SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE
Themes, Symbols, Motifs, and Construction
Themes are the fundamental and often
universal ideas explored in a literary work.
 Alienation may be defined as, among other things,
an inability to make connections with other
individuals and with society as a whole.
 In this sense, Billy Pilgrim is a profoundly alienated
individual. He is unable to connect in a literal sense,
as his being "unstuck in time" prevents him from
building the continuous set of experiences which
form a person's relationships with others.
 While Billy's situation is literal in the sense of being a science fiction
device—he is "literally" travelling through time—it also serves as a
metaphor for the sense of alienation and dislocation which follows
the experience of catastrophic violence (World War II) and which is,
for Vonnegut and many other modern writers, a fact of life for
humanity in the twentieth century.
 It is appropriate that what is arguably the closest relationship Billy
has in the novel is with the science fiction writer Kilgore Trout,
another deeply alienated individual: "he and Billy were dealing with
similar crises in similar ways. They had both found life meaningless,
partly because of what they had seen in the war."
 One of the most important themes of
Slaughterhouse-Five is that of free will, or, more
precisely, its absence.
 This concept is articulated through the philosophy
of the Tralfamadorians, for whom time is not a linear
progression of events, but a constant condition: "All
moments, past, present, and future, always have
existed, always will exist." All beings exist in each
moment of time like "bugs in amber," a fact that
nothing can alter.
 "Only on Earth is there any talk of free
will." What happens, happens. "Among
the things Billy Pilgrim could not change
were the past, the present, and the
future."
 Accordingly, the Tralfamadorians advise
Billy "to concentrate on the happy
moments of life, and to ignore the
unhappy ones."
 What connections does the novel seem
to draw between having "character" and
having free will? Who are the real
characters in the novel, if any?
 Why is the Tralfamadorian idea of time
incompatible with free will?
 Does Billy Pilgrim exercise his own will
at any point in the novel? If so, when?
 Apathy and passivity are natural responses to the idea that
events are beyond our control.
 Throughout Slaughterhouse- Five Billy Pilgrim does not act
so much as he is acted upon.
 If he is not captured by the Germans, he is kidnapped by
the Tralfamadorians.
 Only later in life, when Billy tries to tell the world about his
abduction by the Tralfamadorians, does he initiate action,
and even that may be seen as a kind of response to his
predetermined fate.
 Other characters may try to varying degrees to initiate
actions, but seldom to any avail.
 As Vonnegut notes in Chapter Eight, "There are almost no
characters in this story, and almost no dramatic
confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick
and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces."
 Given the absence of free will and the inevitability of
events, there is little reason to be overly concerned about
death.
 The Tralfamadorian response to death is, "So it goes," and
Vonnegut repeats this phrase at every point in the novel
where someone, or something, dies.
 Billy Pilgrim, in his travels through time, "has seen his own
death many times" and is unconcerned because he knows
he will always exist in the past.
 "Billy told her what had happened to the buildings that used to
form cliffs around the stockyards. They had collapsed. Their
wood had been consumed, and their stones had crashed down,
had tumbled against one another until they locked at last in low
and graceful curves. "It was like the moon," said Billy Pilgrim.
 The destruction of Dresden symbolizes the destruction of
individuals who fought in the war, in addition to the millions
who died.
 This destruction of men includes those like Billy Pilgrim who are
not able to function normally because of the experience.
 Time in the novel is subjective, or determined by those
experiencing it.
 For example, the British POWs in Germany, captured at the
beginning of the war, have established a “timeless” prison
camp. For them, the monotony of daily life has insulated
them from history and the war “outside.”
 On the other hand, Valencia and Barbara, Billy’s daughter,
serve to mark “normal,” lived time. Barbara perceives life
as linear and is angered by Billy’s claims of a fourdimensional universe.
 On the alien world of Trafalmadore
that all time happens
simultaneously; thus, no one really
dies.
 But this permanence has its dark
side: brutal acts also live on
forever.
 The Tralfamadorians are pretty clear that their
novels hold no moral lessons for readers. After all,
what would be the point of a moral lesson when you
can't do anything to change the future?
 Slaughterhouse-Five, with its tiny sections, seems to
be imitating a Tralfamadorian novel. So it makes
sense that the narrator doesn't spend much time
preaching about right or wrong: that's not the point
of this book.
 Vonnegut seems to be asking his readers to do
instead is to think about how much human suffering
the war brought for both sides.
 Some of the most evil characters in the book –
Bertram Copeland Rumfoord and Paul Lazzaro – are
the ones who think they are absolutely right.
 This kind of righteous self-assurance is what leads
to war in the first place.
 In the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, the
narrator promises Mary O'Hare that he will write a
novel about World War II that will not attract the
attention of manly men like John Wayne or Frank
Sinatra.
 One way in which Vonnegut certainly succeeds in
making war seem utterly unappealing (besides, you
know, the death and pain and misery) is by
emphasizing the hunger and illness of the soldiers
fighting it.
 Paul Lazzaro's stomach is shrunken with hunger, Edgar Derby
weeps at the taste of syrup, and all the American POWs spend
their first night in the British compound with explosive diarrhea.
 The book really foregrounds the unattractive, absurd realities of
male bodies under stress. The only soldiers with big muscles
and washboard abs are the English officers, who have been
prisoners for the whole war, and who barely fight
 Kurt Vonnegut depicts the bodies of the American POWs as
weak and poorly fed to demonstrate that this is a war being
fought by fools and children rather than heroic manly men.
 Slaughterhouse-Five is a book about prisoners of war, and
it doesn't get much more confined than that.
 But even more, it's a book about the many, many ways
people get trapped: by the army, by family, and by their
own beliefs in God or glory.
 It isn't only the Germans or the U.S. Army who take away
Billy's choices. He also finds himself caving in to the
expectations of his mother, his optometry office, and even
his own daughter.
 Billy sees very little real freedom in his life, which is
perhaps why he is so eager to accept that there is no such
thing as free will.
 The Germans and the Tralfamadorians both take away
Billy's freedom, but the Tralfamadorians go a step further
by giving him the tools he needs to accept his confinement.
 Even after Billy is freed from German captivity, he remains
mentally a prisoner of his war experiences – until he can
replace these memories with life on Tralfamadore.
Motif is an object or idea that repeats itself
throughout a literary work.
 In a literary work, a motif can be seen
as an image, sound, action or other
figures that have a symbolic
significance and contributes toward
the development of theme.
 Motif and theme are linked in a literary
work but there is a difference between
them.
 In a literary piece, a motif is a
recurrent image, idea or a symbol that
develops or explains a theme while a
theme is a central idea or message.
 Sometimes, examples of motif are
mistakenly identified as examples of
symbols.
 Symbols are images, ideas, sounds or
words that represent something else and
help to understand an idea or a thing.
 Motifs, on the other hand, are images,
ideas, sounds or words that help to
explain the central idea of a literary work
i.e. theme.
 Moreover, a symbol may appear once or
twice in a literary work, whereas a motif is
a recurring element.
 Birdsong rings out alone in the silence after a massacre,
since no words can really describe the horror of the
Dresden firebombing.
 The bird sings outside of Billy’s hospital window and again
in the last line of the book, asking a question for which
there is no answer, just as there is no answer for how such
an atrocity as the firebombing could happen.
 The bird symbolizes the lack of anything intelligent to say
about war.
 The phrase “So it goes” follows every mention of death in
the novel, equalizing all of them, whether they are natural,
accidental, or intentional, and whether they occur on a
massive scale or on a very personal one.
 The phrase reflects a kind of comfort in the Tralfamadorian
idea that although a person may be dead in a particular
moment, he or she is alive in all the other moments of his or
her life, which coexist and can be visited over and over
through time travel.
 The repetition of the
phrase keeps a tally of
the cumulative force of
death throughout the
novel, thus pointing out
the tragic inevitability of
death.
 Phrase occurs 106 times
in the novel.
 On various occasions in Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy’s
bare feet are described as being blue and ivory, as
when Billy writes a letter in his basement in the cold
and when he waits for the flying saucer to kidnap
him.
 These cold, corpselike hues suggest the fragility of
the thin membrane between life and death,
between worldly and otherworldly experience.
 The barbershop quartet made up of optometrists
(see sight), sing a sentimental song about old
friendship. The experience of watching and
listening to them visibly shakes Billy.
 He remembers the night Dresden was destroyed.
The four guards huddled together, and the
changing expressions on their faces—silent mouths
open in awe and terror—seem to Billy like a silent
film of a barbershop quartet.
 The singing provides Billy with a long-delayed
catharsis for the tragedy that he seems to have
passively observed in Dresden.
 In fact, Billy experienced the actual firebombing as
no more than the sound of heavy footsteps above
the safe haven of the meat locker.
 Seeing the Febs and remembering the sight of his
German guards, Billy is finally able to create an
association with the tragedy.
 Four open-mouthed men signify for Billy the loss of
tens of thousands of lives.
 Realizing this fact allows him to grieve the loss and
discuss it openly with Montana Wildhack when she
asks for a story.
 By contrast, when Valencia questions Billy about the
war on their wedding night, he tells her nothing
because he cannot yet understand his own
experience, much less recount it to others.
 Montana Wildhack wears a locket on which is
written, "God grant me the serenity to accept the
things I cannot change, courage to change the
things I can, and wisdom always to tell the
difference”
 The same words appear framed on Billy's
optometry office wall
 First, the prayer appears in both Billy's real life and his
Tralfamadorian life, strongly hinting that his Tralfamadorian
experiences are made up. He has taken bits and pieces
from things he has seen in his daily life and read in science
fiction novels to make up a world he wants to live in.
 Second, this prayer expresses something profound that
Billy is really looking for. He does want to find a way to
accept what he cannot change (the past), the courage to
change what he can (his current reality), and the wisdom to
tell the difference.
 The narrator describes his own breath when he is drunk as
"mustard gas and roses"– which is what his dog, Sandy,
specifically does not smell like.
 This is also the odor of the corpses at Dresden a couple
days after the firebombing, which Billy Pilgrim discovers as
he digs through the rubble of the city
 Repetition demonstrates that no part of this story is isolated
from any other.
 Each section, as brief as it may be, fits into a larger
consideration of wartime and its aftermath.
 After the bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim and
several POWs return to the slaughterhouse to pick
up souvenirs.
 Billy does not actually spend much time looking for
things; he simply sits in a green, coffin-shaped
horse-drawn wagon the POWs have been using and
waits for his comrades.
 Billy weeps for the first and last time during the war
at the sight of these poor, abused animals
 As Billy lies in his wagon in the afternoon sun, two
German doctors approach him and scold him for
the condition of his horses. The animals are
desperately thirsty, and in their travel across the
ashy rubble of Dresden, their hooves have cracked
and broken so that every step is agony. The horses
are nearly mad with pain.
 Given that this scene is the only time Billy cries
during the whole war, it must be pretty significant.
 These horses have no way of understanding the
destruction around them, nor the orders being
given to them. With no way of protesting their
treatment, they obediently keep walking through
the ruins of Dresden even though every step on the
sharp rocks damages their hooves.
 Like Billy himself, the animals are innocent victims
of great suffering without ever understanding why.
 The Children's Crusade was a real historical event
and also a giant wartime screw-up. Fired up by the
religious fanaticism of the day, a boy named
Nicholas Cologne inspired thousands of children
and teens to march out of France and Germany to
go Jerusalem to join the Crusades.
 It's unclear if any of these kids ever made it to
Jerusalem; many turned back and it's likely that
most of them died along the journey
 The Children's Crusade, a pointless sacrifice of
innocent life, relates to the novel's anti-war themes.
 The narrator (Vonnegu) says that he promised the
wife of his war buddy that he would call his war
book The Children's Crusade so that it would never
be misinterpreted as a heroic war story.
 Billy is an Optometrist
 Billy’s Job is to find different lenses to help his
patient’s see clearly the world around them.
 Billy/Vonnegut present the reader with different
lenses in order to correct the nearsightedness of
the world.
 Show the mistakes and the problems in society
 Perhaps the most notable aspect of Slaughterhouse-Five's
technique is its unusual structure.
 The novel's protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, has come "unstuck in
time"; at any point in his life, he may find himself suddenly
at another point in his past or future.
 Billy's time travel begins early on during the major
experience of his life—his capture by German soldiers
during World War II and subsequent witnessing of the
Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany.
 Both the centrality of this event and its radically alienating
effect on the rest of Billy's life are represented by the
novel's structure.
 Billy's experiences as a prisoner of war are told in more or
less chronological order, but these events are continually
interrupted by Billy's travels to various other times in his
life, both past and future.
 In this way, the novel's structure highlights both the
centrality of Billy's war experiences to his life, as well as the
profound dislocation and alienation he feels after the war.
 Another unusual aspect of Slaughterhouse-Five is its use of
point of view. Rather than employing a conventional thirdperson "narrative voice," the novel is narrated by the
author himself.
 The first chapter consists of Vonnegut discussing the
difficulties he had in writing the novel, and Vonnegut
himself appears onstage as a character several times later
in the novel.
 Instead of obscuring the autobiographical elements of the
novel, Vonnegut makes them explicit; instead of presenting
his novel as a self-contained creative work, he makes it
clear that it is an imperfect and incomplete attempt to
come to terms with an overwhelming event.
 In a sentence directed to his publisher, Vonnegut says of
the novel, "It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam,
because there is nothing intelligent to say about a
massacre."
 Style—the way an author arranges his or her words,
sentences, and paragraphs into prose—is one of the most
difficult aspects of literature to analyze.
 However, it should be noted that Slaughterhouse-Five is
written in a very distinctive style.
 In describing overwhelming, horrible, and often
inexplicable events, Vonnegut deliberately uses a very
simple, straightforward prose style.
 He often describes complex events in the language one might use to
explain something to a child, as in this description of Billy Pilgrim being
marched to a German prison camp:
A motion-picture camera was set up at the border—to record the fabulous
victory. Two civilians in bear-skin coats were leaning on the camera when Billy
and Weary came by. They had run out of film hours ago.
One of them singled out Billy's face for a moment, then focused at infinity again.
There was a tiny plume of smoke at infinity. There was a battle there. People were
dying there. So it goes.
 In writing this way, Vonnegut forces the reader to confront the fundamental
horror and absurdity of war head-on, with no embellishments, as if his
readers were seeing it clearly for the first time.
 Black humor refers to an author's deliberate use of humour in
describing what would ordinarily be considered a situation too
violent, grim, or tragic to laugh at.
 In so doing, the author is able to convey not merely the tragedy, but
also the absurdity, of an event.
 Vonnegut uses black humor throughout Slaughterhouse-Five, both in
small details (the description of the half-crazed Billy Pilgrim, after the
Battle of the Bulge, as a "filthy flamingo") and in larger plot elements
(Billy's attempts to publicize his encounters with the
Tralfamadorians), to reinforce the idea that the horrors of war are not
only tragic, but inexplicable and absurd