At the time of the 2004 presidential election, the nation was overwhelmed by fear—fear of terrorists, of John Kerry’s rambling answers, of gay people having the right to get married. It was clear that the war in Iraq was being mismanaged and that the rationale for military action had been severely flawed, based more on national anxiety than any real threat. On election night, I sat in the dark until George Bush’s victory was announced. I’ve never felt so disappointed as an American before. It was the first time in my life that the political had become personal.
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I searched out other novels that deal with similar questions and soon enough found myself rereading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. First published in 1969, the book follows Billy Pilgrim, a young American prisoner of war who witnesses the Allied bombing of Dresden, Germany, during World War II. In a good-natured prologue, Vonnegut recounts telling Harrison Starr, a movie producer, that he was working on it. “‘Is it an anti-war book?’” Starr asks.
“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”
I wanted to attain the tone Vonnegut had achieved in Slaughterhouse—a combination of the epic and the comically absurd encapsulated in the book’s famous refrain, “So it goes.” I was especially interested in how he built Billy Pilgrim, who travels back and forth in time, searching for meaning in a fractured world. He’s introduced to the reader like this: “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”
