"I think the highest and the lowest points are the most important ones. Everything else is just...in between."
-Jim Morrison (Lead singer for The Doors and cult figure)
Rarely, if ever, has mankind been taken on such a ride, with all of its emotional baggage following in its train, as during World War 2.
He, who has seen the face of the devil will emerge from the experience so shell shocked that he may either never speak again of it again or find himself at a miserable loss for words when attempting to describe what he saw to his fellowmen. Our language has evolved and developed during relatively peaceful times, and for the purpose of representing emotions and experiences of a rather limited spectra; which is why World War 2 left us searching and groping for words which were never invented in our language by our ancestors, since it is impossible and pointless to try and describe something which you cannot imagine. Back then, it was as if God were giving us the finger.
It is out of such a predicament, that this novel arose. How Kurt Vonnegut solved the problem is quite amazing, when you think about it. This is not a thousand-page volume that is full of painstaking detail. That doesn't do the trick for us. Nor is it something that would sound like hysterical screaming coming from behind a pulpit. That is even less effective. Kurt Vonnegut relies on more than just language to make his book work. His active imagination and brilliant ability to set up the most interesting relations and juxtapositions make this novel a success.
With all the above established, it's time to delve into the mechanics of the machinery of Slaughterhouse 5. The book uses the weirdest of components that at first seem to have little do with war or anything else on this planet for that matter. The main character, through the eyes of which the war is described is called Billy Pilgrim. He is typically unsuited to war. He is non-courageous and hates war. Other characters include soldiers, his rarely mentioned wife, Kilgore Trout - the crazy sci-fi author and most importantly, the Tralfamadorians. The Tralfamadorians are the highly advanced alien species who frequently visit Earth and also kidnap Billy Pilgrim once and take him away to their planet to keep him in a zoo with an actress from Hollywood for other Tralfamadorians to watch. In this process Billy Pilgrim has learnt a lot from them by the way of conversation. He learns that Tralfamadorians are capable of seeing in the fourth dimension of time as well. This privilege differentiates their belief system from that of humans. So, while humans are used to viewing events as successive and irreversible in time, the Tralfamadorians have the freedom to focus their attention on any event in the past or in the future just as humans have the freedom to view any object located anywhere in space. Billy Pilgrim needs no confirmation of this fact since he too has become a victim of the permanent nature of time. He is an unwilling time traveller, constantly hurtling back and forth between his birth and his death. Taking upon himself the job of teaching other people what he has learnt about time he tries to diminish the fear of death in their mind by giving them a sense of permanence of life, as of everything. The Tralfamadorians also make an interesting case about free will. They do not believe in it and regard the present moment as nothing but the inevitable outcome of an infinite chain of cause and effect. This fatalist attitude frees everyone of any kind of guilt or responsibility for anything in life, and wars in particular. This would obviously be deeply comforting to hear for people especially with reference to war. Whether Vonnegut is seriously proposing this theory or whether he just means it to be a neurotic reaction on the part of Billy Pilgrim to the horrors of war has been the subject of some debate inside my head (and outside of it). Whatever Vonnegut might have said about this outside this book I have no knowledge of, and the answer to this question might very well lie there, but the exercise is to try and find a self-consistent answer to the question within the book. If one believes that this deterministic attitude is nothing more than neurotic then we must concede that the Tralfamadorians (who are the original preachers of this theory in the first place) are but merely a result of Billy Pilgrim's frayed ends of sanity. That this IS in fact so has been boldly propositioned in class. If this were granted then we (or at least I) would be left wondering what this book achieves.
Let us look at the other option that we have on how to interpret this book.
It is a fact that Kurt Vonnegut has made Billy Pilgrim go through much the same war experiences as he went through himself. If the Tralfamadorians are real (only as real as Billy Pilgrim, though) then what we have is a perfectly coherent doctrine from Billy Pilgrim and Kurt Vonnegut on how to deal with war and death and how to put these unpleasant things in perspective so that they stop appearing unpleasant at all. Maybe, here it is not important to ask whether determinism is true though we must learn to differentiate between the theory of determinism and the theory of the absence of free will. Vonnegut is just proposing a sound theory that would help in alleviating a lot of pain in people.
My own opinion that not believing in free will is very reasonable and rational is irrelevant in this context.