My school’s book club’s selection this month is Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I’ve really enjoyed everything I’ve read by Vonnegut, and he’s one of the authors I always mean to read more of. Thus, I was looking forward to this book. And it did not disappoint.

These were a few passages that struck me as I was reading, which I will post for your enjoyment.

This was written from Vonnegut’s point of view:

I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for a while after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.

Another thing they taught was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, “You know - you never wrote a story with a villain in it.”

I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war.

I never realized it until I read that, but the lack of villainy is one of the things I like about his books. They’re not black and white good vs. evil stories. They’re just about people. And I’m all about people being just people.

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

***

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, seperating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

I think that this is one of the best passages I have ever read. It’s where the anti-war message of the book struck me most heavily. The images of the Germans healing the American planes, and of the bombs being dismantled and made safe, are powerful because they feel so happy and kind. I feel like that’s how life should be. It makes the reality seem more barbaric and stupid and useless by contrast.