Slaughterhouse-Five

The test is subtractive, and the book is compressed enough that little yields to it; much that looks removable bears load. The first chapter, the author’s confession of the years in which he failed to write about Dresden, must stay: it sets the terms on which every later scene is judged and gives the subtitle its meaning. The Tralfamadorian chapters must stay, since they supply the law of time the book both tests and suspects. The refrain is necessary in the strict sense: a death without “So it goes” would read as an exception. What could go with little loss is some of Billy’s life in Ilium, the Lions Club and parts of the Valencia material, the longer summaries of Kilgore Trout’s plots, and the party scene with Maggie White, which repeat a joke the book has already made. Perhaps a twentieth of the whole is permitted rather than compelled.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. First, that the war was fought by children, and that the stories a culture tells about war, of glory, purpose and the film hero, are lies told about children: the subtitle makes this the book’s claim, and the boy soldiers carry it, Billy in his civilian coat and silver boots, Roland Weary in his fantasy of the Three Musketeers. Second, that a massacre has no meaning to be extracted from it: the author says plainly that “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre”, and the form is the demonstration. Third, and hardest, that the injury of war is an injury to time: Billy’s unsticking is a psychic wound rendered as a physics, years before the clinical vocabulary for it was settled. Held below the top because the book also offers the Tralfamadorian consolation and does not finally choose between it and the author’s own refusal of massacre, so that part of the meaning is a mood of resignation rather than a disclosure.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The book refuses the elevated register on principle, and its heights come by understatement. The firebombing itself is not shown: Billy and his guards are underground in a meat locker, and come up to a city like the surface of the moon, a cold sublime of absence. A film of a bombing raid watched backwards, the destruction undone, is the book’s single great transport, terror turned into a dream of undoing. The corpse mines, the four guards like a barbershop quartet, the horses whose bleeding mouths make Billy weep at the end of the war, and the bird’s last question, “Poo-tee-weet?”, all rise. Held in the low eights because the deadpan flattens by design, and long runs of the Ilium and Tralfamadore material are comic rather than elevated.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Some of the myth is built. The Children’s Crusade is load-bearing: the title names it, Mary O’Hare’s anger founds it, and the soldiers enact it. Lot’s wife is built into the frame: the author looks back at the burning city and calls himself “a pillar of salt”, so that the whole book is the act forbidden in Genesis. Billy Pilgrim’s name carries Bunyan, and the pilgrimage is real if aimless. The Christ pattern runs through Billy and through Edgar Derby, the decent schoolteacher shot for taking a teapot, who is the book’s sacrificial figure. Held a tenth below the bar because much of this is evoked rather than structural: the Christ material is ironic aside, Billy is too passive to bear an archetype’s weight, and Tralfamadore is a pulp cosmos whose mythic charge is cheapened by design.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance is the American war novel, the black comedy of Catch-22 (1961), and the paperback science fiction by which Vonnegut had made his living. The swerve is the joining of them in one book: the author’s own failure set at the front as the first chapter, a protagonist whose life is told as a mosaic of moments in no order, an alien cosmology used to carry the testimony of the century’s most suppressed Allied atrocity, and a refrain that turns every death into a shrug and so makes the reader count them. The stake was real: Vonnegut was known as a genre writer, the material was his own captivity, and the risk was that the science fiction would trivialise Dresden or that the frame would read as self-indulgence. Held below the top because Heller had established the black-comic war novel and the play with time has antecedents, so that the turn lies in the combination more than in a wholly new instrument.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. Told in order, Billy’s life would be a war memoir with a breakdown at the end; told as it is, the war is never over, because every moment of the life opens onto the boxcar or the slaughterhouse, and the reader lives the structure of the trauma instead of being told of it. The book is built in short blocks divided by white space, moments set side by side rather than in sequence. The frame turns a novel into a testimony about the impossibility of the novel, which is its knowledge about massacre. The refrain is form as ethics: it is the only ceremony the dead receive. Held a step below the top because the Tralfamadore episodes in the zoo, with Montana Wildhack, are closer to a container for jokes than an instrument.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Evidence over fifty-seven years: the book has sustained a large critical literature, and its central questions are still argued. Is Tralfamadore real within the fiction, or Billy’s construction from the head injury of a plane crash in 1968 and from the novels of Kilgore Trout? Is the book’s fatalism its wisdom, or its diagnosis of a broken man? Does “So it goes” anaesthetise or indict? These questions are real and do not exhaust. Held in the mid eights because the book is lucid and short, much of its meaning lies on the surface and is grasped at a first reading, and some of the scholarship is about the author’s war rather than the text. A reader returns to it for its compression more than to find what was hidden.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The field is the literature of the 1960s in American English: Heller, Pynchon’s V. and The Crying of Lot 49, Barth, Barthelme, Mailer, Kesey. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation: the book showed that the testimony of atrocity could be carried by fabulation and comedy rather than by realism, that an author’s failure to tell could be the telling, and that a writer could step into his own novel without collapsing it into play. Held below the top because much of the reach runs through its manner and its refrain, and because Catch-22 had opened the comic war novel first. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became one of the defining American novels of the Vietnam years; it carried the autobiographical frame and the fractured time of trauma into later war fiction, and its backward raid is acknowledged as an antecedent of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow; and it moved the devices of science fiction into literary fiction for a mass readership.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over fifty-seven years. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print continuously. Presence is among the widest of any American novel of its decade: it is taught in schools and universities, translated widely, filmed by George Roy Hill in 1972, and repeatedly challenged and banned, which is presence of a contested kind, not absence. The surface is partly fixed to its moment: the closing chapter’s 1968, the assassinations and the body counts from Vietnam, and the pulp texture of Tralfamadore belong to their years, though the first is the book’s occasion and the second is meant to be cheap. That partial fixing holds the axis a tenth below the widest figure for its span, and fifty-seven years demonstrate less than centuries.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Judged on Vonnegut’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the plain sentence and its timing: short declaratives, the comic deadpan, the paragraph that ends on a turn, and the refrain placed so that it never quite becomes automatic. The great technical feat is the transition: the book moves between 1944, 1967 and Tralfamadore on a single word, image or sensation, so that the cutting is invisible and the reader’s own sense of time comes loose. “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” opens the story proper and is a model of compressed exposition, and the first chapter’s voice, conversational and wry, is a separate instrument kept apart from Billy’s. Charges hold it below the higher marks: the range of register is narrow by design; characters other than Billy are drawn in single strokes, Lazzaro, Weary, Valencia; some jokes repeat their mechanism; and the Montana Wildhack passages lapse into the pulp they mimic.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the author in the first chapter, telephoning old comrades late at night with drink on his breath, and the Tralfamadorian zoo with its geodesic dome. They obey one law: to the wounded mind all time is present at once, and every moment, the comic and the atrocious, is equally there and equally unredeemable. The firebombing and the optometry convention, the boxcars and the honeymoon at Cape Ann, are governed by the same physics, and the refrain falls on every death without grading it. The range is wide, from slapstick to massacre and from autobiography to space opera. Charged: the author’s own stance in the frame, a refusal of massacre, sits against the Tralfamadorian counsel to ignore the bad times and dwell on the good; the tension is designed rather than a contradiction, but it leaves one law in suspension.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Many orders, held in one short book by one man’s unmoored life. Consciousness, in the mind wounded in time. War and the state: the Bulge, the prison camps, and the official history of the Army Air Forces that Professor Rumfoord is writing. History, from Dresden to 1968 and Vietnam. The family: Billy’s parents, his marriage to Valencia, his daughter Barbara and his son Robert, the Green Beret. Commerce and class, in the prosperous optometry practice in Ilium. The cosmos and the sacred, in Tralfamadore and the Christ pattern. The author’s own life. They are integrated, not listed: each is a way of looking away from Dresden or back at it. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the short form, which holds these orders as glimpses: labour, the natural order and the inner lives of others are thin, and the book is built of fragments by intention. A low mark on a short form describes the form.

Score: 8.2 / 10