Aliens, Therapy, and Slaughterhouse Five | When Aliens Make More Sense Than the World | Slaughterhouse Five

    

"Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut

Published by Dial Press Trade Paperback, January 12, 1999

Genre: Fiction

Format: Read via paperback and tabbed it up

When the Aliens Make More Sense Than the World

There must be something strange about returning to Slaughterhouse-Five, but this was my first time. My friend told me to expect the absurd, time travel, the unsettling. But what I did not expect was the way the book reminded me that writing itself can be a form of survival.

Vonnegut introduces Billy Pilgrim, a man unstuck in time. He flits between moments of his life without warning—one second, a prisoner of war in Dresden; the next, a suburban optometrist; the next, a kidnapped specimen on the planet Tralfamadore. This is not the structure of a book trying to explain life logically. This is the structure of someone trying to live with madness.

And maybe that’s the point.

When Vonnegut writes about aliens, he is not trying to convince us they exist. He is showing us that the human mind will reach for anything to try to make sense of the senseless. Billy’s time travel and alien encounters are not an escape from reality so much as a reframing of it.

If you can imagine a world where beings see all of time at once, where every moment is fixed and eternal, then you can survive the knowledge that you once stood in the ruins of a firebombed city. You can survive the memory of bodies you could not save.

For Vonnegut, the alien logic of the Tralfamadorians is not sillier than war. In fact, the aliens make the insanity make more sense. It gives him a container for the unbearable. It gives him permission to stop asking why. The absurd. Of course the absurd. What else?

This is where Slaughterhouse-Five feels less like a novel and more like abstract art meets journal. 

Vonnegut takes the unmanageable bombs, war, trauma, and loss and rewrites it in a way that allows him to walk around inside it without collapsing. He breaks chronology. He invents an alien race. He refuses to narrate pain in a linear, tidy way because that is not how pain works. I think this book has struck such a chord for decades because anyone who has faced grief like his understands that. Time is not linear. At any moment, we are holding a dying friend in our arms.

The book is both an act of remembering and an act of distancing. Vonnegut rehashes what he faced as a way to survive it. Survival, like redemption, is a moment and a process all at once.

The Comfort in "So it goes"

One of the most famous refrains in the novel “So it goes” appears every time death is mentioned. At first, it drove me crazy. But after a beat, it became an exhale. Of course, death is something that comes for us all. Maybe it's depressing, but maybe after you live long enough, you accept that every inhalation is one that brings you closer to your own turn. It's not necessarily a catastrophe. It's a natural part of the circle.

LOVELY BIT

“All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist."

RATING