Slaughterhouse-Five

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: 0440180295
• ISBN13: 9780440180296
• Publish Date: 3 November 1991
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group
• Format: Paperback (US Mass Market)
• Pages: 224
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780440180296

Reviews

[celinenyx]

I slightly detest World War Two books. The war is turned into something fictional to be looked at, and then forgotten. It's glorified or turned into swaying love stories, or easily compressed into a two-hour documentary. No matter how you treat it, the war that cost the lives of millions is turned into something rational, something understandable, while by pure definition WWII cannot to be understood. Sure, we can know all the facts, apply some cause and effect, but to truly understand what went down back then cannot be grasped.

So Mr Vonnegut doesn't try to. The beauty of Slaughterhouse-Five is that it hardly deals with the war at all. Billy Pilgrim, the main character, jumps through time, being at his wedding one moment and in a German prison camp the next. Instead of diving right into the main theme, it skirts it, just barely edges it most of the time. Yet this book manages to be sad, funny, and poignant.

Billy Pilgrim thinks he's been kidnapped by aliens. If you've seen the bombing of Dresden, I'm sure an alien planet seems downright cozy after that.

Not what I expected at first but this book really grew on me. I always thought of Vonnegut (perhaps mistakenly) as a science fiction writer (and I suppose he is) but I didn't realize he was a satirist and black humorist. Although it's fairly short, once I got into the rhythm of the book and took it for what it was it was quite enjoyable.

[clementine]

So, I did review this book ages ago when I first finished it, but it didn't save. I'm too lazy to type it all out again and I didn't say anything that hadn't already been said much more eloquently and insightfully, so I'll just leave it. I loved it, obviously.

[Briana @ Pages Unbound]

Slaughterhouse-Five can be a difficult book. Even the narrator admits it. He wants to write about the Second World War, in which he fought, but he does not know quite how. He has put it off for decades. In the end, he writes a story about Billy Pilgrim, who had been young, a boy. War is not glorious. It was fought by infants. Some of them were ruined.

Whether Billy Pilgrim lost his mind, or just came unstuck in time, is not perfectly clear. It was probably during the war, but since he experiences different points of his life all the time, it is hard to say. Luckily, the crazy timeline of Slaughterhouse-Five is fairly straightforward to follow despite this. Billy may move twenty or forty years into the future, but he always comes back to the war. Readers discouraged by the crazy jumps or repetitions of time in other books like Catch-22 should find this one easier to read.

The message is also fairly easy to swallow. Slaughterhouse-Five manages to make one think about the horrors of war without being overly graphic or depressing. The breaks from the fighting, when Billy visits outer space, can even be quite amusing. Back in the war, people go hungry, die, are maimed. But, the narrator reminds readers, “So it goes.” This is not flippancy; it is just life, whatever the reader wants to make of that.

Slaughterhouse-Five is a great, thought-provoking classic that is also a quick read.