Slaughterhouse: PTSD

Slaughterhouse Five
Kurt Vonnegut

"There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters," (Vonnegut, 183).

Since the beginning of the book, I had wondered whether or not the speaker was entirely mentally sound. The jumbled organization of the book and its constant jumping around from one event to another led me to believe that the speaker had some sort of mental issue. Realizing that this was a war-based novel, I just assumed that the disorder suffered by the speaker was that of post-traumatic stress disorder. He was unable to emotionally relate to others, suffered from drinking problems, and had the need to come to terms with what had happened to him. It was not until the last section of the book that my suspicions were finally confirmed.

Slaughterhouse Five is written with a humorous tone despite the dark subject matter of the book. Vonnegut inadvertently explains this writing style by saying that "I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living," (Vonnegut, 167). These "wonderful new lies" take form in Vonnegut's writing style as humor that downplays the significance of the horror of the Dresden firebombing. In the lives of the characters, however, the lie is the self-imposed forced forgetting of war-time terrors. By failing to remember the war, the veterans are lying to themselves in order "to want to go on living."