Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

I first read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five in my late teens. The Bosnian conflict had reached its climax and was at a turning point. 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were slaughtered in the Srebrenica massacre forcing the world to draw its attention to the conflict and act decisively. The atrocity led to international outrage and eventually prompted NATO to launch airstrikes against Bosnian Serb targets. By the end of the year the Dayton Peace Agreement was reached to bring an end to the conflict bringing unsettling peace to the region. The events of Bosnia, the Chechen War brought about immense human suffering, geopolitical tensions, and ethnic divisions.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut talks about the madness of war through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist who forms the nucleus of the narrative. Billy Pilgrim, an American soldier captured by the Germans is sent to a POW camp in Dresden and is held captive in an underground Slaughterhouse. A meat locker in which he takes refuge inevitably saves him from being killed in the fierce bombardment which is said to have taken more lives than the Hiroshima bombing. An event which Vonnegut himself experienced as a POW in WWII. Even today there are no clear numbers of the lives lost at Dresden. Nothing less than a massacre. A slaughterhouse of men, women and children.

Billy’s miraculous escape has a brutal but profound impact on his life, and he turns incomprehensible to his daughter. Suffering from PTSD, Billy hallucinates time travel and alien abduction at the hand of Tralfamadorians. Billy sees things differently and has a different perspective on time and life having seen the barbarity of war up-close. Slaughterhouse-Five draws our attention to the deathly effects on the soldiers and the cataclysmal impact on them post-war. What stands out here is the unwonted nature of war relative to the combatants and non-combatants. There are no winners in the war, no kings nor queens in the battlefield, only pawns.