Criticizing human nature and society alongside time-travel and otherworldly beings, Kurt Vonnegut’s `Slaughterhouse-Five` serves to exemplify the absurdity of time and space, and the societies that follow its very laws through the usage of time travel and repetition, while at the same time evoking emotion in a story which lacks any kind of suspense or climax. Symbolism running rampant across the span of the book, protagonist Billy Pilgrim’s disconnects from society and frequent time-travelling ridicule the absurd nature of society as a whole, and thus, the main symbol the story is based on directly associates the oddity of human nature to the society which encompasses the individuals who live in it.
Firstly, the greatest symbol of `Slaughterhouse-Five` is that of its oddly erratic format. Incidentally, this very symbol acts as a focal point to which the story revolves around. The form and structure of the story serves as an allegory between the author and the protagonist as a way to express the inability and uselessness the way the protagonist/narrator feels throughout the book – and at the same time, the wayward antics of society and its people. Pilgrim alludes to the structure of the novel in the very first chapter. He states that the structure of the novel is “jumbled and jangled” (Vonnegut 12). This, in fact, foreshadows the way Tralfamadorian novels are written - Tralfamadorians being extraterrestrial life forms that time travel to only the good moments of life and skip the bad ones, and thus write their books in full imagery, rather than separate parts of a book into pieces. “A clump of symbols read all at once, not one after the other...there isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects” (Vonnegut...