NONLINEAR CONSCIOUSNESS IN SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE

Kurt Vonneguts 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five is an exercise in nonlinear

consciousness as narrative, a without-time book conducted in pursuit of human experience. The
text shares modernist strains of thought concerning time and stream-of-consciousness, but
ultimately discards them in pursuit of a more self-aware, abstract, and scattered depiction of the
mind. By fragmenting the telling of protagonist Billy Pilgrims experiences of the Dresden
bombings, Vonnegut subverts the narrative highs and lows of chronological storytelling, seeking
instead to replicate the simultaneity of consciousness. Following the example of
Tralfamadorianstoilet plunger shaped aliens who experience reality in four dimensions
stream of consciousness is discarded in favour of fragmented snapshots and events. In diverting
from the tangled linearity of modernist fiction in favour of a scattered, Tralfamadorian-esque
approach, the intuitive, timeless vision of Vonneguts writing mark an interesting oddity; a kind
of devolution in the search for literature that is true to life.
The origins of Slaughterhouse-Fives style can be traced through the texts ties to literary
modernism. Although Vonnegut shares parallels with the movements inward focus, he does not
entirely align with it methods. While not identical with it, William Allen writes, SlaughterhouseFives narrative mode is allied with the stream-of-consciousness technique pioneered by Joyce
and Faulkner, which seeks to reproduce the minds simultaneous blending of the past through
memory, the present through perception, and the future through anticipation.1 Vonnegut is party
to the modernist task of articulating the nature of the mind in a literary context, but he subverts
one of its guiding tensions. He attempts to abandon time.
The French philosopher Henri Bergson looms large over the modernist landscape. His
distinction between dure (internal time) and letendu (clock-time) informed the writings of a
number of authors during the early 20th century, coaxing reflection on the temporal synchronicity
(or lack thereof) between mind and world.2 Landmark texts have often been placed on a spectrum
between the two extremes. Unlike Woolf, Marie Ann Gillies writes, who was preoccupied with
the opposition of dure and l'etendu, Joyce's interest in time centres around the exploration of
character and how to represent life's fluid inner world.3 Such dynamics are not necessarily the
focal point of such texts, but they are undeniably prevalent. Indeed, Mrs Dalloway working title
was famously The Hours, so focused was the text on times authority.4 Vonnegut is not engaged
in quite the same dialogue. Although his inward focus bears distinct resemblance to modernist
projects, his methods are inverse. If, as Wyndham Lewis argues, Ulysses is a time-book,
Slaughterhouse-Five is a without-time-book.5 The latters depiction of time as a simultaneity severs
it from key aspects of modernist writing.
Slaughterhouse-Five concerns itself almost entirely with dure. The novel makes a point
of undermining letendu as a legitimate narrative consideration, railing against its inherent
constraints of linearity. Much of the opening chapter is devoted to Vonneguts struggles with it.
Mary OHare, the wife of an old war buddy, is furious at the prospect of war book because she
expects it will be turned into a war movie starring Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of
those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful.6 Vonneguts
own scepticism of storyline peaks and troughs is well documented. In his memoir he identified
Shakespeares Hamlet as a masterpiece because it told us the truth, [which is] we know so little
about life, we dont really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.7 Even the most
tangled linearity muddies that truth. As Mary OHare warns, sincere efforts to relay life in linear
terms can be misdirected in a way that is not true to intention.
W. R. Allen, Understanding Kurt Vonnegut (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 83-84.
M. A. Gillies, Henri Bergson and British Modernism (McGill-Queens University Press, 1996), 11-12.
3 Ibid, 134.
4 A. J. Lewis, From The Hours to Mrs. Dalloway, The British Museum Quarterly, 28 (1964), 16.
5 W. Lewis, Time and Western Man (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993), 81.
6 K. VonnegutSlaughterhouse-Five, or The Childrens Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (Frogmore:
Panther, 1974), 17.
7 K. Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 37.
1
2

Stream of consciousness still denotes linearity and chronology, however fluid. The styles
connotations give modernist literature a kind of tangled linearity. The causal, traceable
undertones of Joyce, Woolf, and their peers slow down and accelerate the mind as deemed
appropriate, but they do not mix it up.
Slaughterhouse-Five outgrows its roots to avoid this, freeing itself of the suffocation of
chronology. Vonnegut uses the distinction between humans and the fourth-dimensional
Tralfamadorians to convey the limits of linear time in accounting experience. The sorry traveller
in the Tralfamadorian metaphor for the limits of human understanding could be likened to how
stream of consciousness writings traverses the terrain of the mind; twisting and turning, but still
ultimately in one big line:
Among [Tralfamadorians] was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a
steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole through
which he could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe.
This was only the beginning of Billys miseries in the metaphor. He was also
strapped to a steel lattice which was bolted to a flatcar on rails, And there was no
way he could turn his head or touch the pipe. The far end of the pipe rested on a
bi-pod which was also bolted to the flatcar. All Billy could see was the dot at the
end of the pipe. He didnt know he was on a flatcar, didnt even know there was
anything peculiar about his situation.
The flatcar sometimes crept, sometimes went extremely fast, often stopped
went uphill, downhill, around curves, along straightaways. Whatever poor Billy
saw through the pipe, he had no choice but to say to himself, Thats life.8
This is the scope of linearity. By bringing its protagonist Billy Pilgrim into the realm of the
Tralfamadorians, Slaughterhouse-Five dispels with it. As will be discussed, a degree of material
linear constraint is practically (and necessarily) unavoidable, but within the texture of the novels
narrative it is framed as a limiting force when trying to communicate the mind. Stream of
consciousness evokes images of a vast domino chain, while nonlinear consciousness sees them
scattered where they may.
In this sense, Slaughterhouse-Five perhaps best characterised as a kind of after-party
modernism. Although the text has been identified with both modern and postmodern schools of
thought, it does not fit snugly in either. Relaying the essence of the mind and attaining truth
remains paramount, temporality does not. Seeking to outline their respective natures, Algot Ruhe
considers the difference between material succession and the change in non-spatial, psychic
phenomena. It is, in fact, the difference between the world of things and the world of the mind,
he writes.9 Can, then, the world of the mind be expressed without resorting to succession? Even
the tenets of stream of consciousness seem to suggest so. Robert Humphrey contends that
consciousness is in its prespeech levels unpatterned; a consciousness by its nature exists
independent of action. In short, plot had to go by the wayside.10
This ethos manifested itself in modernist circles as spectacular inner ramblings of fairly
humdrum people, but for Vonnegut it translates as discarding plot within the mind itself. The
world of dure, according to Marie Ann Gillies, is broken into segments so we can explain, analyse,
and even understand the nature of experience.11 Accordingly, when the intention of a literary
work is to communicate the state of a consciousness, it is sometimes possible to circumvent
causal structures. The purpose of Pilgrims hops through time is to make temporal factors
Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 79.
A. Ruhe and N. M. Paul, Henri Bergson: An Account of His Life and Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1914),
106.
10 R. Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1962), 121.
11 Bergson and British Modernism, 12.
8
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unimportant. While clock-time utterly dominates texts like Mrs Dalloway, Slaughterhouse-Five
reduces it to arbitrary background noise. What Vonnegut in essence creates, Philip M. Rubens
posits, is the acceptance of Henri Bergson's world where not only is man free to move at random
through time, but also able to experience a progressive interiorization into memory where
Bergson sees time residing.12 As engaged by Vonnegut, certain aspects of consciousness can be
articulated without deference to chronology. His text marks a near-definitive leap into
nonlinearity.
Slaughterhouse-Five abandons material time for the timelessness of the mind. William
Allen describes the text as an attempt to describe a new mode of perception that radically alters
traditional conceptions of time, and that is the foundation it builds on.13 It does so by presenting
the fourth dimension as something analogous to essence of the mind. Maniacs in the Fourth
Dimension, one of several fictional novels that appears in Slaughterhouse-Five, explicitly frames it
in such terms. It was about people whose mental diseases couldnt be treated because the causes
of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldnt
see those causes at all, or even imagine them.14 Vonnegut seeks to bridge that divide. Pilgrims
adaptation to a loss of linear temporality is psychologically beneficial, allowing him to coolly
process the makeup of his own head.15
The not so subtly named Billy Pilgrims exposure to the Tralfamadorian perspective
allows him to identify causal structures, and thus their folly in a narrative context. As he contests
in the fifth chapter, It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another
one, like beads on a string, and that once it is gone it is gone forever.16 Pilgrims becoming
unstuck in time frees him to relay a scattergun narrative.17 Slaughterhouse-Five removes itself
from chronology because, as Robert T. Tally summarises, Billy is really not leaving one present
for another moment in time, but is actually present in all moments at once.18 In this sense,
Pilgrims leaps across the fourth dimension in Slaughterhouse-Five can be understood as a limited
simulation of the ether of the mind.
The closest the text gets to speculating on what that ether might look like in book form is
the Tralfamadorian novel. The reader is told they comprise of brief clumps of symbols separated
by stars read simultaneously, where each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message
describing a situation, a scene.19 Truth is attained through intuitively understanding their
interrelation:
There isnt 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. What we love in our
books are the depths of many marvellous moments seen all at one time.20

P. M. Rubens, Nothings Ever Final: Vonneguts Concept of Time, College Literature, 6 (1979), 64.
Understanding Kurt, 81.
14 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 72.
15 C. Baker, P. Crawford, B. J. Brown, M. Lipsedge, and R. Carter, Madness in Post-1945 British and American
Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 51.
16 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 25.
17 Ibid, 23.
18 R. T. Tally, Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography (London: Continuum,
2011), 80.
19 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 62.
20 Ibid, 62-63.
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Slaughterhouse-Five itself is often characterised as an attempt at a Tralfamadorian novel.21

Although, as will be discussed, a perfect rendering of such a text is not possible, Vonnegut
certainly embraces the idea as a legitimate method of expression. It attempts to bridge a divide
between thought and language. If in the minds eye a state of consciousness consists of countless
unpatterned moments occurring simultaneously, the goal in a literary context becomes
equalizing the power of a texts various images.
This requires the removal of dramatic tension, of the ups-and-downs, up-and-downs, as
Vonnegut puts it.22 Slaughterhouse-Five removes dramatic tension, and in doing so makes the coexistence of disparate symbols and moments its own subject of interest. Its time shifts, Todd F.
Davis argues, are exactly what prevent the writer and the reader from developing causes and
effects, from creating meaning based on a metanarrative.23 Vonnegut himself subverts any
potential for such forces to shape the novel by sharing its first and last sentence at the end of
chapter one.24 They remind the reader that terms like beginning and end have no meaning or
importance as far as [Slaughterhouse-Five] is concerned, T. J. Matheson writes.25 The novel
repeatedly mentions events housed on later pages, making their later placement incidental. As
Davis writes, The structure of the novel [...] subverts the notion of causality in its own telling.26
By robbing a novel of its traditional, clock-time-enabled highs and lows, Vonnegut allows the
essence of the mind not to be superseded by chronology. The moments the novel is comprised of
become their own objects of expression for the writer, and understanding for the reader. The
happy ending of a without-time-book, if there is one, is the articulation of the unspeakable
through a selection of symbols and moments.
Texts in the vein of Slaughterhouse-Five (B. S. Johnsons The Unfortunates, Joseph Hellers
Catch-22) seek to capture the essence of something through the sum total of its moments, rather
than through narrative. Order does not matter. Dramatic ebb and flow is a hindrance in the realm
of consciousness because it muddies its representation. There is a frantic clarity to
Slaughterhouse-Fives constellation of moments. As Stan Smith argues, its mode of narration is
not simply a formal device, like the cinema's flashback technique; for this cutting backwards and
forwards is precisely how Billy experiences the narrative of his own life.27 Outside, arguably, of
the framing justification of itself, the order of events in Slaughterhouse-Five does not strictly
matter.
Jerome Klinkowitz identifies the text as an attempt to say everything all at once because
imposing conditions of time and space steal meaning from the event.28 In its structureor lack
of itSlaughterhouse-Five succeeds here. As with something like The Unfortunates, a book
literally separated into pieces to be read in random order, the various jumps across time in
Vonneguts novel could be chopped up and shuffled and it ought to have no bearing on their
collective intuitive prompts. Thus, as William Allen writes, rather than being like a straight line,
the narrative chronology of Slaughterhouse-Five is more like an ascending, widening spiral that
circles over the same territory yet does so from an ever higher and wider perspective.29 As
symbols are processed, the overarching picture becomes clearer.
M. Coleman, The Meaninglessness of Coming Unstuck in Time, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce
Society, 44 (2008), 694.
22 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 62.
23 T. F. Davis, Kurt Vonneguts Crusade; Or, How a Postmodern Harlequin Preached a New Kind of Humanism
(New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), 78.
24 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 23.
25 Matheson, T. J., This Lousy Little Book: The Genesis and Development of Slaughterhouse-Five as
Revealed in Chapter One, Studies in the Novel, 16 (1984), 238.
26 Vonneguts Crusade, 76
27 S. Smith, A Sadly Contracted Hero: The Comic Self in Post-War American Fiction, BAAS Pamphlets in
American Studies, 5 (South Shields: British Association for American Studies, 1981), 30.
28 J. Klinkowitz, The Vonnegut Effect (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 83.
29 Understanding Kurt, 85.
21

This said, it ought to be emphasised that Slaughterhouse-Five is obviously not a pure

nonlinear text. There are traces of coherence which relate the novel back to the duality of its
author (and readers). It is true, Mary Ann Gillies writes, that Bergson raised dure over l'etendu,
but he did not dispel with l'entendu entirely.30 Similarly, Vonnegut does notindeed cannot
entirely separate his writing from order. We are not toilet plunger beings of the fourth dimension,
after all.
Vonnegut sidesteps this potential hindrance to the mess of his book by deferring elements
of letendu almost entirely to the necessary physical manifestation of his book in the material
worldwhich binds its contents in clock-time. The words on the page; the pages in the book;
these relay a clump of symbols that would ideally be viewed all at once. Readers are aware of this
clash, doubly aware because Vonnegut has already written the book, and because the narrator is
telling the story in retrospect.31 The Tralfamadorian sense of time identifies any given moment
as something that simply is. [] trapped in the amber of [the] moment.32 Concurrently,
Slaughterhouse-Five is understood by the reader to be a state of consciousness trapped in the
amber of a book. The material housing allows for the documentation of a state of mind. This
imposes a mild degree of form on Slaughterhouse-Five, but then is that not also true to life?
Without-time minds in material shells? The story is a ghost to the books machine.
Vonnegut effectively treats the content of the novel as a mind in and of itself. Books as a
format provide lentendu; their contents provide dure. In words, the pages they are printed on,
spatializing is inherent, and so the intellectual content of a novel neednt aspire to depict it in for
that aspect of life to be accounted for. Algot Ruhe outlines a Bergsonian framing of consciousness
as follows:
One must organize the present and the past together into the whole, as we
organize the notes of a melody and melt them, as it were, one into another. For
although we hear those notes in succession we nevertheless perceive them as one
within the other; and we may well compare the whole they constitute to our own
self, wherein parts, though they are distinct, are interpenetrating just because
they are vitally connected.33
The Tralfamadorian-enabled non-structure of Slaughterhouse-Five allows Vonnegut to echo such
a dynamic. The individual moments the novel is comprised of intuitively merge into a singular
state. Vonnegut was an avowed admirer of George Orwell, who was himself famed for his
journalistic streak.34 It bears considering that Vonnegut adopts nonlinear snapshot writing in the
spirit of reportage. As a newspaper might seek to provide a picture of a given region through a
selection of stories, so too does Slaughterhouse-Five assemble a shuffle of events as ambassadors
of the mind of its author.
Crucially, though, such ambassadors need not be sober in character. All this happened,
more or less, Slaughterhouse-Fives famous opening line, alerts the reader immediately to its
process.35 Distanced from chronology, freed from the constraints of dramatic tension, what
constitutes truth in the realm of the mind is that which triggers an intuitive picture of life. To be
true to consciousnesshowever frenetic or fantasticis to be true to experience. The peculiar
not-quite-modern-not-quite-postmodern ethos of Slaughterhouse-Five is that an abstract,

Bergson and British Modernism, 12.

Cordle, Daniel, Changing of the Old Guard: Time Travel and Literary Technique in the Work of Kurt
Vonnegut, The Yearbook of English Studies, 30 (2000), 176.
32 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 56.
33 Henri Bergson: An Account, 105.
34 Vonnegut, Kurt, Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, ed. by William Rodney Allen (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1988), 66.
35 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 9.
30
31

scattered account of something can be true to it in ways that a painstakingly exact, chronological
one cannot.
The veracity of Pilgrimsand by extension Vonnegutsexperiences is founded in the
outlandishness of their telling. A fantastic scenario can induce very typical human responses. A
constellation of outlandish moments can form an intellectual or emotional state true to the
intentions of its author. In Vonneguts case, that was to relay his experiences of World War II and,
more specifically, the Dresden bombings. In this Slaughterhouse-Five was apparently successful.
Vonnegut claimed that having finished it he didnt have to write at all any more if he didnt want
to. [] So I had a shutting-off feeling, you know, that I had done what I was supposed to do and
everything was OK.36 That this enviable sense of communication and closure was reached
through nonlinearity speaks volumes.
This is not to say that Vonneguts conception and portrayal of time and consciousness is
truer to life than any other might be. To suggest any one writing style or method holds a monopoly
on truth is to be silly. Vonneguts nonlinear approach stands as a narrative tool, with its own
possibilities and limitations. Arnold Edelstein aptly summarises that Slaughterhouse-Five makes
eloquent sense within its own esthetic limits.37 The timeless, schizophrenic dynamic of the book
succeeds in replicating the essence of a certain state of consciousness. It preserves its own
moment in amber; it cannot necessarily lay claim to any other. In this sense its methods are more
informative than its contentsunless, of course, one wants to share in Kurt Vonneguts
experiences of war.
The underlying ethos of Slaughterhouse-Five, as Jermome Klinkowitz notes, is that the
oblique can sometimes lend itself to truth in ways that directness cannot. Imagination is what
novels are made of, Vonnegut knows.38 The texts unreserved embrace of the nonlinear as a
literary tool isolates it as worthy touchstone in the depiction of consciousness. In many respects
Vonnegut simply takes modernist techniques to their stylistic limits, and in doing so undermines
some of their core tenets. If the combination of the texts enduring reputation and Vonneguts
catharsis are indicative of anything, it is that which is messy, fantastic, and without-time can be
deeply reflective of life in its own intuitive way. Through its anarchic wielding of dure thinking,
Slaughterhouse-Five shows it is possible to render temporal factors unimportant when writing
about the mind. Clock-time can be reduced to the mere practicality of a texts physical
manifestation. Vonneguts novel may not shelter the truth of experience in any definitive sense,
but the jumble of symbols and moments it consists of does produce an isolated picture of life that
is beautiful and surprising and deep. And true, more or less.

Vonnegut, Conversations with Kurt, 135.

A. Edelstein, Slaughterhouse-Five: Time out of Joint, College Literature, 1 (1974), 139.
38 The Vonnegut Effect, 96.
36
37

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