The Book About The Book About The War

As I read the book, I thought about time, the narrator, Billy Pilgrim, his meaning of life, the stories within the story, and so on. I kept writing blogs about these different ideas that rushed my mind as I read, “Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future” (Vonnegut 60), or “The truth of it startled him. It would make a good epitaph for Billy Pilgrim – and for me, too” (Vonnegut 121). But even the most obvious aspect that the book contemplates, never dared to cross my mind. What’s this book about? This book is about a book about war. Therefore, the book itself is about war.

Even though Vonnegut states that there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Or, in other words, that war is not interesting. I myself find war a very interesting event in human history. How many books have there been about World War II? How many times have we read about the Holocaust, the Ghettos, and the Nazis in the last couple of decades? Indeed, war is interesting. “That’s the attractive thing about war. Absolutely everybody gets a little something” (Vonnegut 111). You might think here Vonnegut is being rude by referring to war as “attractive”. I believe that he is being quite satirical by employing irony and hyperbole. First of all, war is everything but attractive. Honestly, I don’t find corpses, blood, or guns attractive. On the other hand, not everybody gets what they want. You might end a war without a home, without a family, or even without yourself. So, are you getting a “little something”?

I decided to leave war for my last blog because I believed that it was definitely the central figure of the book’s structure and proceedings. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut not only discards the usual climax structure, but also demonstrates that war itself has no climax. If the book is about war, and war has no climax, then the book cannot have climax either. That might explain the idea of Billy being “unstuck in time”. In order to make the book about the book about the war, a greater resemblance of war itself, Vonnegut dismisses the climax in order for the reader to feel the reading of the book as a soldier feels in a battlefield of war. When we finish the book we have nothing to say, just as when a war finishes there is nothing to say about it. “One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, “Poo-tee-weet?”” (Vonnegut 215). As the story finishes the way Vonnegut planted ten chapters before, the reader has nothing to say about it. It just happens, there is no why.

There is no why in the story. The events just happen. Sometimes we ask ourselves, why did World War II happen? Why did it happen? Some people say because Hitler wanted to clean the human race from Jews amongst other ethnicities and religions. Others say that it had to happen due to the constant unrest happening in Europe due to totalitarianism. These are just vague explanations. Seventy years have passed since the war started and yet we have to find the why. Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why” (Vonnegut 77). Throughout the book events happened without a reason. We might think of many reasons why Vonnegut might have chosen Billy to be unstuck in time. But we will never find the true reason of why. So, if there is nothing intelligent to say about war, why did he write a book?