Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
“Written by a man who survived the firebombing of Dresden — and spent 23 years trying to find words for it. He finally decided the only honest response was: 'So it goes.'”
Character Analysis
Billy is not a hero in any conventional sense — he is tall, weak, passive, and constitutionally incapable of resistance. He is the anti-soldier, the anti-hero, the man who survives by not being important enough to kill. His time-travel is Vonnegut's formal encoding of trauma: the mind that cannot stay in the present because the present is unbearable. His adoption of Tralfamadorian philosophy — acceptance of all moments, 'So it goes' — is either wisdom or dissociation, and the novel refuses to decide.
Almost no distinctive speech patterns — he speaks in standard midwestern American, unremarkably, without social pretension or performance