lines
If nothing else, the specific details like the syrup and slaughterhouse are strong evidence that Vonnegut is trying to convey his true experiences through Billy Pilgrim. When Billy describes Dresden as the surface of the moon without moon men, we can believe that Vonnegut saw the same when he emerged after the bombing.
Now, to my knowledge, postwar Billy is not a direct parallel to Vonnegut. From Trafalmadorians to plane crashes, Billy’s postwar journey is largely his own in terms of historical detail. However, as I will explore in other posts, I think that Billy’s philosophy and experiences are meant to convey indirectly the effects of trauma he (and Vonnegut) experienced.
As alluded to earlier, Billy Pilgrim is not the only Vonnegut character in Slaughterhouse-Five: there’s also the narrator. By narrator, I mean the character who writes the largely stand-alone first chapter in first person and later makes a brief cameo. Although I plan to spend more time exploring the narrator in another post, it’s worth pointing out here some parallels between the narrator and Vonnegut:
- Both went to war with Bernard V. O’Hare
- Both studied anthropology at the University of Chicago
- Both taught in the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa
- Both had a daughter named Nanny
- Both worked as publicists at General Electric in Schenectady, New York
- Most importantly, both wrote a novel about their experiences at Dresden
When these two characters are taken together, it becomes very obvious that Vonnegut was, in his own way, trying to share his own experiences in a fictionalized way.²
Conclusions
Simply pulling up the major plot points and comparing them to Vonnegut’s biography quickly reveals that historical events had a profound impact on the nature of the novel. If we accept this kernel of truth at the heart of the writing, we should also extrapolate this onto the non-autobiographical aspects of the novel. The themes and motifs, such as disillusionment, absurdity, and truth, shed insight onto how Vonnegut understood his experiences and what he wants his readers to take away from his writing. The primary lens through which we interpret Slaughterhouse-Five should be that of a veteran and survivor trying to impart his knowledge and beliefs about his past to his audience.
If you’re interested in finding out more, please check out my other posts exploring these themes (and others) in more detail. Thanks for reading!
Footnotes/Citations
- Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, New York: Random, 1991, Print, pg. 1.
- Although it might seem fair to assume that the narrator is simply Vonnegut communicating directly with his readership, I don’t think that this is necessarily a given. I’ll explore why I consider the narrator his own character in a later post.
“Kurt Vonnegut.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation. Web. 30 May 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut. Used for biographical details on Vonnegut.
