Structuralism and Space Aliens

At a glance, Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five appears to be something like a normal novel cut to pieces and reassembled at random. Of course, first impressions aren’t always accurate, and anyone who has *read* the novel can tell you that it is in reality a meticulously assembled work that is made to appear random as part of a comment on narrative structure. In the novel, Vonnegut also uses a bizarre race of aliens called the Tralfamadorians to further comment on the structure of novels, particularly the novel they appear in.

The Tralfamadorians, little creatures in flying saucers that look like toilet plungers with hands on top of them, perceive time as happening all at once, without beginning or end. As a result of their peculiar perception of chronology, they view time one moment as being no more important than another, each just another facet in time’s crystalline structure. Beginnings and endings have no importance in the grand scheme of things, and life and death are barely made distinct from one another.

Vonnegut constructs his novel to reflect the way Tralfamadorians perceive time, and in doing so subverts traditional narrative structure. This is evident in the first chapter of the novel, in which Vonnegut (the narrator) tells us exactly how Vonnegut (the author) will begin and end the story of protagonist Billy Pilgrim, and in doing so strips both moments of their significance in a traditional narrative. If the reader already knows how the story will begin and end, then everything in the middle becomes of equal or greater importance.

Of course, simply telling readers how a story begins and ends isn’t enough to be taken as a comment on narrative structure, so Vonnegut also structures in the middle in a wholly non-linear fashion, alternating between moments in Billy Pilgrim’s strange existence with such fluidity that they seem to be happening all at once. The novel has a faint hint of a traditional narrative structure with moments of rising and falling action and a fairly distinct climax, but they are created through the juxtaposition of unrelated events and not one moment leading to the next in chronological order.

Vonnegut takes the comparison between the Tralfamadorians and the structure of Slaughterhouse Five a step further when he introduces the Tralfamadorian novel during Billy Pilgrim’s flying saucer voyage back to the aliens’ home planet as “brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. . .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.”

This is Vonnegut’s ultimate comment on the nature of stories: it need not matter what order the pieces are in, as long as they are part of a meaningful whole.