Slaughterhouse Five or the Children's Crusade by Kurt Vonnegut, spoiler free

Slaughterhouse Five or the Children's Crusade (spoiler free).

Despite "majoring"* in literature in high school, I realized that they are many classics that I did not read. In my quest of self love at a time when I felt more desperate than ever, I wanted to spend some time again for myself and doing again things that I loved before but could not do anymore. As I said before, one of those was reading. 

I then started to search here and there for books and came across Slaughterhouse Five. I had heard of it some years before, when I was looking at war related works. Kurt Vonnegut is an author, but also one of the seven American soldiers who survived the bombing at Dresden in 1945 during World War II. This episode, and all the events he experienced during the war, influenced a lot his work. Slaughterhouse Five is considered one the best works of the 20th century and put Kurt Vonnegut to fame.

The story and thoughts.

As my thoughts are tangled with the story, I'm going to mix the two for this review. It might be a huge chunk of lines and words, but I hope you will still be able to go through :)

We start with a strange warning sort of page that gives the tone for the rest of the story. We follow Billy Pilgrim, who has the particularity to travel through space and time. But this is a not a faculty that he can control or trigger, and it's limited to his life. Therefore the time of this story is not linear and Billy go back and forth from his young adult life, his marriage, his kidnapping by aliens to the time he spent as a soldier during World War II. However, despite of all this, Slaughterhouse Five is still very structured and it's easy to follow all the different events. 

The main subject of this story is, of course, the war and all the catastrophic consequences it has and leaves. Billy is a very strange character. Not because of his ability, but because of the way he is. He seems desperate and stoic and the same time. We feel sorry for him and want to cheer for him, but at the same time, we cannot help but think he's miserable. We pity him just as much we admire him. 

An important part of Billy's life is the time when he was abducted by aliens, the Tralfamadorians, who put him in a cage for their zoo. It's then that he gains a new point of view on life and fate. He catches their saying "and so it goes", and this sentence comes back a lot in the story. 

"And so it goes". It might be considered quite fatalist but it's not. This phrase has to be taken in its most literal way : and so it goes. It's more like an observation on life than a desperation. Hurtful things happen in life, but it's just way life is. And despite all the things Billy goes through, he still manages to  move forward. Of course, there are times when he breaks down in tears, but he still gets up. He accepts his life and everything that arrives to him. It could be seen as fatalist, as in 'I accept my fate', but strangely, to me, it was more a story of hope. 

The most important thing about this story though is the heavy criticism of war. Obviously, most people is against war, but Kurt Vonnegut lived in a period tainted with wars all around the world. Many of his contemporaries thought war was the only way, and that it was the pride of the nation to fight for its beliefs. Kurt Vonnegut was part of the anti-war movement, like many other artists. Billy Pilgrim, his main character, that he paints as a truly existing person that he met at Dresden, is often considered crazy by his relatives, especially after the day he talked publicly about his ability and his abduction. Sometimes, we, the readers, are left wondering, 'is this true? Are all those things truly happening to him or is he going mad?' The writer plays with this, as this fantasy element is put in the real world. I guess it was his way of showing just how awful war is and the huge impact it had on survivors. If you took history classes, you know that it was traumatizing. But... how much? Who truly payed the cost? 

Conclusion.

Slaughterhouse Five or the Children's Crusade is an anti-war story without being a war story. Billy Pilgrim is sometimes taken back to World War II, but the whole story does not revolve around these moments. But at the same time, all of the different events are related to the war and the damaged it caused on Billy. 

It was a nice discovery. The author brilliantly alternates between horror, rawness and peace. Long after reading it, I still thought about it and it made me question myself. 

I recommend it but I have to say, some passages might feel heavy.