The fun thing about this "100 books in 365 days" thing is that it's prompting me to read books that I was never forced to read in high school or college. Slaughterhouse-Five is one of those books for me. I never had to read it in high school, but had it described to me many times by classmates and friends. When it dropped down to $4.27 on Kindle last week, I thought, what the hell, I'll take a chance. And I did. Number 80 for the year (we're getting so close to the end!) is Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist tale of war and its repercussions.
Slaughterhouse-Five's narrator (Kurt Vonnegut himself) is a veteran of World War II trying to write a story about his experiences in the firebombing of Dresden, Germany. But instead, he makes himself only the bit-part in the tale of the tragic Billy Pilgrim, a student of optometry who is drafted into the war and finds himself woefully unprepared for the horror that greets him when he arrives in Europe. Ridiculed by his fellow soldiers, he is captured by the German army and taken as a prisoner of war to the makeshift prison known as "Slaughterhouse-Five" in Dresden, a quiet city of seemingly little import. There Billy lies adrift in a sea of fantasy as the city collapses around him in a firebombing worse than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, surviving to return to the United States a different person, wholly altered, trying to find his way in a world that does not understand him.
It took me a few pages to wrap my brain around the fundamental illness that was plaguing Billy Pilgrim -- post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Known and understood now, after so many veterans of the Vietnam conflict returned home with such a diagnosis, it was virtually unheard-of during World War II. Anyone who has seen the George C. Scott film Patton will remember the difficult scene where Patton screams at a young soldier that he finds huddled and sobbing in the hospital tent, accusing him of cowardice in the face of the enemy. We've all heard stories of veterans "hitting the deck" when they hear a loud noise, or experiencing flashbacks to the Asian jungle, or any number of other horrific experiences. But Billy Pilgrim takes it one step further -- he really believes that he has the ability to travel through time and space, and spends much of these travels on the far-away planet of Tralfamadore. There he creates an alternate reality; instead of being a ridiculous optometrist-turned-soldier, he is a being both mysterious and respected. Instead of having an overweight, foolish wife, he sleeps with a beautiful movie star every night. Tralfamadore gives Billy a world he can understand, while providing a safe haven from the world he has never felt comfortable in.
I loved this book. It's not my favorite ever, but I think it was a sad, but excellent description of the hell that post-traumatic stress disorder wreaks upon individuals, and how, if unchecked, it can drive them to create an alternative reality from a world too painful to confront. It made me sad whenever someone in the book dismissed Billy as "ridiculous", "insane", or "demented". To a 21st-century mindset, it was obvious what was hurting Billy and making him the way that he was. Had he been alive (or, you know, real) today, hopefully he could have received the help he needed, rather than ridicule and dismissal.
Rating: ****
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