In a review of Slaughterhouse- Five, Time Magazine called it’s author, Kurt Vonnegut, “a zany but moral mad scientist.” It’s subtitle, “The Children’s Crusade,” identifies it as an anti-war book specifically centered around the Dresden fire-bombings of World War II. In the first edition of the title page, Vonnegut writes, “by Kurt Vonnegut, a Fourth-Generation German-American Now Living in Easy Circumstances on Cape Cod [and Smoking Too Much], Who, as an American Infantry Scout Hors de Combat, as a Prisoner of War, Witnessed the Fire Bombing of Dresden, Germany, ‘The Florence of the Elbe,’ a Long Time Ago, and Survived to Tell the Tale. This Is a Novel Somewhat in the Telegraphic Schizophrenic Manner of Tales of the Planet Tralfamadore, Where the Flying Saucers Come From. Peace.”
The famous phrase, “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time,” launches this book into its scattered and incredible timeline. What happens next is a romp through time and space as Billy Pilgrim floats in and out of the past, present and future like an insect in “a blob of amber.” The aliens that kidnap Pilgrim, the Tralfamadorians, see in four dimensions, allowing them to view a person’s life as a stretch of a mountain range, the book explains.
These aliens are essentially post-modernist beings. Since they see in four dimensions they believe in the tenets of the post-modernist movement, mainly a relative universe and a lack of objective truth. Their understanding of existence is fundamentally different than Earthlings who are very “modern” or Enlightenment-values driven. This book is set up to ping-pong the reader between different years and even different galaxies in a fundamentally post-modernist fashion. Pilgrim’s life is told through the eyes of an indifferent third-person omniscient narrator who detachedly says whenever a character in the book dies, “so it goes.” This is to explain even further the cavalier attitude the Tralfamadorians take toward death. They believe that a person is never dead; that person stays alive in moments past. Because of this, the aliens don’t mourn death or unhappy moments, they focus on the joyous times.
Slaughterhouse-Five is and was, as you could have guessed, a banned book, as recently as September 2010 in Republic, Missouri (irony, anyone?). They banned the book for obscene and profane language, but make no mention to the drawing in the last couple pages of the book of a woman’s breasts with an engraved locket, the reason for the picture, in between them (more irony?). However, the reason for the profanity is the fact that this is a post-modernist text. If post-modernists believe that there is no objective truth, then, by extrapolation, they also believe there is no objective evil. In a relative, or Tralfamadorian, world, there is no such thing as “bad” language. This book is using the coarse, provocative words to make a point and fit a writing style.
However many times this book may have been banned (or burned, as was the case in Drake, ND in 1973), there are still some judicious souls who see the larger picture that Vonnegut painted with his colorful words. In Howell, Michigan, in 2007, the book was challenged because of its strong sexual content. The Livingston Organization for Values in Education (LOVE) requested that the county’s top law enforcement officer review the book to decide whether laws against sexually explicit materials being distributed to minors were broken by this book. His logical statement was as follows: “After reading the books in question, it is clear that the explicit passages illustrated a larger literary, artistic or political message and were not included solely to appeal to the prurient interests of minors... Whether these materials are appropriate for minors is a decision to be made by the school board, but I find that they are not in violation of criminal laws.” Three cheers for the (rare) reasonable law official!
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