Kurt Vonnegut’s postmodern work Slaughterhouse-Five is a deeply influential, anti-war novel that focuses on the plight of its anti-hero, Billy Pilgrim, and recovery from his experience being an American prisoner-of-war in the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany during WWII. In order to impart his anti-war message, Vonnegut uses many symbols and motifs, some of which concern Billy Pilgrim and the fractured narrative that encapsulates his journey, but all of which deal with the absurdity of war. Two such symbols—the colors of blue and ivory—recur throughout the text and point to a deeper meaning. In the text, the colors blue and ivory symbolize death and refer to the skin hue of corpses. Slaughterhouse-Five is a semi-autobiographical work, as Vonnegut actually was a POW in Dresden during the Allied Forces’ firebombing, and he saw firsthand the death and destruction caused by war.
Blue and ivory are the colors human skin turn postmortem, once the heart ceases pumping and the blood drains from the body. Vonnegut uses these colors as symbols in several instances in the text, the first of which occurs as he describes Billy Pilgrim, who later in life sits down to write letters about his experiences with the alien race, the Tralfamadoreans: “His bare feet were blue and ivory” (28). Ironically, a few sentences later, when his daughter comes looking for him, Vonnegut writes that she had expected to find him a “corpse” (28). Clearly, blue and white symbolize death and herald Billy’s own fate.
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Another instance of Vonnegut’s use of blue and ivory occurs after the German forces capture Billy and his group and march them on the road to Dresden. Vonnegut writes, “There was so much to see—dragon’s teeth, killing machines, corpses with bare feet that were blue and ivory” (65). Again, we have images of the violent instruments and deathly consequences of war, coupled with the colors blue and ivory and symbolizing death. Interestingly, as in the previous example of Billy writing a letter as an older man, Vonnegut again chooses to couple the colors with the image of “bare feet,” which imply not only death but the extreme poverty caused by it. This parallel shows us that the images of death follow Billy throughout his life; they are not self-contained and restricted to the act of war itself, but haunt Billy through time, showing readers the far-ranging and tragic consequences of war.
Through the use of color symbolism—blue and ivory—Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five equates war with death and destruction. As Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck in time” and his narrative begins to destabilize, we see firsthand the tragic effects of war. Vonnegut uses blue and ivory to provide vivid images of death that remain with us long after we read the book’s final pages. By using the color images recurrently throughout the text, Vonnegut is able to create a parallel between past, present, and future and show how war is a timeless structure whose impacts reach far beyond the act itself.
- Isaacs, Neil. “Unstuck in Time: Clockwork Orange and Slaughterhouse-Five.” Literature/Film
Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 2, 1973. Accessed 12 Dec. 2016. Proquest.
http://search.proquest.com/ - Kopper, Edward. “Color Symbolism in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.” Notes on Modern
American Literature, 1977. Accessed 12 Dec. 2016. Proquest.
http://search.proquest.com.online.library - Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Dell Publishing, 1969.
