Sit down, shut up and read the chart

Slaughterhouse-five, Kurt Vonnegut and Optometry

Feb 06, 2024

I have a confession: I didn’t know what Slaughterhouse-Five was about until recently. Yes, I considered it for my Dangerous Words course. Yes, I knew it was a fictionalized account of Kurt Vonnegut’s experiences surviving the fire bombing of Dresden. But I didn’t realize the protagonist was an optometrist. You’ll see why this is unforgivable in a moment.

For I am the child of eye doctors. Not one, but TWO eye doctors. Because the Universe has a sense of humor, I have absolutely terrible vision. This is not hyperbole,1 but a statement of fact.

My parents met in Optometry school, and have run their own optometric practice for years. In fact, their Office is older than I am. (They broke ground on it before I was born.) In even greater irony, they’re both from Western Massachusetts, and are distantly related to each other by marriage, aside from they themselves being married to each other.2 This is hilarious to me, though no one seems to appreciate my incest jokes.3

*This cartoon is in my parents’s Office.*

Being a child of eye doctors was part of my personality as a kid. In a small town, what else is interesting about you? My brother and I went in opposite directions: I retained some of the eye stuff while my brother did not, so much so that I will have friends who will still ask me basic eye questions. Caveat etc etc that I am neither an eye doctor nor medical professional, but I have some rudimentary understanding of how the eye works and its diseases therein. It’s why when I was sent to a neurologist because a doctor thought I had MS I was able to explain that no,4 I don’t have optic neuropathy, and have never had optic neuropathy, and how did I know this? Well my Dad’s my doctor and he’d tell me, that’s how.5

What’s a gal to do? When your Optometrist parents are discussing eye stuff at the dinner table, you either absorb the information or drown in it. I still spout off random eye facts as a party trick.

I did wonder how I could incorporate this ostensibly large part of my life into the blog, and I needn’t have worried, because neither Western Mass nor Optometry will ever let me go. An example beyond Slaughterhouse-five having an optometrist protagonist and being in the running for my course reading list? Ok: I discovered on the second day of class that one of the students at Salve is from my hometown, and my parents are her eye doctors. I will never escape.

Ironically, I had the chance to talk to my father in the course of reading this book, and learned that he:

had not only read Slaughterhouse-five, but also had a signed leather bound edition
could not understand why the book had been banned and
also could not remember anything in the book involving optometry

Meaning: I now had to read this book to prove my Dad wrong.

Book Review

Spoilers ahead

Billy Pilgrim, World War II soldier and future optometrist, has become unstuck in time. What follows is a weirdly detached romp through time, space, and war. We see parts of his childhood, his capture as a POW after the Battle of the Bulge, his survival of the firebombing of Dresden, his marriage, optometry career, abduction by aliens, and death.

*The famous Dresden photograph. Walter Hahn/Agence France- Presse - Getty Images.*

As I was reading, I was struck by how un-science fiction like this book felt. Yes, there are aliens. Settle down. I’m not denying that. But, it read like to me was a realistic portrayal of PTSD, rather than anything fantastical. This book was published in 1969, so it probably wasn’t considered anything *but* science fiction upon its release. I’m reading this with 2024 eyes, and as an American culture, we have progressed much further in talking about mental health. I didn’t know Vonnegut personally (quelle surprise), but I’d venture that this was an easier way for him to talk about how his wartime experiences effected him mentally. In fact, he effectively says so as much in the first chapter: he’d been trying to write his ‘Dresden Book’ for years.

Slaughterhouse-Five features rampant disassociation and repetition - something I also associate with PTSD and its literary appearances. The phrase ‘And so it goes’ and variations therein was repeated upwards of 100 times throughout the book, illustrating the futility of life. I don’t know the exact number, I didn’t count. But it quickly became a litany and was inserted after some of the most heinous and upsetting images the book has to offer. The disassociation and the combination of recounting something horrific in flat prose reminded me of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, one of my book superlatives from 2023 and a fictionalized account of surviving Auschwitz.6

The book is classified as science-fiction, and I was surprised to not see meta fiction tagged anywhere because this book is definitely also that. The first and last chapters involve Vonnegut directly inserting himself into the text as a narrator, and I’m still unsure if he’s narrating as himself or Vonnegut-as-character. He also makes asides throughout the novel, interjecting what he would have been saying or doing at times when his path and Billy’s intersected, à la The Things They Carried, another metafiction anti-war novel written by a veteran.7 I had the same problem with Slaughterhouse-Five as I did with The Things They Carried: at times, I was unsure of what was real. Tim O’Brien is also a character in his short story collection, and I wasn’t sure if I was reading his *actual* reminisces, or a fabrication. O’Brien dedicates his collection to his fictional characters, and by the end of Slaughterhouse-Five, I was beginning to think Vonnegut had done the same thing.

This is a personal preference, though. I am much to earnest and can easily get sucked into fictional realities, so I like to have clear delineations between what is real and what is story. It was effective, I’ll tell you that much. Vonnegut mentions one character, an American who becomes a Nazi propagandist, and renders him so compellingly that I had to look up whether or not he was real. (Spoiler alert: he’s not.) It made for uncomfortable reading at times, as I had to fact check every name drop as to whether they were a historical figure or not. If you’re looking for commentary on how war warps your perception, you’ve found it.

In the end, the two books that I thought of while reading Slaughterhouse-Five were fictionalized accounts of wartime experiences, which included metafiction. I’d wager this is a larger commentary as to what is ‘real’ - each of these authors decided that the most realistic way to tell their stories was through fiction.

So my final verdict is rendered thusly: it’s a classic for a reason. It’s a well done anti-war book that highlights the absurdity of humanity and its behaviors. If you liked The Things They Carried and books that blur the line between fiction and reality, you’ll like Slaughterhouse-Five. And more importantly, I proved my Dad wrong because this book is FULL of Optometry references.

Great for: people who love metafiction, anti-war novels, blurring the lines between fiction and reality
Bad for: people who hate metafiction, ‘serious’ war novels, people who see in black and white

Slaughterhouse-Five and Optometry

Optometry does not really have much bearing on the plot, other than to illustrate that one day Billy will have a very stable career and life. It’s easy to refer back to, and is such a distant reality from Billy’s wartime experiences that it’s a jarring comparison. Completely demolished city versus nice suburban office? Easy to tell the difference. However, any middle class occupation could have been slotted in there and made the same point.

For better or worse, like the above cartoon illustrates, Optometry is not a particularly ~exciting~ profession. And I mean exciting as in: when was the last time you saw an Optometrist featured as the protagonist on a primetime medical drama?

*I did flag every time optometry was mentioned. Which was a lot, as you can see.*

My parents have saved people’s lives - that I can confirm. Both of them have detected cancer or other debilitating illness in folks and gotten them to see specialists. So lest anyone thing I am bashing eye doctors (or my parents), I am not. I’m just pointing out Vonnegut could have chosen any white collar profession to contrast with Billy being a POW.

The profession does serve as a useful foil to Billy’s perception, and this is the one way that it’s indispensable to the overall theme. The goal is to see 20/20, and Billy clearly doesn’t. He’s jumping back and forth in time, and his timeline is not linear or stable in any way, shape, or form. Billy’s perception is off, and there’s nothing his profession can do to help. Optometry is more thematically resonant than say, Billy being an anesthesiologist or a plumber. This also proves helpful when we meet the aliens, who can see in four dimensions. We’ve reached the limit of what the human eye can perceive, and it’s up to the aliens to tell us how all of time and space works.

And, to that point, Optometry was mentioned quite a bit. All of those blue and purple flags in my book are every direct reference to Optometry, Optometrists, or anything directly therein. Sum told, a mixed bag for Optometry here. Indispensable to the theme, not the plot.

To finish up, here are some fun eye facts, both about myself and eyes generally:

I have only been dilated twice in my life. Once as a teen because my dad wanted to see what would happen, and then once as an adult when my dad was concerned I had a bleed in my eye.8 I have big enough pupils that dilation isn’t necessary. Watching my pupils getting bigger and smaller as you take me from total darkness into light is a great party trick to amuse drunk people.9
Babies are not born with color vision. The retina is not fully developed at birth, and so for the first 6-9 months of a baby’s life, they can’t distinguish color. This is why very small children are drawn to patterns.
While beta-carotene is good for your eyes and can help spur production of vitamin A, the direct link between eating carrots and improved night vision was made up during World War II by the British government. Long story short, the British army had new radar technology in their airplanes that was top secret, so in order to account for their air successes, they had to come up with some explanation, so lo and behold: carrots.
Eye color is not determined by one singular gene, unlike what we’re taught in science class. If the punnett squares of our youths were correct, there would only be brown eyes and blue eyes, and no variations. After learning rudimentary genetics, I became convinced I was adopted. Why? I have blue eyes, my dad green, my mom brown. At age 8, I had yet to grasp that I took after the recessive, Slavic end of my gene pool. I only stopped protesting I was adopted when my mother got out my birth certificate and said, “Would you please stop now?”

Slaughterhouse-Five as a banned book

In terms of why Slaughterhouse-five was banned, for “explicit sexual scenes, violence, and obscene language,” my personal opinion is that this is an overblown reaction born out of moral hysteria.10 There’s some swearing, but nothing that an average human wouldn’t have already heard. There are a few explicit sex scenes, I will grant that, but they are described so clinically that I’d be surprised if anyone drew any pleasure from them rather than say, reading how a dishwasher works. And it’s a book about war - of course there’s going to be violence.

Vonnegut himself wrote a letter to the school board of Drake, North Dakota, a school district where they BURNED HIS BOOKS IN A FURNACE. The irony was not lost on him.

Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.

Vonnegut continues by explaining that Slaughterhouse-five was born from real experiences, and that he11

gather[s] from what I read in the papers and hear on the television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people…If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real like. Especially soldiers…and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

Vonnegut concludes that anyone who thinks his book is promoting war has missed the point. I agree. Part of the first chapter is explaining why the book has the subtitle ‘The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death.’ The majority of the (American) men sent to fight in Europe were barely that, and Vonnegut takes great pains to highlight how childlike Billy still is. If anything, his ridicule of wartime is an argument for reading the book, not banning it.

What about you, have you ever read Slaughterhouse-five? Do you know random amounts about a niche topic area and like to recite fun facts? And for all of you wondering, the title of today’s post is what my father would (jokingly) say to me as a kid when I went to go get my eyes examined. It helps when you have the eye chart memorized.

The Chaotic Reader

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