Sophie's Reviews > Slaughterhouse-Five

I liked the message, I liked the techniques, I liked the idiosyncratic style. BUT, I didn't like the pacing.

To begin this review - I am not a literary critic, I am not an English student, I haven't read any of Vonnegut's other material, and I don't have an extensive knowledge on WW2 or PTSD. However, these are some of the things a novice like myself enjoyed about the book -


Now, these are just my interpretation, and may not be the intention of the author or have the depth that literary critics may be able to afford, but I really liked -

- How the use of aliens reflected Billy Pilgrim's feeling of alienation - both in the army and back in civilization after the war. Billy is not a good soldier, it is not his strength, and he is often seen as pathetic to the other American soldiers, British soldiers and the Germans he encounters. He does not fit in here. In contradiction, Billy should fit in well in normal society after the war - he is a bright and skilled optometrist. However, he appears to not care about social forms (he doesn't even seem too bothered about his choice of wife), and struggles to fit in, eventually admitting himself to a mental institution fearing he is going crazy. He doesn't fit in at war, and he doesn't fit in at home. He feels alienated. And yet, where does he get some appreciation? Where does he become a spectacle to admire with intrigue? When he escapes to the Tralfamadorians - the aliens - which he does frequently throughout the novel and his life.

- I think it's important to note that his name is Billy Pilgrim, by no mistake. He is a traveler of time seeking a salvation, something higher - which he finds as aliens.

- His feeling of becoming 'unstuck' in time, his disorientation, and his inability to escape the thoughts/flashbacks of the war. To signify trauma in this way in intriguing and through the harmless sounding adventures through time of Billy's life and his experiences with the Tralfamadorians, the reader gets and insight to the very real and tormenting suffering that veterans and patients of trauma experience of inescapable flashbacks to their suffering or the suffering of others they have witnessed. The idea of time traveling is novel and sounds like fun, but underneath it all it is a technique masterfully used to demonstrate the internal mental struggle that a lot of veterans experience - that war never ends for those who've experienced it, because it lives on inside their minds tormenting them.

- I can imagine, most famous are the lines 'so it goes'. I can imagine there has been endless literary theories and comments made about the repetition of the phrase throughout the novel. I felt that it represented a coping mechanism - rather than be horrified, be apathetic. Don't feel anything and you won't be troubled by the horrors of this world. Often the term was used in relation to death, and usually flippantly so. Both the death of his wife and a complete stranger get the same treatment. Instead of dealing with the emotions that come along with experiencing such events, such images, Billy takes it as a natural thing that cannot be changed or altered, and thus doesn't pay it too much attention - because if he opened his eyes to accepting these horrors he wouldn't be able to cope with them. He uses this strategy during the war, and later in his life he resumes to using such a technique again, because it has served him so well, but also possibly because if he acted differently then he may have to accept the other things he has experienced and pushed out of his conscience. Rarely do we see him cope physically in the war, but Billy's strength is that he survives mentally through using this phrase to help him, though it could be argued that it is also what puts him in a mental institution later in life, or what stops him being able to sleep, or indeed even be the reason why he struggles to cope and fit in and ends up escaping reality though 'time travelling'.

-The use of time travel, which I understood to be used less literally (as in physical time travelling), and more that his time travelling was a way of describing his mind not being able to cope and so kept shifting in and out of reality and revisiting past experiences and impressions of the future.


Although I loved these techniques, I did find this novel hard to read, and it took great determination to finish it. I found it incredibly disjointed, jumping around through all of Billy's experiences, some lasting pages, some lasting a paragraph. I believe this was a technique used to deliberately show how disjointed Billy was psychologically, and that worked. However, I found the flow difficult for my personal preference of flow in a novel.

There's so much more to say about this novel really, but I will leave it here. Overall, I enjoyed it, and I know that if I read it again I would probably get even more out of it.