Slaughterhouse Five

In an interview on Time and Eternity

Your next book is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. 

This book is at the other end of the spectrum – written in the 20th century. Kurt Vonnegut, through fiction, takes up the same questions as Augustine all those centuries before. He is also looking at the relationship between the present moment and what had happened before. And then he takes it one step further than Augustine to look at the future. His main character, Billy Pilgrim, is constantly unstuck in time. He is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. And the alien’s experience of time is very different to the earthling’s experience of time. They experience time almost as if it was a mountain range. It is just there. Everything that happens is there and solid. And on earth human beings can see just whatever moment they are in. But, Billy Pilgrim has the ability to do what the Tralfamadorians can do. He can transcend time.

What I find intriguing about all this is that Vonnegut tried so many times to write the story of his memories of the bombing of Dresden and he kept failing. And, finally with Slaughterhouse Five, he wrote this outrageous story about time travel. That was his way of getting to grips with the horror that he lived with. His character Billy Pilgrim lives through the bombing of Dresden and he goes back and forth to Tralfamadore. There is one beautiful bit where he describes how Billy Pilgrim experienced the bombing of Dresden backwards. The bombs fly up to the airplane, then they go back to the factory and the parts go to the places where the parts came from and eventually back to the mines where the metal is mined. And all this is seen in slow motion. 

Even though he is no philosopher Vonnegut is still able to ask the questions that all of us think about – how time affects our lives.