I was an extremely resistant reader to Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut when I first began reading the text. It took me three attempts to actually begin reading more than the first few pages, and I took about ten breaks before I finally finished reading chapter one.
However, once I did get through the excruciating pain of chapter one, I began to submit to the text mostly because the content became more interesting. The Symbolic Code can be found throughout the novel after taking a look at the way the narrator generates unresolvable oppositions between being sane or being completely delusional. It is honestly hard to tell the difference between the two after submitting to this text.
First of all, the story begins by the narrator expressing his purpose, which is to remember what happened to him while he was a prisoner of war in Dresden during World War II. The narrator expresses his interest in writing a book about it. For whatever reason, the narrator cannot remember anything of significance from that period of his life other than being held captive in Dresden. Devon (in her first blog post about the book) explains in her analysis of the controlling values of the text that the narrator may not want to remember what happened during his time as a POW due to unpleasant, suppressed memories. I want to propose, instead, that maybe he can’t remember because he is actually going crazy in his old age. In chapter one, the narrator talks about how he can’t remember anything significant enough to write a book about his experience as POW, and then the rest of the time is spent talking about irrelevant things that, in my opinion, have nothing to do with the story that unfolds in future chapters (other than magnifying to the possibility that he is utterly losing his mind.) For example, on page three, the narrator recites a poem that apparently reminds him of the war, which is the infinite “Yon Yonson” poem. Then on page 7, the he says, “I’m an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls. My name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin, I work in a lumbermill there.” Another example: “And I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me,” (7.) This is why it took me so long to get through chapter one. There’s a bunch of jumbled up babble that doesn’t have anything to do with the story that follows throughout the rest of the book.
In chapter two, it becomes a whole different story. I believe that it’s the novel the narrator in chapter one finally wrote about WWII. Why didn’t Vonnegut just start out with this, and save us the burden of getting through that useless ramble of chapter one? The main character in chapter two is named Billy Pilgrim, and the story is told in third person. This could possibly be the name of the narrator from chapter one, retelling his story in third person, but it’s not clear since the narrator from chapter one went unnamed.
Now, getting back to the Symbolic Code: maybe the narrator is sane since he was finally able to remember enough to write a book about WWII. But wait…there are aliens and flying saucers in Billy Pilgrim’s story. Oh boy.
Billy is completely convinced that he can travel through time, just like the aliens (the Tralfamadorians) can. Throughout the rest of the novel, Billy travels back and forth through time to different events of his life and also to and from his time at Tralfamadore. Billy’s daughter, Barbara, is convinced that her father is crazy. On page 29, she asks him why he’s making stuff up about aliens and flying saucers. He responds saying that “it’s all true,” (29.)
Billy even knows how he is going to die. “As a time-traveler, he has seen his own death many times,” (141.) He has apparently re-lived that scene numerous times. For this reason, there is no big revelation at the end of the book: no big mystery. We already knew that Billy was going to make it out alive after being a POW, and then readers even find out how Billy dies before the story even ends. (I will not reveal this just incase my reading 
group members have not reached this far in the book yet.)
The reader is left wondering whether or not this man’s story is truly factual or if he’s just crazy and stuck in his own imagination. The narrator does start the book off by saying, “all this happened, more or less,” (1.) It’s the readers choice whether to submit or resist.
How Writers Read 
The semic code can also be pulled from Slaughterhouse-Five. There is an emphasis on repetition of words and certain themes throughout the book. One example of this is the use of the phrase “blue and ivory” when referring to feet. When working in the basement trying to get the furnace to work, “His bare feet were blue and ivory” (35). Here, the phrase would suggest that blue and ivory is a description for extreme cold. However, blue and ivory is used many times throughout the book to describe the feet of those who have died. Only the feet of the dead and Billy’s own feet are described as blue and ivory. This would suggest that maybe Billy feels that he is on the border between life and death itself. His feet are a reminder of just how thin the line is between the two. Billy says that he can time travel and have many experiences at once, so it is possible that in a way he has already died. Due to his mindset he does not value life in the same way that other people do.
Continuing with the semic code, feet are mentioned very frequently. During the war, Billy goes without decent boots for a long time. For a long time he may well have been a dead man walking. Feet need to be protected because they are the only thing grounding us. Throughout the story, Billy constantly mentions his lack of footwear. Finally, he gets boots, nice silver sparkly boots. “The boots fit perfectly. Billy Pilgrim was Cinderella, and Cinderella was Billy Pilgrim” (185).
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I think the symbolic code that Amanda mentions between the sanity and insanity of the author leads one to question the cultural code that surrounds sanity and insanity as well. Inventing a story about aliens seems to make the narrator “insane” as society, represented by the character Billy Pilgrim’s daughter Barbara, “It’s all just crazy, none of it’s true,” (37).. Billy is “insane” to some because he is talking about the existence of something most people are unwilling to believe. The narrator does not tell the reader that his subject, Billy Pilgrim, or himself is insane. The reader hypothesizes that he is because the addition of a topic like aliens into a book that was assumed to be only a war story breaks a genre convention, thus giving the reader a sense that something is not right.
As a society, Americans tend to think there is something “wrong” with people who don’t conform to societal conventions. A book about a man who believes in aliens may seem out of the ordinary, and easy to write off as insane, as we are cultured to disregard anything that challenges our existing beliefs about what is normal. Perhaps the purpose of the narrator, or Billy Pilgrim’s “insanity” is to make a reader consider the difference between what is true in their life personally, and what is true within the story. Or, perhaps whatever value the author wants their intended audience to take from the story cannot be conveyed without using elements and a style of writing that confuses the reader into conforming to the narrative, and becoming a submissive reader. It is not asking for the aliens to be perceived as an actual part of reality for the author, or for the narrator. The narrator did write them into their telling with purpose, and the author wrote them into their telling of the narrator’s telling with equal purpose. The reader must simply accept that they exist in the novel’s realm and take that for truth, then discover the reason they are incorporated and their function in the story.
An important distinction to make is between the author’s audience, and the narrator’s audience. This gets confusing in Slaughterhouse Five because the narrator is the “author” of the book, though is not the author of the entire book. It is a book inside a book. Bookception. The narrator’s audience is someone who would pick up their book to read. That is also the author’s audience, but that does not make the author the same person as the narrator. The author is commenting on something through the narrator, as any writer does.From the beginning we are told not all of it really happened. This statement makes all of it as real as it would have been without that statement because it is fiction and fiction is true in its’ own world through the eyes of the narrator who is telling the story. The narrator tells the audience directly that some of what is told actually happened, they pull the audience in closer through honesty.
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