Vonnegut's smarter than you and steals your wallet.

Imagine if Vonnegut eliminated time-travel in Slaughterhouse Five. That's right. No time-travel. Just an organized story of a weird guy named Billy Pilgrim. I tried re-reading key parts of his life and organizing the plot in my mind into a neat order, but it is next to impossible. Even if we were to sort through dates of events, there are so many elements in Billy's life that seem completely random. For example, where do the Tralfamadorians come into play? We know those events come into play sometime after the war, but things get tricky. Are they real, or are they a figment of Billy's imagination? If they are real, did Billy leave Earth after the war and return to live in Ileum as an old lunatic after his extraterrestrial adventure?

Kurt Vonnegut is smarter than you. And he knows it.

Many of my peers complained that Slaughterhouse Five did not have a true ending, but did it even have a true beginning or middle? In reorganizing this book, we could identify the beginning as Billy's childhood, maybe through flashbacks. The middle would mostly be the war and Dresdan. The end now becomes more clear. Whether his trip to Tralfamadore is real or not, the end would still involve his assassination after a presentation on time-travel. Before that, we would see his marriage, career as an optometrist, and meet his family. 

Here's the catch, though. How would the plot go? There really isn't any real antagonist or conflict facing Billy in Slaughterhouse Five, and it is mostly known for its confusing time frames and organization methods. This translates very poorly into a neat version of the book. Sure, there's the suspense factor that would be returned, since the reader has to learn everything as the tale progresses, but people won't really find anything unique about the novel. Vonnegut knows this, so he wrote his book in a way that would attract attention and bring people to understand his ideas and themes. 

Vonnegut's excuse for writing his novel the way he did was that one could not write an organized story about a topic so crazy and hectic (war). This, however, may only be partially true. Slaughterhouse Five, while containing important ideas about war, also incorporates other messages, such as enjoying the happy moments in life and forgetting the bad. However, most members of the public would not want to read a story like his if it was clear-cut for us. As I said in an earlier post, Vonnegut gives us the major spoilers of the book early on so that we can fully focus on the other elements of the novel, and by keeping it so messy and unorganized, he further helps that same goal. Oh, and by making Slaughterhouse so unique, more people want to read it, which means that Vonnegut makes more money. Yup, winning.