I recently re-read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five in preparation for a scholarship essay. I finished it in two days, and though some read like that or more all the time, I can’t remember the last time I plowed through a book like that. I felt accomplishment.

Elder and Leemaur Publishers put on a scholarship every year, and this is my most recent submission. The question I selected to answer was “What do you believe is the greatest literary work of all time, and why?” Using all of the only 500 words allowed for an essay, I answered this awful question. Other equally meaningless questions you could answer were “Who do you believe is the greatest inventor of all time, and why?” and “What single event in the period of the 20th century (1900 – 2000) do you believe will have the greatest influence over the 21st century?” Questions like these make me so frustrated, and then to try to condense a review of what’s presumably one of the best books written into 500 words. Disgusting, but I would like them to give me money. This is my selling out:

“Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the most incredible books from the 20th century. It’s well-written and uproariously funny; but most importantly, it’s timeless.

This book is about coming to terms with atrocity. Our ability to find humor and irony during unfortunate times is our saving grace. It’s not meant to trivialize tragedy, but simply to say that if we are to survive, we must learn to laugh. We are “stuck in the amber of the moment,” Vonnegut says, reminding us that all horrible moments are now and always, but more comfortingly, so are beautiful ones.

That idea brings an existential peace with the world to Slaughterhouse-Five. The Tralfamadorians (an alien race who temporarily put Billy Pilgrim on display in a zoo on their planet) see time and space “just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains;” all moments are. Friends who have passed away are simply in an unfortunate state at that time, but in other moments, they’re in perfect health.

Books from Tralfamadore are a series of moments, carefully chosen by the author to be considered simultaneously to describe something beautiful. Slaughterhouse-Five is one such book. It’s filled with two-paragraph passages describing disjointed moments: a young boy is thrown into a pool at the YMCA; English POWs put on a production of Cinderella for American prisoner; a man is executed for stealing a teapot.

The central tragedy of the book is the firebombing of Dresden. Kurt Vonnegut was one of seven Americans to survive it, and he encourages us to remember that it was the greatest massacre in world history - 135,000 people were killed.

Billy Pilgrim’s comforting dissociation from the world lets us see the tremendous irony that abounds in the war. As he and other American POWs are sent to a prison camp, a hobo’s dying words are “You think this is bad? This ain’t bad.” While in Dresden, a hundred American prisoners are watched by eight guards, including a man with a fake leg and a grandfather and his grandson - one too young to guard and the other far too old. Many of Vonnegut’s war criticisms are presented through these absurd situations.

The book is lined with motifs that help with continuity: virtually every mention of death is followed by the phrase “So it goes,” a sort of “c’est la vie” popular with the Tralfamadorians. Mrs. Pilgrim dies from carbon monoxide poisoning on the way to see her husband. So it goes. These motifs conjure passages from elsewhere in the book, sucking the reader into a Tralfamadorian perspective where all moments are happening all at once.

Vonnegut urges us to dwell on the positive and remember that all moments are: “Be patient. Your future will soon come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what.” Billy’s self-written epitaph presents it concisely: “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”