Meta-Narrative #2 – “Slaughterhouse-Five”
If you haven’t read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five – which most people haven’t- this blog post might not make much sense. I’ll do my best to adjust for people that haven’t read it, but honestly this is a good excuse to make you read the book. Trust it’ll be unlike anything you’ve ever read. Anyways, spoilers (of a kind) ahead.
Slaughterhouse-Five, by my reading, was a deconstruction of the shape of stories, imbued with the bitterness of an author who can’t put the significance of what’s in his head in the right order on the page.
The book opens with a chapter told from the perspective of its author (presumably Vonnegut), ending the chapter with a Shakespearean spoiler of what’s to come: the first and last line of the “book” proper. In fact, the whole first chapter is riddled with these little spoilers and embeds. To me, most interesting “type” of spoiler/embed was the inclusion the line “so it goes.”
Anytime a death is mentioned or described in Slaughterhouse-Five, “so it goes,” immediately follows. This mentality surrounding death comes from the Tralfamadorians, aliens who experience time four-dimensionally (please read the book, I don’t feel like explaining this bit). They abduct Billy, the main character, and help him process his strange relationship with time.
In the scene where Billy is abducted, a Tralfamadorian novel is given to Billy and briefly explained. In my opinion, this short explanation is the crux of the book’s meta-narrative. Tralfamadorian novels, the alien explains, are meant to be read by a dour-dimensional creature. As such, they are non-linear, much like this book (although this book has its own sort of linearity, whereas the concept wouldn’t apply at all to a Tralfamadorian novel, but I digress).
“There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep.”
When I read this quote, the whole rest of the book started to finally make sense to me. At the beginning of the book, like I alluded to before, Vonnegut expresses the difficulties he’s had writing his “famous Dresden book,” the very one we’re reading. There is a bitterness hidden behind the eagerness he places on his younger self who is eager to write a book about Dresden, a self who understands the structure and significance of it all, the climax and the irony. But of course, he does not write his book about Dresden until much later, presumably because it never quite felt right; because it never quite came together.
The result is a sort-of approximation of a Tralfamadorian novel: an out of order novel wherein individual pieces have little relation to each other, except that they all follow the non-linear life of Billy Pilgrim. Well, that and repetitive stylistic nuggets such as “so it goes.” Since Vonnegut can’t quite tell the story about Dresden taht he’s supposed to be able to tell, these nuggets are his attempt to craft “an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep,” the pieces of the story that he does have.
I have a lot more to say, but I think I’ll cut it there for now, as the rest would require me to get into more specific technical aspects of the novel. The point I’m making in this post is that, alongside the regular narrative points and themes Vonnegut touches on, he smoothly integrates a compelling and nuanced point about the frustration about getting story structure “right,” into both the narrative and the meta-narrative. And I think that’s neat.