Slaughterhouse-Five: So It Goes

Here it goes: the first of four posts this week touching on the subject of time travel in some shape or fashion. Yeah, I know. You don't believe I can get out four posts in one week, but I've seen the future and it has already happened.

I begin with a spoiler-filled review of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, as I know most of you have already read it in high school. Somehow I had missed the pleasure, but got caught up when all my kids were getting the assignment. If you haven't read it, this is your last chance to stop, read the book, and then come back.

Anyway, this book is about Billy Pilgrim, an American POW who witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden. Vonnegut spends most of the time detailing the terrible conditions Americans had to survive behind German lines, leading to what could arguably be the most atrocious act committed by the British and Americans against innocent civilians: burning an entire city with liquid fire -- a city once known for its art, architecture, and high society. Tens of thousands of people died, and Vonnegut, himself, witnessed it firsthand.

Thus, war is just terrible all around. There are terrible acts committed by all players -- sometimes justified, and sometimes not.

The book is written by some unknown Author, who was with Billy Pilgrim during the war, leading one to wonder how much of the book really happened, and how much was made up to fill in the fiction. It's all about how the Author's been working so hard to put together his Dresden book.

Well after the war, Billy is abducted by aliens who teach him how to see along the fourth dimension. He then becomes unstuck in time and can travel back and forth within his own consciousness. He immediately sees how he dies: an assassination by laser gun in the year 1976. In fact, all of the aliens can see their own death and the ultimate death of their planet. When Billy asks why they don't do anything to stop these deaths, the aliens explain that the timeline can't be changed. It is what it is. Things die, and so it goes.

Thus, throughout the book, whenever someone dies, or even when a concept dies, the Author writes, "so it goes." Sometimes it's funny, and sometimes it's sad. There are even moments when the Author comes out and tells you this guy over there is going to die in a couple of weeks, and when it actually happens, it's still sad -- though I found myself still hoping he'd avoid it somehow.

At times, I could only read a few pages at a time. Sometimes I had to take a few days off from reading. It just got depressing to read, even with the black humor throughout.

But get this: just like in The Wizard of Oz (the movie), Vonnegut has created a story that could either have happened exactly as he had written, or it was all in the head of a damaged veteran with PTSD. Whichever it is, there is no way to determine what really happened, and the reader can almost decide for himself what he would like to happen.

You, too, can be unstuck in time, once you realize that time is just another dimension that you can travel. Just close your eyes, and remember your favorite memories. If you do it long enough, you can almost imagine yourself being back there, looking ahead to the future events that are yet to come. And then you jump ahead and imagine new futures that can not yet be verified or contradicted. Now, doesn't death by laser gun sound like a plausible death on Earth? It does if you can't prove that it hasn't happened ... yet.

And get this: it's easy to get depressed about death and all that until you realize, there really is no death when you're unstuck in time. You can go back and forth along your entire lifeline ad infinitum, as that is when you're actually alive. You ... just ... exist, and nothing can change it. Something may mark the beginning and end of your existence, but nothing can take you away from your existence during the entire middle.

Stephen Hawking once explained a similar concept when talking about our universe as a big 4-dimensional sphere, where one end could be the Big Bang, and the opposite end could be the Big Crunch. And then the universe would have no beginning or end of time, as it just exists as a 4-D object. It ... just ... exists.

And so it goes. I can't remember how the book ends, but as a whole it can mess with your head. It remains a highly recommend book to read if you haven't read it -- even after reading this spoiler-filled review. But then again, can anything really be spoiled when you can already see the future?

Oh and when you're done reading that, I hear that Billy has a brother who's really good at video games ...