The Firebombing of Dresden
The most important historical event which informs Slaughterhouse-Five took place almost a quarter of a century before the novel was published. On February 13-14, 1945, allied aircraft dropped incendiary bombs on the German city of Dresden—a so-called "open city" with no significant military targets. The bombing raid created a firestorm that destroyed the city and killed an estimated 135,000 people, almost all of them civilians. This was nearly twice the number of people killed by the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The Dresden bombing remains the single heaviest air strike in military history. The raid remains controversial to this day, as many historians have suggested that the raid served no real military purpose and did nothing to hasten Germany's defeat. Approximately one hundred American prisoners of war, captured at the Battle of the Bulge, were in Dresden during the bombing. Vonnegut was one of them
The Vietnam War
The war between communist North Vietnam and non-Communist South Vietnam began in 1954 and ended in 1975 with a North Vietnamese victory and the reunification of Vietnam under communist rule. This same time period also covered most of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, a conflict which led to the United States entering the Vietnam War on the side of South Vietnam. The year before Vonnegut's novel was published, 1968, saw the American presence in Vietnam peak at 543,000 troops. As American involvement increased, so did opposition to the war among Americans. By 1969, a sitting President, Lyndon Johnson, had chosen not to run for reelection because of his role in prosecuting the war. Also, antiwar sentiment had taken the form of mass demonstrations and the migration of thousands of young American men to Canada, Sweden, and other countries in order to avoid the draft.
Although Vonnegut's novel is centered on events which took place in the 1940s during World War II, it is very much a product of the Vietnam era. Vonnegut even makes direct references to Vietnam in Chapter Three, when Billy Pilgrim, in 1967, listens to a speech by a Marine urging increased bombing of North Vietnam. And in Chapter Ten Vonnegut refers to the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy while observing that "every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam." It is perhaps no surprise that a novel which faced head-on the horrors of war, as well as American responsibility for some of those horrors, struck a chord with the American reading public at a time when many Americans were beginning to think their country had made a terrible mistake.
The UFO Phenomenon
An important element of Slaughterhouse-Five is Billy Pilgrim's abduction by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In the 1990s, "alien abduction" has become a well-recognized cultural myth, as countless individuals claim to have been abducted by aliens from outer space. Public speculation about UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) and the possibility of life on other planets is at an all-time high, fueled by both popular entertainment (television shows such as Star Trek and The X-Files, movies such as E.T. and Independence Day), scientific discoveries (the identification of planets outside our solar system), and news events (the Heaven's Gate mass suicides).
Although Vonnegut's novel predates the current wave of popular awareness of UFOs, the phenomenon was already well-documented when Slaughterhouse-Five appeared in 1969. Beginning in 1947, reports of UFOs came in waves from all over the world. Between 1965 and 1967, the U.S. Air Force received almost three thousand reports of UFO sightings. In 1966, there was even a congressional hearing on the subject, and the Air Force appointed scientist Edward U. Condon to investigate the matter. Condon's conclusion—that there was "no direct evidence whatever" that UFOs were in fact extraterrestrial spacecraft—was the subject of great controversy.
Science Fiction
Slaughterhouse-Five is, among other things, a science fiction novel, and it is also a novel with a strong awareness of the history of science fiction. Vonnegut began his writing career labeled as a science fiction writer, a classification he never fully escaped until the 1960s. In its use of the alien Tralfamadorians, his novel shows a keen awareness of the staples of both written "pulp" science fiction of the 1930s and '40s and the popular movies of the 1950s. The character of Kilgore Trout is especially interesting in this regard. Some critics have seen Trout—a visionary writer doomed to poverty and obscurity because of his work in a literary genre considered to be inferior to "real" literature—as a projection of Vonnegut's own fears of how he might have wound up if he had not escaped the "science fiction" label. Others have suggested that Trout is modeled on actual science fiction writers of the 1950s, especially Philip K. Dick and Theodore Sturgeon.
Thomson Gale Document Number: EJ2111500114