Slaughterhouse-Five 1111another American, pledges to avenge his death by
killing Pilgrim. The wartime ethics of comradeship
and fair treatment are replaced by ethics of self-
interest and revenge, which ignore traditional ethical
codes and loyalties. Even the English soldiers whom
Pilgrim meets at a prisoner-of-war camp save the
best supplies for themselves. These negative models
of self-serving ethics demonstrate the persistent
failure to follow even the barest code of ethics dur-
ing wartime and the consequent brutality that men
inflict on each other. The repeated breaches of ethics
by Pilgrim’s fellow soldiers argues against the pos-
sibility of ethical conduct by the individual soldier,
beyond the meek ethic of survival that Pilgrim
himself seems to follow.
Vonnegut also criticizes historians’ and politi-
cians’ explanations of the decisions to bomb the
civilian population of Dresden, as well as Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. Researching the war with his friend
Rumfoord’s wife, Lily, Pilgrim reads various reasons
for the bombings: that they were necessary tragedies
that ended the war, that the harm they wrought was
not fully intended, that the opposing side started the
war, and that the bombings saved future lives from
being lost. Such rationalizations ignore the typical
restriction against targeting civilians to argue that
the ends justifies the means, no matter how horrific.
This kind of ethics stresses the importance of an
action’s consequences over its intentions, the way it
is accomplished, or even other duties or values that
would normally prevent someone from achieving
that end.
Pilgrim’s civilian life after the war illustrates the
futility of this kind of ethics, which takes benefi-
cial consequences as its main principle. Time after
time, good fortune turns into tragedy for Pilgrim.
He marries into wealth, but his life is disrupted by
uncontrollable time travel that symbolizes the war’s
continued hold on his soul. After he survives a plane
crash, his wife dies on the way to the hospital to see
him. Imprisoned by aliens, he lacks freedom but
finds happiness for a brief time with his fellow pris-
oner. Where soldiers and political leaders abandon
all vestiges of traditional wartime ethics to bring
about the best consequences for themselves, Pil-
grim’s life demonstrates the futility of such an ethics
in a world where one’s intentions never lead directly
to the stated goal. Vonnegut’s novel suggests that
the only ethics one can rely on involve the intrinsic
value of human life itself, rather than the ability to
control it.
Tim BryantFutILIty in Slaughterhouse-Five
The narrator’s conclusion at the end of chapter 1 of
Slaughterhouse-Five—that his book is a failure—sug-
gests his sense of futility at writing a work of fiction
about the bombing of the city of Dresden by Allied
forces during World War II. Comparing himself to
Lot’s wife of the Bible, who turns to a pillar of salt
for looking back as her city is being destroyed, the
narrator warns, “People aren’t supposed to look back”
and states that he will no longer do so now that his
book has been written. The narrator also appears as
a minor character at points in the novel, drawing
further attention to the futility of separating fact
from fiction when writing a novel based on the true
history in which thousands of civilians died. The
writer’s sense of futility at attempting to make sense
of war and death as his subject matter is reflected
in the seemingly futile efforts of various characters
throughout the novel.
Chief among these characters is the protagonist
Billy Pilgrim, who has become “unstuck in time.” In
other words, Billy becomes a time traveler during
the war, jumping in and out of different moments
of life in no particular order. Although these leaps
in time give Billy a unique perspective, he has no
control over when he jumps or where or when he
goes when he travels in time. Consequently, he is in
a constant state of nervousness and does not enjoy
his travels. Thus, the depiction of Billy’s time travel
as an unpredictable, uncontrollable phenomenon
mirrors the narrator’s own suspicions about the
futility of trying to makes sense of the war. Where
traveling in time is often portrayed in fiction as an
advantageous ability, Kurt Vonnegut presents it as
another way in which the individual cannot control
or make sense out of serious human problems such
as death and war.
Billy and his fellow soldiers face the futility of
survival set against preserving one’s honor in war.
He is ineffective as a soldier because of physical
ineptitude and emotional trauma caused by the war.