I read for a variety of reasons. I read to enlighten myself, to pass the time, to be entertained, to fill up with ideas I would never ordinarily expose myself to with only my imagination at the helm. I read because each book has a fundamental idea behind it, an idea I can uncover page by page, an idea that reveals itself to me in a style particular to the author who penned it.
Sometimes I come away from a book feeling like I have not fully absorbed the concept behind it, or even worse, that the book had nothing but an empty core behind its story. Most of the time these are books that are written in a style that I really do not like, or they are books that I just downright hated but forced myself to finish. Tea From an Empty Cup is one such example.
Slaughterhouse-Five is very much a book that feels incomplete to me, though strangely enough it still worked. I didn’t hate it - to the contrary, I found it extremely enjoyable and rather delightful with its early postmodern eccentricity. It just felt extremely open-ended, as if someone came along and cracked a reasonably straightforward narrative open out in the weightlessness of space and let its contents lazily float away in all directions, drifting into nothingness.
I felt like I’d managed to retrieve some of those fragments, though without any idea of how they once fit together. It was as if they were randomly stacked into a sheaf of paper, bound and mailed to me in the guise of a complete novel.
I knew it wasn’t a complete story, and the author knew it too. But, since the rest of the words and pages were lost in a vast dark nothingness, we decided to pretend it’s all that was ever written, and we each pretended that we were none the wiser, though the other party may have had their suspicions.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that Slaughterhouse-Five lacks what we might normally expect from a novel-length work of fiction, which is another nice way of saying that climax and denouement are completely absent. It is ultimately perfectly fine, though, because this is a novel that operates and succeeds on several levels. The only one it does not succeed on is the level of the standard format novel, which would require much more action and closure than Vonnegut ever delivers. It works as a piece of science fiction, and as an example of metafiction (oh, how it shines) and even as a piece of magical realist literature.
Either it doesn’t work as a plain novel, or I’ve failed my duty as a reader, which has been and always will be to comprehend a work on all intended levels. I’ve done that before, and I’m sure I’ll do it again, but with Slaughterhouse-Five I’m not sure if I did or not. The book is quick and written in a very simple but dated language. It’s impossible not to know immediately what time period in which it was written, which instantaneously endeared it to me. Unlike reading Gibson or Wallace, I didn’t need to make any mad grabs for my dictionary. Everything was right there on the page in quirky, lovable, easy to digest chunks.
But, aside from “War is ugly and pointless,” were there any other concrete ideas to be taken away? I don’t know. It could be possible that the only thing left after that were the stories of different ordinary people, their mostly mundane lives and slightly tragic deaths, and the moments they played out that could have easily gone on forever.
4/5
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