© The Gale Group. 2001

Trafamadorian Structure in Slaughterhouse-Five
from Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: Broadening Views, 1968-1988.

On the title page of Slaughterhouse-Five Vonnegut invites the reader to see the book as 'a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore.' With its short chapters and paragraphs, its short sets of sentences or paragraphs with spaces between them, the novel has a physical resemblance to the Tralfamadorian model. Many of the juxtaposed segments do not relate sequentially or thematically but together build a total impression like a montage. Events from two periods (1944-1945 and 1968) and from other points in the life of the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, are intermixed. His life is not revealed chronologically, by beginning in medias res, or by flashback; rather, the reader knows its end from the start, and the parts are filled in, from all segments of his life, as the ovel progresses.

Vonnegut cannot use the traditional form of the novel in presenting life viewed in contemporary terms because the conventional novel conforms to assumptions of cause and effect and rigidities of time and substance that he questions. For him the apparently pointless firebombing of Dresden, with its destruction of beautiful art and architecture and the killing of thousands of innocents, epitomizes the illogical. Consequently he needs a form that, while providing the reader with an intelligible account, does not appear to rationalize the events. In particular he needs a form that recognizes duration as a fourth dimension. He has sought to incorporate this view of reality into his fiction from the start. It means that each object or character is its history, not something that exists and has a history. In contrast to the portrayals of Proteus and Constant in Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan, the nonlinear characterization of Billy Pilgrim emphasizes that he is not simply an established identity who undergoes a series of changes but all the different things he is at different times.

The same principles that govern characters govern events as well. Dresden is led up to, as it were, by events that precede and follow it. It is surrounded by allusions to other catastrophes and to other events with comparable victims. Its being is its history, so that it ceases to be a single event with a single explanation or meaning. It is as Vonnegut and Billy Pilgrim see it, as the stunned German guards see it, as the weeping civilian couple sees it, in all the ambiguity this implies. The relationship between parts in the novel resembles relationships in life -- relative, ambiguous, and frequently subjective.

Part of Vonnegut 's artistry shows in his giving his peculiar brand of realism a strong pattern in its apparent randomness. The novel is described as ''A Duty Dance with Death,'' which seems appropriate since there is a kind of sweeping circularity in its movement. Dresden, symbol of death, is always at the center; it begins where it ends, with the author speaking; and throughout characters appear and reappear. In confronting in this novel the specter of death -- the deaths of many others and his own near death -- it is as if he is at last performing an obligatory ''Dance with Death.''

© The Gale Group. 2001