Books: The Price of Survival

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, OR THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 186 pages. Delacorte. $5.95.

Rabbits, we are told, have mercifully been provided with short memories because they are so constantly prey to the threat of being killed. They would go mad with fear and despair if they could remember the past. Men seldom realize it, Kurt Vonnegut suggests in his latest novel, but they have more in common with rabbits than they like to think. Except that men forget on purpose, and are a prey to one another.

The occasion for these and other reflections is an agonizing, funny, profoundly rueful attempt by Vonnegut to handle in fable form his own memories of the strategically unnecessary Allied air raid on Dresden that killed 135,000 people. The book's narrator, like Vonnegut, lived through the raid as a prisoner of war in an underground slaughterhouse. Like Vonnegut, too, he has spent more than 20 years trying to mark out the limits of its metaphoric meaning in a book.

Everyman Figure. The task is beyond him. Eventually he presents his publisher with the jumbled chronicle of another American prisoner who also survived the raid, as well as some of the horrors of peace and prosperity. Too archly named Billy Pilgrim, the second survivor is hardly a real character—"there are almost no characters in this book," Vonnegut says, "because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces." But he does very well as something between a consumer-age Candide and a Vonnegut Everyman figure.

Billy lives through the war merely because he happens not to die in it, then becomes a husband and a prosperous optometrist for equally random reasons. He acquires a Reagan-stickered Cadillac and a son named Robert, who graduates from failure as a high school alcoholic to "the famous Green Berets" and becomes a fine young man, fighting in Viet Nam. The only trouble is that Billy sometimes just can't keep from bursting into tears.

Mountain Time. He visits the planet Tralfamadore (which Vonnegut invented several books ago) in a flying saucer, and learns from little green men there that time is not a river, as earthlings think, but an unmoving phenomenon like a mountain range, continually visible to the Tralfamadorians from one end to the other. Since he has become unstuck in time, like the flying-saucer people, Billy, too, experiences many times over the events of his life, repeatedly returning to recollections of Dresden, and the great fire that followed. No one of these occurrences seems more unusual to Billy than any of the others. As the narrator says resignedly, repeatedly, "So it goes."