Distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) also called Decentralized Artificial Intelligence is a subfield of artificial intelligence
research dedicated to the development of distributed solutions for
problems. DAI is closely related to and a predecessor of the field of multi-agent systems.
Multi-agent systems and distributed problem solving are the two main DAI approaches. There are numerous applications and tools.
Definition
Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) is an approach to solving complex learning, planning, and decision-making problems. It is embarrassingly parallel, thus able to exploit large scale computation and spatial distribution of computing resources. These properties allow it to solve problems that require the processing of very large data sets. DAI systems consist of autonomous learning processing nodes (agents),
that are distributed, often at a very large scale. DAI nodes can act
independently, and partial solutions are integrated by communication
between nodes, often asynchronously.
By virtue of their scale, DAI systems are robust and elastic, and by
necessity, loosely coupled. Furthermore, DAI systems are built to be
adaptive to changes in the problem definition or underlying data sets
due to the scale and difficulty in redeployment.
DAI systems do not require all the relevant data to be aggregated in a single location, in contrast to monolithic or centralized
Artificial Intelligence systems which have tightly coupled and
geographically close processing nodes. Therefore, DAI systems often
operate on sub-samples or hashed impressions of very large datasets. In addition, the source dataset may change or be updated during the course of the execution of a DAI system.
Development
In
1975 distributed artificial intelligence emerged as a subfield of
artificial intelligence that dealt with interactions of intelligent
agents. Distributed artificial intelligence systems were conceived as a group
of intelligent entities, called agents, that interacted by cooperation,
by coexistence or by competition. DAI is categorized into multi-agent
systems and distributed problem solving. In multi-agent systems
the main focus is how agents coordinate their knowledge and activities.
For distributed problem solving the major focus is how the problem is
decomposed and the solutions are synthesized.
Goals
The objectives of Distributed Artificial Intelligence are to solve the reasoning, planning, learning and perception problems of artificial intelligence,
especially if they require large data, by distributing the problem to
autonomous processing nodes (agents). To reach the objective, DAI
requires:
A distributed system with robust and elastic computation on unreliable and failing resources that are loosely coupled
Coordination of the actions and communication of the nodes
There are many reasons for wanting to distribute intelligence or cope
with multi-agent systems. Mainstream problems in DAI research include
the following:
Parallel problem solving: mainly deals with how classic artificial intelligence concepts can be modified, so that multiprocessor systems and clusters of computers can be used to speed up calculation.
Distributed problem solving (DPS): the concept of agent, autonomous entities that can communicate with each other, was developed to serve as an abstraction for developing DPS systems. See below for further details.
Multi-Agent Based Simulation (MABS): a branch of DAI that builds the
foundation for simulations that need to analyze not only phenomena at macro level but also at micro level, as it is in many social simulation scenarios.
Approaches
Two types of DAI has emerged:
In Multi-agent systems
agents coordinate their knowledge and activities and reason about the
processes of coordination. Agents are physical or virtual entities that
can act, perceive its environment and communicate with other agents. The
agent is autonomous and has skills to achieve goals. The agents change
the state of their environment by their actions. There are a number of
different coordination techniques.
In distributed problem solving the work is divided among nodes and
the knowledge is shared. The main concerns are task decomposition and
synthesis of the knowledge and solutions.
DAI can apply a bottom-up approach to AI, similar to the subsumption architecture as well as the traditional top-down
approach of AI. In addition, DAI can also be a vehicle for emergence.
Challenges
The challenges in Distributed AI are:
How to carry out communication and interaction of agents and which communication language or protocols should be used.
How to ensure the coherency of agents.
How to synthesise the results among 'intelligent agents' group by formulation, description, decomposition and allocation.
Applications and tools
Areas where DAI have been applied are:
Electronic commerce, e.g. for trading strategies the DAI system learns financial trading rules from subsamples of very large samples of financial data
Electric power systems, e.g. Condition Monitoring Multi-Agent System
(COMMAS) applied to transformer condition monitoring, and IntelliTEAM
II Automatic Restoration System
DAI integration in tools has included:
ECStar is a distributed rule-based learning system.
Notion of Agents: Agents can be described as distinct entities with
standard boundaries and interfaces designed for problem solving.
Notion of Multi-Agents: Multi-Agent system is defined as a
network of agents which are loosely coupled working as a single entity
like society for problem solving that an individual agent cannot solve.
Software agents
The key concept used in DPS and MABS is the abstraction called software agents. An agent is a virtual (or physical) autonomous
entity that has an understanding of its environment and acts upon it.
An agent is usually able to communicate with other agents in the same
system to achieve a common goal, that one agent alone could not achieve.
This communication system uses an agent communication language.
A first classification that is useful is to divide agents into:
reactive agent – A reactive agent is not much more than an automaton that receives input, processes it and produces an output.
deliberative agent – A deliberative agent in contrast should have an internal view of its environment and is able to follow its own plans.
hybrid agent – A hybrid agent is a mixture of reactive and
deliberative, that follows its own plans, but also sometimes directly
reacts to external events without deliberation.
Well-recognized agent architectures that describe how an agent is internally structured are:
Swarm intelligence systems consist typically of a population of simple agents or boids interacting locally with one another and with their environment. The inspiration often comes from nature, especially biological systems. The agents follow very simple rules, and although there is no
centralized control structure dictating how individual agents should
behave, local, and to a certain degree random, interactions between such
agents lead to the emergence of "intelligent" global behavior, unknown to the individual agents. Examples of swarm intelligence in natural systems include ant colonies, bee colonies, bird flocking, hawks hunting, animal herding, bacterial growth, fish schooling and microbial intelligence.
The application of swarm principles to robots is called swarm robotics while swarm intelligence refers to the more general set of algorithms. Swarm prediction
has been used in the context of forecasting problems. Similar
approaches to those proposed for swarm robotics are considered for genetically modified organisms in synthetic collective intelligence.
Boids is an artificial life program, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, which simulates flocking. It was published in 1987 in the proceedings of the ACMSIGGRAPH conference. The name "boid" corresponds to a shortened version of "bird-oid object", which refers to a bird-like object.
As with most artificial life simulations, Boids is an example of emergent
behavior; that is, the complexity of Boids arises from the interaction
of individual agents (the boids, in this case) adhering to a set of
simple rules. The rules applied in the simplest Boids world are as
follows:
separation: steer to avoid crowding local flockmates
alignment: steer towards the average heading of local flockmates
cohesion: steer to move toward the average position (center of mass) of local flockmates
More complex rules can be added, such as obstacle avoidance and goal seeking.
Self-propelled particles (SPP), also referred to as the Vicsek model, was introduced in 1995 by Vicseket al. as a special case of the boids model introduced in 1986 by Reynolds. A swarm is modelled in SPP by a collection of particles that move with a
constant speed but respond to a random perturbation by adopting at each
time increment the average direction of motion of the other particles
in their local neighbourhood. SPP models predict that swarming animals share certain properties at
the group level, regardless of the type of animals in the swarm. Swarming systems give rise to emergent behaviours
which occur at many different scales, some of which are turning out to
be both universal and robust. It has become a challenge in theoretical
physics to find minimal statistical models that capture these
behaviours.
Metaheuristics lack a confidence in a solution. When appropriate parameters are determined, and when sufficient
convergence stage is achieved, they often find a solution that is
optimal, or near close to optimum – nevertheless, if one does not know
optimal solution in advance, a quality of a solution is not known. In spite of this obvious drawback it has been shown that these types of algorithms work well in practice, and have been extensively researched, and developed. On the other hand, it is possible to avoid this drawback by
calculating solution quality for a special case where such calculation
is possible, and after such run it is known that every solution that is
at least as good as the solution a special case had, has at least a
solution confidence a special case had. One such instance is Ant-inspired Monte Carlo algorithm for Minimum Feedback Arc Set where this has been achieved probabilistically via hybridization of Monte Carlo algorithm with Ant Colony Optimization technique.
Ant colony optimization (ACO), introduced by Dorigo in his doctoral dissertation, is a class of optimizationalgorithms modeled on the actions of an ant colony. ACO is a probabilistic technique
useful in problems that deal with finding better paths through graphs.
Artificial 'ants'—simulation agents—locate optimal solutions by moving
through a parameter space representing all possible solutions. Natural ants lay down pheromones
directing each other to resources while exploring their environment.
The simulated 'ants' similarly record their positions and the quality of
their solutions, so that in later simulation iterations more ants
locate for better solutions.
Particle swarm optimization (Kennedy, Eberhart & Shi 1995)
Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a global optimization
algorithm for dealing with problems in which a best solution can be
represented as a point or surface in an n-dimensional space. Hypotheses
are plotted in this space and seeded with an initial velocity, as well as a communication channel between the particles. Particles then move through the solution space, and are evaluated according to some fitness
criterion after each timestep. Over time, particles are accelerated
towards those particles within their communication grouping which have
better fitness values. The main advantage of such an approach over other
global minimization strategies such as simulated annealing
is that the large number of members that make up the particle swarm
make the technique impressively resilient to the problem of local minima.
Karaboga introduced ABC metaheuristic in 2005 as an answer to optimize numerical problems. Inspired by honey bee
foraging behavior, Karaboga's model had three components. The employed,
onlooker, and scout. In practice, the artificial scout bee would expose
all food source positions (solutions) good or bad. The employed bee
would search for the shortest route to each position to extract the food
amount (quality) of the source. If the food was depleted
from the source, the employed bee would become a scout and randomly
search for other food sources. Each source that became abandoned created
negative feedback meaning, the answers found were poor solutions. The
onlooker bees wait for employed bees to either abandon a source or give
information that the source has a large quantity of food and is worth
sending additional resources to. The more an onlooker bee is recruited,
the more positive the feedback is meaning that the answer is likely a
good solution.
Artificial Swarm Intelligence (2015)
Artificial
Swarm Intelligence (ASI) is method of amplifying the collective
intelligence of networked human groups using control algorithms modeled
after natural swarms. Sometimes referred to as Human Swarming or Swarm
AI, the technology connects groups of human participants into real-time
systems that deliberate and converge on solutions as dynamic swarms when
simultaneously presented with a question ASI has been used for a wide range of applications, from enabling
business teams to generate highly accurate financial forecasts to enabling sports fans to outperform Vegas betting markets. ASI has also been used to enable groups of doctors to generate
diagnoses with significantly higher accuracy than traditional methods. ASI has been used by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations to help forecast famines in hotspots around the world.
Applications
Swarm
Intelligence-based techniques can be used in a number of applications.
The U.S. military is investigating swarm techniques for controlling
unmanned vehicles. The European Space Agency is thinking about an orbital swarm for self-assembly and interferometry. NASA is investigating the use of swarm technology for planetary mapping. A 1992 paper by M. Anthony Lewis and George A. Bekey
discusses the possibility of using swarm intelligence to control
nanobots within the body for the purpose of killing cancer tumors. Conversely al-Rifaie and Aber have used stochastic diffusion search to help locate tumours. Swarm intelligence (SI) is increasingly applied in Internet of Things (IoT) systems, and by association to Intent-Based Networking (IBN), due to its ability to handle complex, distributed tasks through
decentralized, self-organizing algorithms. Swarm intelligence has also
been applied for data mining and cluster analysis. Ant-based models are further subject of modern management theory.
Ant-based routing
The use of swarm intelligence in telecommunication networks has also been researched, in the form of ant-based routing. This was pioneered separately by Dorigo et al. and Hewlett-Packard in the mid-1990s, with a number of variants existing. Basically, this uses a probabilistic
routing table rewarding/reinforcing the route successfully traversed by
each "ant" (a small control packet) which flood the network.
Reinforcement of the route in the forwards, reverse direction and both
simultaneously have been researched: backwards reinforcement requires a
symmetric network and couples the two directions together; forwards
reinforcement rewards a route before the outcome is known (but then one
would pay for the cinema before one knows how good the film is). As the
system behaves stochastically and is therefore lacking repeatability,
there are large hurdles to commercial deployment. Mobile media and new
technologies have the potential to change the threshold for collective
action due to swarm intelligence (Rheingold: 2002, P175).
The location of transmission infrastructure for wireless
communication networks is an important engineering problem involving
competing objectives. A minimal selection of locations (or sites) are
required subject to providing adequate area coverage for users. A very
different, ant-inspired swarm intelligence algorithm, stochastic
diffusion search (SDS), has been successfully used to provide a general
model for this problem, related to circle packing and set covering. It
has been shown that the SDS can be applied to identify suitable
solutions even for large problem instances.
Airlines have also used ant-based routing in assigning aircraft arrivals to airport gates. At Southwest Airlines
a software program uses swarm theory, or swarm intelligence—the idea
that a colony of ants works better than one alone. Each pilot acts like
an ant searching for the best airport gate. "The pilot learns from his
experience what's the best for him, and it turns out that that's the
best solution for the airline," Douglas A. Lawson
explains. As a result, the "colony" of pilots always go to gates they
can arrive at and depart from quickly. The program can even alert a
pilot of plane back-ups before they happen. "We can anticipate that it's
going to happen, so we'll have a gate available," Lawson says.
Crowd simulation
Artists are using swarm technology as a means of creating complex interactive systems or simulating crowds.
Stanley and Stella in: Breaking the Ice
was the first movie to make use of swarm technology for rendering,
realistically depicting the movements of groups of fish and birds using
the Boids system.
Tim Burton's Batman Returns also made use of swarm technology for showing the movements of a group of bats.
Airlines have used swarm theory to simulate passengers boarding a
plane. Southwest Airlines researcher Douglas A. Lawson used an
ant-based computer simulation employing only six interaction rules to
evaluate boarding times using various boarding methods.(Miller, 2010,
xii-xviii).
Human swarming
Networks
of distributed users can be organized into "human swarms" through the
implementation of real-time closed-loop control systems. Developed by Louis Rosenberg
in 2015, human swarming, also called artificial swarm intelligence,
allows the collective intelligence of interconnected groups of people
online to be harnessed.The collective intelligence of the group often exceeds the abilities of any one member of the group.
Stanford University School of Medicine
published in 2018 a study showing that groups of human doctors, when
connected together by real-time swarming algorithms, could diagnose
medical conditions with substantially higher accuracy than individual
doctors or groups of doctors working together using traditional
crowd-sourcing methods. In one such study, swarms of human radiologists
connected together were tasked with diagnosing chest x-rays and
demonstrated a 33% reduction in diagnostic errors as compared to the
traditional human methods, and a 22% improvement over traditional
machine-learning.
Swarm grammars are swarms of stochastic grammars that can be evolved to describe complex properties such as found in art and architecture. These grammars interact as agents behaving according to rules of swarm intelligence. Such behavior can also suggest deep learning algorithms, in particular when mapping of such swarms to neural circuits is considered.
Swarmic art
In a series of works, al-Rifaie et al. have successfully used two swarm intelligence algorithms—one mimicking the behaviour of one species of ants (Leptothorax acervorum) foraging (stochastic diffusion search, SDS) and the other algorithm mimicking the behaviour of birds flocking (particle swarm optimization,
PSO)—to describe a novel integration strategy exploiting the local
search properties of the PSO with global SDS behaviour. The resulting hybrid algorithm
is used to sketch novel drawings of an input image, exploiting an
artistic tension between the local behaviour of the 'birds flocking'—as
they seek to follow the input sketch—and the global behaviour of the
"ants foraging"—as they seek to encourage the flock to explore novel
regions of the canvas. The "creativity" of this hybrid swarm system has
been analysed under the philosophical light of the "rhizome" in the
context of Deleuze's "Orchid and Wasp" metaphor.
A more recent work of al-Rifaie et al., "Swarmic Sketches and Attention Mechanism", introduces a novel approach deploying the mechanism of 'attention' by
adapting SDS to selectively attend to detailed areas of a digital
canvas. Once the attention of the swarm is drawn to a certain line
within the canvas, the capability of PSO is used to produce a 'swarmic
sketch' of the attended line. The swarms move throughout the digital
canvas in an attempt to satisfy their dynamic roles—attention to areas
with more details—associated with them via their fitness function.
Having associated the rendering process with the concepts of attention,
the performance of the participating swarms creates a unique,
non-identical sketch each time the 'artist' swarms embark on
interpreting the input line drawings. In other works, while PSO is
responsible for the sketching process, SDS controls the attention of the
swarm.
In a similar work, "Swarmic Paintings and Colour Attention", non-photorealistic images are produced using SDS algorithm which, in
the context of this work, is responsible for colour attention.
The "computational creativity" of the above-mentioned systems are discussed in through the two prerequisites of creativity (i.e. freedom and
constraints) within the swarm intelligence's two infamous phases of
exploration and exploitation.
Michael Theodore and Nikolaus Correll use swarm intelligent art installation to explore what it takes to have engineered systems to appear lifelike.
A psychedelic experience (known colloquially as a trip) is a temporary altered state of consciousness induced by the consumption of a psychedelic substance (most commonly LSD, mescaline, psilocybin mushrooms, or DMT). For example, an acid trip is a psychedelic experience brought on by the use of LSD, while a mushroom trip is a psychedelic experience brought on by the use of psilocybin. Psychedelic experiences feature alterations in normal perception such as visual distortions and a subjective loss of self-identity, sometimes interpreted as mystical experiences . Psychedelic experiences lack predictability, as they can range from being highly pleasurable (known as a good trip) to frightening (known as a bad trip).
The outcome of a psychedelic experience is heavily influenced by the
person's mood, personality, expectations, and environment (also known as
set and setting).
Researchers have interpreted psychedelic experiences in light of a range of scientific theories, including model psychosis theory, filtration theory, psychoanalytic theory, entropic brain theory, integrated information theory, and predictive processing. Psychedelic experiences are also induced and interpreted in religious and spiritual contexts.
Along with psilocybin's unique effect on the state of mind,
psilocybin has been subject to the idea of being used for therapeutic
treatments. This rapidly developing field of psilocybin-assisted therapy
has produced promising results in studies targeting mental disorders
like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
Etymology
The term psychedelic was coined by the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond during written correspondence with author Aldous Huxley and presented to the New York Academy of Sciences by Osmond in 1957. It is derived from the Greek words ψυχή, psychḗ, 'soul, mind' and δηλείν, dēleín,
'to manifest' thus meaning "mind manifesting," the implication being
that psychedelics can develop untapped potentials of the human mind. The term trip was first coined by US Army scientists during the 1950s when they were experimenting with LSD.
Phenomenology
Despite several attempts that have been made, starting in the 19th and 20th centuries, to define common phenomenological structures of the effects produced by classic psychedelics, a universally accepted taxonomy does not yet exist.
Visual alteration
A prominent element of psychedelic experiences is visual alteration. Psychedelic visual alteration often includes spontaneous formation of
complex flowing geometric visual patterning in the visual field. When the eyes are open, the visual alteration is overlaid onto the
objects and spaces in the physical environment; when the eyes are closed
the visual alteration is seen in the "inner world" behind the eyelids. These visual effects increase in complexity with higher dosages, and also when the eyes are closed. The visual alteration does not normally constitute hallucinations,
because the person undergoing the experience can still distinguish
between real and imagined visual phenomena, though in some cases, true
hallucinations are present. More rarely, psychedelic experiences can include complex hallucinations of objects, animals, people, or even whole landscapes. Visual alterations also include other effects such as afterimages, shifting of color hues, and pareidolia. The appearance of colors and light are usually enhanced.
The visuals of psychedelics have been reproduced in video and image form using artificial intelligence.
A number of studies by Roland R. Griffiths and other researchers have concluded that high doses of psilocybin and other classic psychedelics trigger mystical experiences in most research participants.Mystical experiences have been measured by a number of psychometric scales, including the Hood Mysticism Scale, the Spiritual Transcendence Scale, and the Mystical Experience Questionnaire. The revised version of the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, for
example, asks participants about four dimensions of their experience,
namely the "mystical" quality, positive mood such as the experience of
amazement, the loss of the usual sense of time and space, and the sense
that the experience cannot be adequately conveyed through words. The questions on the "mystical" quality in turn probe multiple aspects:
the sense of "pure" being, the sense of unity with one's surroundings,
the sense that what one experienced was real, and the sense of
sacredness. Some researchers have questioned the interpretation of the results from
these studies and whether the framework and terminology of mysticism
are appropriate in a scientific context, while other researchers have
responded to those criticisms and argued that descriptions of mystical
experiences are compatible with a scientific worldview.
A group of researchers concluded in a 2011 study that psilocybin
"occasions personally and spiritually significant mystical experiences
that predict long-term changes in behaviors, attitudes and values".
Some research has found similarities between psychedelic experiences and non-ordinary forms of consciousness experienced in meditation and near-death experiences. The phenomenon of ego dissolution is often described as a key feature of the psychedelic experience.
Individuals who have psychedelic experiences often describe what
they experienced as "more real" than ordinary experience. For example,
the psychologist Benny Shanon, after observing ayahuasca
trips, referred to "the assessment, very common with ayahuasca, that
what is seen and thought during the course of intoxication defines the
real, whereas the world that is ordinarily perceived is actually an
illusion." Similarly, the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof
described the LSD experience as "complex revelatory insights into the
nature of existence… typically accompanied by a sense of certainty that
this knowledge is ultimately more relevant and 'real' than the
perceptions and beliefs we share in everyday life."
A "bad trip" is a highly unpleasant psychedelic experience. A bad trip on psilocybin, for instance, often features intense anxiety, confusion, agitation, or even psychotic episodes. Bad trips can be connected to the anxious ego-dissolution (AED) dimension of the APZ questionnaire used in research on psychedelic experiences. As of 2011, exact data on the frequency of bad trips are not available. Some research suggests that the risk of a bad trip on psilocybin is
higher when multiple drugs are used, when the user has a history of
certain mental illnesses, and when the user is not supervised by a sober
person.
In clinical research settings, precautions including the
screening and preparation of participants, the training of the session
monitors who will be present during the experience, and the selection of
appropriate physical setting can minimize the likelihood of
psychological distress. Researchers have suggested that the presence of professional "trip sitters" (i.e., session monitors) may significantly reduce the negative experiences associated with a bad trip. In most cases in which anxiety arises during a supervised psychedelic
experience, reassurance from the session monitor is adequate to resolve
it; however, if distress becomes intense it can be treated
pharmacologically, for example with the benzodiazepinediazepam.Research shows that preparing for the psychedelic experience, as
well as the set and setting of the individual and environment they will
be in, can help mitigate "bad trips''.Harvard Psychologist Timothy Leary has said that "set" and "setting" are important to the experience. Set refers to the participants' internal state – their mental,
emotional and physical state, as well as their intentions for the
experience (whether they want to solve a complex problem, discover the
underlying secrets of the universe, or heal from a past trauma) – the
better these preliminary conditions, the better the experience usually
goes. Setting refers to the environment the experience will take place in.
Leary and others have found that, due to the highly suggestible nature
of the psychedelic experience, the environment the participant is in
plays a critical role. For example, a warmly decorated room with a comfortable couch, nice
music and an overall welcoming atmosphere will have a much more positive
effect than a cold stainless steel and concrete reinforced hospital
room. Taking these necessary precautions before a psychedelic experience,
along with the presence of trained professionals, have been shown to
significantly reduce an overall negative experience.
The psychiatrist Stanislav Grof
wrote that unpleasant psychedelic experiences are not necessarily
unhealthy or undesirable, arguing that they may have potential for
psychological healing and lead to breakthrough and resolution of
unresolved psychic issues. Drawing on narrative theory,
the authors of a 2021 study of 50 users of psychedelics found that many
described bad trips as having been sources of insight or even turning
points in life.
Scientific models
Link
R. Swanson divides scientific frameworks for understanding psychedelic
experiences into two waves. In the first wave, encompassing nineteenth-
and twentieth-century frameworks, he includes model psychosis theory (the psychotomimetic paradigm), filtration theory, and psychoanalytic theory. In the second wave of theories, encompassing twenty-first-century frameworks, Swanson includes entropic brain theory, integrated information theory, and predictive processing.
Model psychosis theory
Researchers
studying mescaline in the early twentieth century and LSD in the
mid-twentieth century took interest in these drugs as producing a
temporary "model psychosis" that could assist researchers and medical
students in understanding the experiences of patients with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.
It was popular to compare between experiences of psychedelics and psychosis in the mid-20th century. The scales used in psychosis and psychedelic research, in the late-20th and 21st century, are more different. Despite the many similarities that were observed between experiences of
psychedelics and psychosis in the past, contemporary psychosis and
psychedelic research highlight some features more than others (since
they have different goals and assumptions), such as mysticism,
connectedness, awe, peace, ego dissolution, hallucinations,
suspiciousness, disorganization, hostility, grandiosity, and withdrawal.
Filtration theory
Aldous Huxley and Humphrey Osmond
applied the pre-existing ideas of filtration theory, which held that
the brain filters what enters into consciousness, to explain psychedelic
experiences (and it is from this paradigm that the term psychedelic is derived). Huxley believed that the brain was filtering reality itself and that psychedelics granted conscious access to "Mind at Large," whereas Osmond believed that the brain was filtering aspects of the mind out of consciousness. Swanson writes that Osmond's view seems "less radical, more compatible with materialist science, and less epistemically and ontologically committed" than Huxley's.
Psychoanalytic theory
Psychoanalytic theory was the predominant interpretive framework in mid-twentieth-century psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. For instance, Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof
characterised psychedelic experiencing as "non-specific amplification
of unconscious mental processes", and he analysed the phenomenology of
the LSD experience (particularly the experience of what he termed
psychospiritual death and rebirth) in terms of Otto Rank's theory of the unresolved memory of the primal birth trauma.
Entropic brain theory
Entropic brain theory is a theory of consciousness proposed in 2014 by neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris and colleagues that was inspired by research on psychedelic drugs. The theory suggests that the entropy
of brain activity within certain limits indexes the richness of
conscious states, particularly under the influence of psychedelics. This
theory posits that elevated brain entropy correlates with heightened
informational richness, suggesting that psychedelics increase brain
criticality, making it more sensitive to internal and external
perturbations. This enhanced state of brain activity is proposed to influence
susceptibility to environmental factors ("set" and "setting") and
potentially offer new insights for treating psychiatric and neurological
disorders, including depression and disorders of consciousness.
Integrated information theory
Integrated
information theory is a theory of consciousness proposing to explain
all forms of consciousness, and has been applied specifically to
psychedelic experiences by Andrew Gallimore.
Predictive processing
Sarit
Pink-Hashkes and colleagues have applied the predictive processing
paradigm in neuroscience to psychedelic experiences in order to
formalize the idea of the entropic brain.
Alan Watts likened psychedelic experiencing to the transformations of consciousness that are undertaken in Taoism and Zen,
which he says is, "more like the correction of faulty perception or the
curing of a disease… not an acquisitive process of learning more and
more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of
wrong habits and opinions." Watts further described the LSD experience as, "revelations of the
secret workings of the brain, of the associative and patterning
processes, the ordering systems which carry out all our sensing and
thinking."
According to Luis Luna, psychedelic experiences have a distinctly gnosis-like
quality; it is a learning experience that elevates consciousness and
makes a profound contribution to personal development. For this reason,
the plant sources of some psychedelic drugs such as ayahuasca and
mescaline-containing cacti are sometimes referred to as "plant teachers"
by those using those drugs.
Furthermore, psychedelic drugs have a history of religious use
across the world that extends back for hundreds or perhaps thousands of
years. They are often called entheogens because of the kinds of experiences they can induce, however various entheogens happen to also be hypnotics (muscimol mushrooms), deliriants (jimsonweed) or atypical/quasi-psychedelics like cannabis.
Some small contemporary religious movements base their religious
activities and beliefs around psychedelic experiences, such as Santo Daime and the Native American Church.
Psilocybin-assisted therapy
Depression
Studies
on psilocybin-assisted therapy have found participants experience
reduced depressive symptoms afterwards, as well as reduced anxiety
symptoms. Studies have also found that reductions in symptoms continued long
afterwards, suggesting psilocybin could potentially be effective as a
long-term treatment.
Post-traumatic stress disorder
Individuals who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may also benefit from psilocybin-assisted therapy. Based on studies so far, MDMA-assisted therapy appears to be effective
for reducing symptoms of PTSD, leading a group of researchers to argue
that psilocybin-assisted therapy may also be effective in PTSD and call
for a study on the topic.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder
In
a study that reviewed a variety of drugs to determine if it had an
impact on symptoms of OCD, psilocybin was also tested and determined
effective in reducing symptoms. This reduction in symptoms applied to all individuals who participated
in the study, proving psilocybin to be very reliable along with
efficiency in reducing OCD symptoms.
Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death is a 1969 semi-autobiographic science fiction-infused anti-war novel by Kurt Vonnegut.
It follows the life experiences of Billy Pilgrim, from his early years,
to his time as an American soldier and chaplain's assistant during World War II, to the post-war years. Throughout the novel, Billy frequently travels back and forth through time. The protagonist deals with a temporal crisis as a result of his post-war psychological trauma. The text centers on Billy's capture by the German Army and his survival of the Allied firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war,
an experience that Vonnegut endured as an American serviceman. The work
has been called an example of "unmatched moral clarity" and "one of the most enduring anti-war novels of all time".
Plot
The novel's first chapter begins with "All this happened, more or less"; this introduction implies that an unreliable narrator
tells the story. Vonnegut utilizes a non-linear, non-chronological
description of events to reflect Billy Pilgrim's psychological state.
Events become clear through flashbacks and descriptions of time travel experiences. In the first chapter, the narrator describes his writing of the book, his experiences as a University of Chicago anthropology student and a Chicago City News Bureau correspondent, his research on the Children's Crusade and the history of Dresden, and his visit to Cold War–era Europe
with his wartime friend Bernard V. O'Hare. In the second chapter,
Vonnegut introduces Billy Pilgrim, an American man from the fictional
town of Ilium, New York. Billy believes that an extraterrestrial species from the planet Tralfamadore held him captive in an alien zoo and that he has experienced time travel.
As a chaplain's assistant in the United States Army during World War II, Billy is an ill-trained, disoriented and fatalistic American soldier who discovers that he does not like war and refuses to fight. He is transferred from a base in South Carolina to the front line in Luxembourg during the Battle of the Bulge.
He narrowly escapes death as the result of a string of events. He also
meets Roland Weary, a patriot, warmonger, and sadistic bully who derides
Billy's cowardice. The two of them are captured in 1944 by the Germans,
who confiscate all of Weary's belongings and force him to wear wooden clogs that cut painfully into his feet; the resulting wounds become gangrenous,
which eventually kills him. While Weary is dying in a rail car full of
prisoners, he convinces a fellow soldier, Paul Lazzaro, that Billy is to
blame for his death. Lazzaro vows to avenge Weary's death by killing
Billy, because revenge is "the sweetest thing in life."
At this exact time, Billy becomes "unstuck in time"; Billy
travels through time to moments from his past and future. The novel
describes the transportation of Billy and the other prisoners into
Germany. The German soldiers held their prisoners in the German city of Dresden;
the prisoners had to work in "contract labor" (forced labor); these
events occurred in 1945. The Germans detained Billy and his fellow
prisoners in an empty slaughterhouse called Schlachthof-fünf ("slaughterhouse five"). During the Allied bombing of Dresden,
German guards hid their captives in the partially underground setting
of the slaughterhouse; this protected those captives from complete
annihilation. As a result, they are among the few survivors of the firestorm that raged in the city between February 13 and 15, 1945. After V-E Day in May 1945, Billy was transferred to the United States and received an honorable discharge in July 1945.
Billy is hospitalized with symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder and placed under psychiatric care at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Lake Placid. During Billy's stay at the hospital, Eliot Rosewater introduces him to the work of an obscure science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout.
After his release, Billy marries Valencia Merble, whose father owns
the Ilium School of Optometry that Billy later attends. Billy becomes a
successful and wealthy optometrist. In 1947, Billy and Valencia conceive their first child, Robert, on their honeymoon in Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Two years later, their second child, Barbara, was born. On Barbara's wedding night, Billy is abducted by a flying saucer and taken to a planet many light-years away from Earth called Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians have the power to see in four dimensions; they simultaneously observe all points in the space-time continuum. They universally adopt a fatalistic worldview: death means nothing to them, and their typical response to hearing about death is "so it goes."
The Tralfamadorians transport Billy to Tralfamadore and place him inside a transparent geodesic dome
exhibit in a zoo; the inside resembles a house on planet Earth. The
Tralfamadorians later abduct a pornographic film star named Montana
Wildhack, who had disappeared on Earth and supposedly drowned in San Pedro Bay.
The Tralfamadorians intend to have her mate with Billy. Montana and
Billy fall in love and have a child together. Billy is instantaneously
sent back to Earth in a time warp to re-live past or future moments of
his life.
In 1968, Billy and a co-pilot are the only survivors of a plane
crash in Vermont. While driving to visit Billy in the hospital, Valencia
crashes her car and dies of carbon monoxide poisoning. Billy shares a hospital room with Bertram Rumfoord, a Harvard University history professor researching an official war history of the USAAF
in World War II. They discuss the bombing of Dresden, which the
professor initially refuses to believe Billy witnessed. Despite the
significant loss of civilian life and the destruction of Dresden, they
both regard the bombing as a justifiable act.
Billy's daughter takes him home to Ilium. He escapes and flees to New York City. In Times Square
he visits a pornographic book store, where he discovers books written
by Kilgore Trout and reads them. He discovers a science fiction novel
titled The Big Board at the bookstore. The novel is about a
couple abducted by extraterrestrials. The aliens trick the abductees
into thinking they are managing investments on Earth, which excites the
humans and, in turn, sparks interest in the observers. He also finds
some magazine covers that mention Montana Wildhack's disappearance.
While Billy surveys the bookstore, one of Montana's pornographic films
plays in the background. Later in the evening, when he discusses his
time travels to Tralfamadore on a radio talk show,
he is ejected from the studio. He returns to his hotel room, falls
asleep, and time-travels back to 1945 in Dresden. Billy and his fellow
prisoners are tasked with locating and burying the dead. After a MaoriNew Zealand soldier working with Billy dies of dry heaves the Germans begin cremating the bodies en masse with flamethrowers.
German soldiers execute Billy's friend Edgar Derby for stealing a
teapot. Eventually all of the German soldiers leave to fight on the Eastern Front, leaving Billy and the other prisoners alone with tweeting birds as the war ends.
Through non-chronological storytelling, other parts of Billy's
life are told throughout the book. After Billy is evicted from the radio
studio, Barbara treats Billy as a child and often monitors him. Robert
becomes starkly anti-communist, enlists as a Green Beret and fights in the Vietnam War.
Billy is eventually killed in 1976, at which point the United States
has been partitioned into twenty countries and attacked by China with thermonuclear weapons. He gives a speech in a baseball stadium in Chicago
in which he predicts his own death and proclaims that "if you think
death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I've
said." Billy soon after is shot with a laser gun by an assassin
commissioned by the elderly Lazzaro.
Narrator: Recurring as a minor character, the narrator seems anonymous while also clearly identifying himself as Kurt Vonnegut, when he says, "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book." As noted above, as an American soldier during World War II, Vonnegut was captured by Germans at the Battle of the Bulge and transported to Dresden. He and fellow prisoners-of-war survived the bombing while being held in a deep cellar of Schlachthof Fünf ("Slaughterhouse-Five"). The narrator begins the story by describing his connection to the firebombing of Dresden and his reasons for writing Slaughterhouse-Five.
Billy Pilgrim: A fatalistic optometrist ensconced in a dull, safe
marriage in Ilium, New York. During World War II, he was held as a prisoner-of-war
in Dresden and survived the firebombing, experiences which had a
lasting effect on his post-war life. His time travel occurs at desperate
times in his life; he relives past and future events and becomes
fatalistic (though not a defeatist) because he claims to have seen when,
how and why he will die.
Roland Weary: A weak man dreaming of grandeur and obsessed with gore
and vengeance, who saves Billy several times (despite Billy's protests)
in hopes of attaining military glory. He coped with his unpopularity in
his home city of Pittsburgh
by befriending and then beating people less well-liked than him, and is
obsessed with his father's collection of torture equipment. Weary is
also a bully who beats Billy and gets them both captured, leading to the
loss of his winter uniforms and boots. Weary dies of gangrene on the
train en route to the POW camp, and blames Billy in his dying words.
Paul Lazzaro: Another POW. A sickly, ill-tempered car thief from Cicero, Illinois
who takes Weary's dying words as a revenge commission to kill Billy. He
keeps a mental list of his enemies, claiming he can have anyone "killed
for a thousand dollars plus traveling expenses." Lazzaro eventually
fulfills his promise to Weary and has Billy assassinated by a laser gun
in 1976.
Kilgore Trout: A failed science fiction writer whose hometown is also Ilium, New York, and who makes money by managing newspaper delivery boys. He has received only one fan letter
(from Eliot Rosewater; see below). After Billy meets him in a back
alley in Ilium, he invites Trout to his wedding anniversary celebration.
There, Kilgore follows Billy, thinking the latter has seen through a
"time window." Kilgore Trout is also a main character in Vonnegut's 1973
novel Breakfast of Champions.
Edgar Derby: A middle-aged high school teacher who felt that he
needed to participate in the war rather than just send off his students
to fight. One of his sons is serving with the marines in the Pacific Theatre.
Though relatively unimportant, Derby seems to be the only American
before the bombing of Dresden to understand what war can do to people.
During Campbell's presentation he stands up and castigates him,
defending American democracy and the alliance with the Soviet Union.
German forces summarily execute him for looting after they catch him
taking a teapot from catacombs after the bombing. The undamaged teapot
is identical to one he has at home, and it is his astonishment at the
find amongst the rubble, that gives him away to the guards. Vonnegut has
said that this death is the climax of the book as a whole.
Howard W. Campbell Jr.: An American-born Nazi. Before the war, he lived in Germany where he was a noted German-language playwright recruited by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda. In an essay, he connects the misery of American poverty
to the disheveled appearance and behavior of the American POWs. Edgar
Derby confronts him when Campbell tries to recruit American POWs into
the American Free Corps to fight the Communist Soviet Union on behalf of the Nazis. He appears wearing swastika-adorned cowboy hat and boots and with a red, white and blue Nazi armband. Campbell is the protagonist of Vonnegut's 1962 novel Mother Night.
Valencia Merble: Billy's wife and the mother of their children,
Robert and Barbara. Billy is emotionally distant from her. She dies from
carbon monoxide poisoning after an automobile accident en route to the
hospital to see Billy after his airplane crash.
Robert Pilgrim: Son of Billy and Valencia. A troubled, middle-class boy and disappointing son who becomes an alcoholic at age 16, drops out of high school, and is arrested for vandalizing a Catholic cemetery. He later so absorbs the anti-Communist worldview that he metamorphoses from suburban adolescent rebel to Green Beret sergeant. He wins a Purple Heart, Bronze Star and Silver Star in the Vietnam War.
Barbara Pilgrim: Daughter of Billy and Valencia. She is a "bitchy
flibbertigibbet" from having had to assume the family's leadership at
the age of twenty. She has "legs like an Edwardiangrand piano," marries an optometrist, and treats her widowed father as a childish invalid.
Tralfamadorians:
The race of extraterrestrial beings who appear (to humans) like upright
toilet plungers with a hand atop, in which is set a single green eye.
They abduct Billy and teach him about time's relation to the world (as a
fourth dimension), fate, and the nature of death. The Tralfamadorians
are featured in several Vonnegut novels. In Slaughterhouse Five,
they reveal that the universe will be accidentally destroyed by one of
their test pilots, and there is nothing they can do about it.
Montana Wildhack: A beautiful young model who is abducted and placed
alongside Billy in the zoo on Tralfamadore. She and Billy develop an
intimate relationship and they have a child. She apparently remains on
Tralfamadore with the child after Billy is sent back to Earth. Billy
sees her in a film showing in a pornographic book store when he stops to
look at the Kilgore Trout novels sitting in the window. Her unexplained
disappearance is featured on the covers of magazines sold in the store.
"Wild Bob": A superannuated army officer Billy meets in the war. He
tells his fellow POWs to call him "Wild Bob", as he thinks they are the
451st Infantry Regiment and under his command. He explains "If you're
ever in Cody, Wyoming, ask for Wild Bob", which is a phrase that Billy repeats to himself throughout the novel. He dies of pneumonia.
Eliot Rosewater:
Billy befriends him in the veterans' hospital; he introduces Billy to
the sci-fi novels of Kilgore Trout. Rosewater wrote the only fan letter
Trout ever received. Rosewater had also suffered a terrible event during
the war. Billy and Rosewater find the Trout novels helpful in dealing
with the trauma of war. Rosewater is featured in other Vonnegut novels,
such as God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965).
Bertram Copeland Rumfoord: A Harvard history professor, retired U.S. Air Forcebrigadier general,
and millionaire. He shares a hospital room with Billy and is interested
in the Dresden bombing. He is in the hospital after breaking his leg on
his honeymoon with his fifth wife Lily, a barely literate high school drop-out and go-go girl. He is described as similar in appearance and mannerisms to Theodore Roosevelt. Bertram is likely a relative of Winston Niles Rumfoord, a character in Vonnegut's 1959 novel The Sirens of Titan.
The Scouts: Two American infantry scouts trapped behind German lines
who find Roland Weary and Billy. Roland refers to himself and the
scouts as the "Three Musketeers".
The scouts abandon Roland and Billy because the latter are slowing them
down. They are revealed to have been shot and killed by Germans in
ambush.
Bernard V. O'Hare: The narrator's old war friend who was also held
in Dresden and accompanies him there after the war. He is the husband of
Mary O'Hare, and is a district attorney from Pennsylvania.
Mary O'Hare: The wife of Bernard V. O'Hare, to whom Vonnegut promised to name the book The Children's Crusade.
She is briefly discussed in the beginning of the book. When the
narrator and Bernard try to recollect their war experiences Mary
complains that they were just "babies" during the war and that the
narrator will portray them as valorous men. The narrator befriends Mary
by promising that he will portray them as she said and that in his book
"there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne."
Werner Gluck: The sixteen-year-old German charged with guarding
Billy and Edgar Derby when they are first placed at Slaughterhouse Five
in Dresden. He does not know his way around and accidentally leads Billy
and Edgar into a communal shower where some German refugee girls from Breslau are bathing. He is described as appearing similar to Billy.
Style
In keeping with Vonnegut's signature style, the novel's syntax and sentence structure are simple, and irony, sentimentality, black humor, and didacticism are prevalent throughout the work. Like much of his oeuvre, Slaughterhouse-Five
is broken into small pieces, and in this case, into brief experiences,
each focused on a specific point in time. Vonnegut has noted that his
books "are essentially mosaics made up of a whole bunch of tiny little
chips...and each chip is a joke." Vonnegut also includes hand-drawn
illustrations in Slaughterhouse-Five, and also in his next novel, Breakfast of Champions
(1973). Characteristically, Vonnegut makes heavy use of repetition,
frequently using the phrase, "So it goes". He uses it as a refrain when
events of death, dying, and mortality occur or are mentioned; as a
narrative transition to another subject; as a memento mori; as comic relief; and to explain the unexplained. The phrase appears 106 times.
The book has been categorized as a postmodern, meta-fictional novel. The first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five is written in the style of an author's preface
about how he came to write the novel. The narrator introduces the
novel's genesis by telling of his connection to the Dresden bombing, and
why he is recording it. He provides a description of himself and of the
book, saying that it is a desperate attempt at creating a scholarly
work. He ends the first chapter by discussing the beginning and end of
the novel. He then segues to the story of Billy Pilgrim: "Listen: Billy
Pilgrim has come unstuck in time", thus the transition from the writer's
perspective to that of the third-person, omniscient narrator. (The use
of "Listen" as an opening interjection has been said to mimic the
opening "Hwaet!" of the medieval epic poem Beowulf.)
The fictional "story" appears to begin in Chapter Two, although there
is no reason to presume that the first chapter is not also fiction. This
technique is common in postmodern meta-fiction.
The narrator explains that Billy Pilgrim experiences his life
discontinuously, so that he randomly lives (and re-lives) his birth,
youth, old age and death, rather than experiencing them in the normal
linear order. There are two main narrative threads: a description of
Billy's World War II experience, which, though interrupted by episodes
from other periods and places in his life, is mostly linear; and a
description of his discontinuous pre-war and post-war lives. A main idea
is that Billy's existential perspective had been compromised by his
having witnessed Dresden's destruction (although he had come "unstuck in
time" before arriving in Dresden). Slaughterhouse-Five is told in short, declarative sentences, which create the impression that one is reading a factual report.
The first sentence says, "All this happened, more or less." (In 2010, the line was ranked No. 38 on the American Book Review's list of "100 Best First Lines from Novels".) The opening sentences of the novel have been said to contain the aesthetic "method statement" of the entire novel.
Themes
War and death
In Slaughterhouse-Five,
Vonnegut attempts to come to terms with war through the narrator's
eyes, Billy Pilgrim. An example within the novel, showing Vonnegut's aim
to accept his past war experiences, occurs in chapter one, when he
states that "All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are
pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a
teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have
his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on.
I've changed all the names." As the novel continues, it is relevant that the reality is death.
Slaughterhouse-Five focuses on human imagination while
interrogating the novel's overall theme, which is the catastrophic
impact that war leaves behind. Death is something that happens fairly often in Slaughterhouse-Five.
When a death occurs in the novel, Vonnegut marks the occasion with the
saying "so it goes." Bergenholtz and Clark write about what Vonnegut
actually means when he uses that saying: "Presumably, readers who have
not embraced Tralfamadorian determinism will be both amused and disturbed by this indiscriminate use of 'So it goes.' Such humor is, of course, black humor."
Religion and philosophy
Christian philosophy
Christian philosophy is present in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five,
though not generally in a well-regarded manner. When God and
Christianity is brought up in the work, it is often mentioned in a
bitter or disregarding tone, particularly with regard to how the
soldiers react to the mention of it. Though Billy Pilgrim had adopted
some part of Christianity, he did not ascribe to all of it. JC Justus
summarizes it the best when he mentions that, "'Tralfamadorian
determinism and passivity' that Pilgrim later adopts as well as
Christian fatalism wherein God himself has ordained the atrocities of
war...". Following Justus's argument, Pilgrim was a character that had been
through war and traveled through time. Having experienced all of these
horrors in his lifetime, Pilgrim ended up adopting the Christian ideal
that God had everything planned and he had given his approval for the
war to happen.
Tralfamadorian philosophy
As
Billy Pilgrim becomes "unstuck in time", he is faced with a new type of
philosophy. Upon making acquaintance with the Tralfamadorians, he
learns a different viewpoint concerning fate and free will. While
Christianity may state that fate and free will are matters of God's
divine choice and human interaction, Tralfamadorianism would disagree.
According to Tralfamadorian philosophy, things are and always will be,
and there is nothing that can change them. When Billy asks why they had
chosen him, the Tralfamadorians reply, "Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is." The mindset of the Tralfamadorian is not one in which free will exists.
Things happen because they were always destined to be happening. The
narrator of the story explains that the Tralfamadorians see time all at
once. This concept of time is best explained by the Tralfamadorians
themselves, as they speak to Billy Pilgrim on the matter stating, "I am a
Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky
Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend
itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is." After this particular conversation on seeing time, Billy makes the
statement that this philosophy does not seem to evoke any sense of free
will. To this, the Tralfamadorian reply that free will is a concept
that, out of the "visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe"
and "studied reports on one hundred more," "only on Earth is there any
talk of free will."
Using the Tralfamadorian passivity of fate, Pilgrim learns to overlook
death and the shock involved with death. He claims the Tralfamadorian
philosophy on death to be his most important lesson:
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears
to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly
for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and
future, always have existed, always will exist. ... When a
Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is
in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is
just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that
somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say
about dead people, which is "So it goes."
Postmodernism
The significance of postmodernism is a reoccurring theme in Vonnegut's works. Postmodernism arose as a rejection of modernist
narratives and structures. According to one critic, Tralfamadorianism
is a restatement of Christian teleology: There is no purpose to life,
effects do not have causes; the only reason for anything is that God has
ordained it. This juxtaposition is displayed throughout the book,
rather directly asking the reader to confront the logical absurdities
inherent in both Christian faith and Tralfamadorianism. The rigid and
dogmatic approach of Christianity is dismissed, while determinism is
critiqued.
Mental illness
Some
have argued that Vonnegut is speaking out for veterans, many of whose
post-war states are untreatable. Pilgrim's symptoms have been identified
as what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder,
which didn't exist as a term when the novel was written. In the words
of one writer, "perhaps due to the fact that PTSD was not officially
recognized as a mental disorder yet, the establishment fails Billy by
neither providing an accurate diagnosis nor proposing any coping
mechanisms." Billy found life meaningless due to his experiences in the war, which desensitized and forever changed him.
Symbols
Dresden
The Alter Schlachthof (Old Slaughterhouse) where Vonnegut sheltered from the bombing of Dresden.
Vonnegut was in the city of Dresden when it was bombed; he came home
traumatized and unable to properly communicate the horror of what
happened there. Slaughterhouse-Five is the product of the twenty
years of work it took for him to articulate the experience in a way that
satisfied him. William Allen says, "Precisely because the story was so
hard to tell, and because Vonnegut was willing to take two decades
necessary to tell it – to speak the unspeakable – Slaughterhouse-Five is a great novel, a masterpiece sure to remain a permanent part of American literature."
Food
Billy
Pilgrim ended up owning "half of three Tastee-Freeze stands.
Tastee-Freeze was a sort of frozen custard. It gave all the pleasure
that ice cream could give, without the stiffness and bitter coldness of
ice cream" (61). Throughout Slaughterhouse-Five, when Billy is
eating or near food, he thinks of food in positive terms. This is partly
because food is both a status symbol and comforting to people in
Billy's situation. "Food may provide nourishment, but its more important
function is to soothe... Finally, food
also functions as a status symbol, a sign of wealth. For instance, en
route to the German prisoner-of-war camp, Billy gets a glimpse of the
guards' boxcar and is impressed by its contents... In sharp contrast, the Americans' boxcar proclaims their dependent prisoner-of-war status."
The Bird
Throughout
the novel, the bird sings "Poo-tee-weet?" After the Dresden
firebombing, the bird breaks out in song. The bird also sings outside of
Billy's hospital window. The song has been interpreted as symbolizing a
loss of words, or the inadequacy of words to describe traumatic
situations.
Allusions and references
Allusions to other works
As in other novels by Vonnegut, certain characters cross over from other stories, making cameo appearances and connecting the discrete novels to a greater opus. Fictional novelist Kilgore Trout, often an important character in other Vonnegut novels, is a social commentator and a friend to Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five. In one case, he is the only non-optometrist
at a party; therefore, he is the odd man out. He ridicules everything
the Ideal American Family holds true, such as Heaven, Hell, and Sin. In
Trout's opinion, people do not know if the things they do turn out to be
good or bad, and if they turn out to be bad, they go to Hell, where
"the burning never stops hurting." Other crossover characters are Eliot Rosewater, from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; Howard W. Campbell Jr., from Mother Night; and Bertram Copeland Rumfoord, relative of Winston Niles Rumfoord, from The Sirens of Titan. While Vonnegut re-uses characters, the characters are frequently rebooted
and do not necessarily maintain the same biographical details from
appearance to appearance. Trout in particular is palpably a different
person (although with distinct, consistent character traits) in each of
his appearances in Vonnegut's work.
In the Twayne's United States Authors series volume on Kurt Vonnegut, about the protagonist's name, Stanley Schatt says:
By naming the unheroic hero Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut contrasts John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress"
with Billy's story. As Wilfrid Sheed has pointed out, Billy's solution
to the problems of the modern world is to "invent a heaven, out of 20th
century materials, where Good Technology triumphs over Bad Technology.
His scripture is Science Fiction, Man's last, good fantasy".
The city in which the novel is set, Ilium, New York, is another allusion. This city appears in many of his books.
The Serenity Prayer appears twice. Critic Tony Tanner suggested that it is employed to illustrate the contrast between Billy Pilgrim's and the Tralfamadorians' views of fatalism. Richard Hinchcliffe contends that Billy Pilgrim could be seen at first as typifying the Protestant work ethic, but he ultimately converts to evangelicalism.
Vonnegut's own experiences
In
1995, Vonnegut said that Billy Pilgrim was modeled on Edward "Joe"
Crone, a thin soldier who died in Dresden. Vonnegut had told this to
friends earlier, but waited until after he learned that both of Crone's
parents were deceased to publicly disclose this information.
Edgar Derby, killed for looting a teapot, was modeled on
Vonnegut's fellow prisoner Mike Palaia, who was executed for plundering a
jar of food (variously described as beans, fruit, or cherries).
Reception
The reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five have been largely positive since the March 31, 1969 review in the New York Times stated: "you'll either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner." It was Vonnegut's first novel to become a bestseller, staying on the New York Times bestseller list for sixteen weeks and peaking at No. 4. In 1970, Slaughterhouse-Five was nominated for best-novel Nebula and Hugo Awards. It lost both to The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. It has since been widely regarded as a classic anti-war novel, and has appeared in Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923.
Censorship controversy
Slaughterhouse-Five has been the subject of many attempts at censorship
due to its irreverent tone, purportedly obscene content and depictions
of sex, American soldiers' use of profanity, and perceived heresy. It
was one of the first literary acknowledgments that homosexual men, referred to in the novel as "fairies", were among the victims of the Holocaust.
In the United States it has at times been banned from literature classes, removed from school libraries, and struck from literary curricula. In 1972, following the ruling of Todd v. Rochester Community Schools, it was banned from Rochester Community Schools in Oakland County, Michigan. The circuit judge described the book as "depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar and anti-Christian." It was later reinstated.
In 1973, Vonnegut learned of a school district in North Dakota that was antagonistic towards Slaughterhouse-Five.
An English teacher at a high school in the district wanted to read the
novel with their class. Charles McCarthy, the head of the school board,
declared the novel inappropriate because of obscene language. All copies
of Vonnegut's novel in the school were burned in a furnace.
In a letter to McCarthy in 1973, Vonnegut defended his
credibility, his character, and his work. In the letter, entitled "I Am
Very Real", Vonnegut wrote that his books "beg that people be kinder and
more responsible than they often are". He contended that his work
should not be censored based on the general message in the novel.
The U.S. Supreme Court considered the First Amendment implications of the removal of the book, among others, from public school libraries in the case of Island Trees School District v. Pico, 457U.S.853
(1982) and concluded that "local school boards may not remove books
from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas
contained in those books and seek by their removal to 'prescribe what
shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters
of opinion.'" Slaughterhouse-Five is the sixty-seventh entry to the American Library Association's
list of the "Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–1999" and number
forty-six on the ALA's "Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009". In August 2011, the novel was banned at the Republic High School in Missouri.
The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library countered by offering 150 free
copies of the novel to Republic High School students on a first-come,
first-served basis.
In an effort to comply with a new 2024 Tennessee state law which added to the 2022 Age Appropriate Materials Act, Slaughterhouse-Five was banned - along with nearly 400 other titles - at the discretion of middle and high school librarians serving Wilson County Schools, a public school district in the greater metropolitan Nashville area. It has also been recently banned from school libraries in the state of Florida.
In 2024 the book was banned in Texas by the Katy Independent
School District on the basis that the novel is "adopting, supporting, or
promoting gender fluidity" despite also pronouncing a bullying policy that protects infringements on the rights of the student.
Criticism
On the book's philosophy
Slaughterhouse-Five has been described as a quietist work, because Billy Pilgrim believes that the notion of free will is a quaint Earthling illusion. According to Robert Merrill and Peter A. Scholl, "Vonnegut's critics
seem to think that he is saying the same thing [as the
Tralfamadorians]." For Anthony Burgess, "Slaughterhouse is a kind of evasion—in a sense, like J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan—in
which we're being told to carry the horror of the Dresden bombing, and
everything it implies, up to a level of fantasy..." For Charles Harris,
"The main idea emerging from Slaughterhouse-Five seems to be that the proper response to life is one of resigned acceptance." For Alfred Kazin,
"Vonnegut deprecates any attempt to see tragedy, that day, in
Dresden...He likes to say, with arch fatalism, citing one horror after
another, 'So it goes.'" For Tanner, "Vonnegut has...total sympathy with
such quietistic impulses." The same notion is found throughout The Vonnegut Statement, a book of original essays written and collected by Vonnegut's most loyal academic fans. When confronted with the question of how the desire to improve the world fits with the notion of time presented in Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut responded "you understand, of course, that everything I say is horseshit."
Historical inaccuracy
For certain elements of historical research, Vonnegut used (and quoted) The Destruction of Dresden, a book published in 1963 by British author David Irving. Irving was later denounced and discredited for being a Holocaust denier and a Nazi sympathizer. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut quotes and bases claims on Irving's book, most notably that 135,000 people were killed in the bombing of Dresden. New, evidence-based research
(published a year after Vonnegut's death) has found that Irving's
claims are inaccurate, and the number of deaths in the Dresden bombing
was fewer than 25,000. George Packer, in an essay published in The New Yorker, claimed that "For many readers of Irving and Vonnegut, the bombing of Dresden scrambled the order of perpetrators and victims in the Second World War and came close to establishing a moral equivalence",
referring to the exaggeration that "reached the West through 'The
Destruction of Dresden', a 1963 best-seller by David Irving".
Both before and for years after Vonnegut's book was initially
published, the figure of 135,000 was used even by American officials,
including U.S Air Force general Ira C. Eaker, who was quoted in Slaughterhouse-Five. Later editions of Slaughterhouse-Five have not featured any kind of explanatory note about, or correction to, this figure.
In 1996, another theatrical adaptation of the novel premiered at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. The adaptation was written and directed by Eric Simonson and featured actors Rick Snyder, Robert Breuler and Deanna Dunagan. The play has subsequently been performed in several other theaters,
including a New York premiere production in January 2008, by the
Godlight Theatre Company. An operatic adaptation by Hans-Jürgen von Bose premiered in July 1996 at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, Germany. Billy Pilgrim II was sung by Uwe Schonbeck.
In September 2020, a graphic novel adaptation of the book, written by Ryan North and drawn by Albert Monteys, was published by BOOM! Studios, through their Archaia Entertainment imprint. It was the first time the book has been adapted into the comics medium.
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