Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel (MOST RED)

by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five is “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time).
 
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
 
Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.”

An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it. Authors as wide-ranging as Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Tim O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J. K. Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonnegut’s words. Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as “the kind of writer who made people—young people especially—want to write.” George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be “the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us . . . a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.”

More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut’s portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.

• ISBN10: 0385333846
• ISBN13: 9780385333849
• Publish Date: 12 January 1999 (first published 21 March 1991)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Random House Inc
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 288
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780385333849

Reviews

[Leigha]

Billy Pilgrim reflects on his life, including World War II, in this oddly fascinating novel from Kurt Vonnegut.

I’m not sure what I expected. My husband loves Kurt Vonnegut and suggested this novel as my first read. While I enjoyed passages of it, I don’t necessarily think I liked the whole of it. The book is very disjointed, especially once time travel is introduced into the mix. Time becomes fluid, zooming around from one experience to the next without any real cohesion. It’s not character-driven nor story driven, but idea driven.

The structure of it may not suit me, but the ideas were fascinating. Vonnegut does a fantastic job deconstructing war and religion, illustrating the faceted complexity of these two societal constructs. I would have enjoyed it more if it had been labeled non-fiction instead of fiction. The narrative structure of fiction kept me from engaging in the ideologies of the author.

tl;dr While I didn’t enjoy the story itself, I found the ideologies within to be fascinating.

[adamfortuna]

A time confused story tieing together world war 2 with alien abduction. As a story, it was amazing. The story about watching a war film in reverse was touching.

[kalventure]

This book changed my life, as discussed on my blog, Reader Voracious.

For those that haven’t read this classic, SH5 is an anti-war novel that follows a non-linear life of Billy Pilgrim, who was present during the bombing of Dresden during WW2. I first read this book in 2002 during my senior year of high school. It was a post-9/11 world. Bush was pushing for war. Reading about the lesser known (at least to me) atrocities of WW2 in a time where the country was priming for war was especially impactful for me, and I think given the current situations and hostilities on the world scale it will resonate with a lot of new readers.

What is this book about? War. Time travel. Survival. Life. Death. The meaninglessness and absurdity of it all. So it goes.

There is no discernible structure to the book, and while this style of writing often drives me insane (not a fan of Bukowski for this reason) it works here because to Billy experiencing his life out of order. This is a gloriously weird book that leaves the reader guessing. Was he abducted by aliens? Or was it a defense mechanism to cope with the traumas of war? Regardless, what he learned from the Tralfmadorians helped him come to peace with the bad — it always existed, and you only experience it for a few brief moments on the cosmic scale.

All moments, past, future, present, have always existed, always will exist… when Tralfmadorians see a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that same person is just fine in other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what Tralfmadorians say about dead people, which is ‘so it goes.’

'So it goes' is a phrase which is repeated throughout the book (106 times to be exact), and while that repetition bothers a number of readers it serves a very specific point. It drives home. Life will happen, we have no control over the good and the bad. It is a very Nietzschian way to look at life - only once you confront and accept the absurdity and meaninglessness of everything can you be free to create your own meaning in life. There will be pain, things will not be beautiful. So it goes.

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[jamiereadthis]

And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.

— Chapter 1, Slaughterhouse-Five

I meant to write how I love this book more every time I read it, Mary O’Hare and Roland Weary and the Children’s Crusade, but I went in search of something I read Vonnegut saying once and fell down a rabbit hole of conversations between him and Joseph Heller, and spent just as much time there as I did reading the book itself. Which— just the fact that these two were friends should mean that some days the world manages things OK.

Their interview with Playboy in 1992 is as good a place as any to start, but where I wound up was at the review mentioned briefly there, Vonnegut’s review of Heller’s Something Happened, where Vonnegut says this about the molasses-like cautiousness of accepting certain books as important ones:

“To accept a new myth about ourselves is to simplify our memories— and to place our stamp of approval on what might become an epitaph for our era in the shorthand of history. This, in my opinion, is why critics often condemn our most significant books and poems and plays when they first appear, while praising feebler creations. The birth of a new myth fills them with primitive dread, for myths are so effective.”

And Vonnegut, like Heller, is no feeble creation. They write jokes, yes, and one writes science fiction, but all the best jokes are dangerous, because they’re truthful, and all the successful jokes start as a threat to someone or something. And science fiction, well:

Rosewater was twice as smart as Billy, but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways. They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in the war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the firebombing of Dresden. So it goes.

So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help.

In the same interview in McSweeney’s, sans Heller this time, Vonnegut says he avoids irony, that he doesn’t like people saying one thing and meaning the other, and it stopped me right there. I had to think about that, because I would have always pegged books like Catch-22, like Slaughterhouse-Five with praise for their irony. But I think there’s something to that. What they do works like irony in that it points out the absurdity, but it works so much better because it’s not saying one thing and meaning the opposite, it’s saying one thing and meaning it for real— it only seems like the opposite when it doesn’t sound like what we expect to hear. So you can have epitaphs like Billy Pilgrim’s, “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt,” and it doesn’t cut to your heart because it means the opposite, it cuts because of the sadness that in one real way it’s true. And I don’t know, I’m just thinking out loud here, but that’s what I like about Vonnegut, about Heller, their two books like twins in all the ways twins are alike and different. There’s no moral written into their stories. It’s just the way things were, and you dig around in them, and you unearth from them the things you need to carry with you.

One of my favorite lines Vonnegut ever wrote is from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater— in true Vonnegut form, the same Rosewater as above. It goes:

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

And yet, babies: all of this happened, more or less.

Chapter 1, Slaughterhouse-Five, again:

It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?”

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

The whole story just has so many layers to try to explain, but it makes for an interesting read. Since Billy keeps randomly traveling to the Past, Future and Tralfamadore there just seems to be a lot going on and can get a little confusing. The book really highlights the effects of war on the survivors and what could be considered schizophrenia.

Full review on my blog;
http://literary-exploration.com/2009/05/30/slaughterhouse-five-or-the-childrens-crusade-a-duty-dance-with-death/