“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
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 Vonnegut describes as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he himself witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines science fiction, autobiography, humor, historical fiction, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. Billy, like Vonnegut, experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW, and, as with Vonnegut, it is the defining moment of his life. Unlike the author, he also experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.” Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most.
Praise for Slaughterhouse-Five
“Poignant and hilarious, threaded with compassion and, behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral statement.”—The Boston Globe
“Very tough and very funny . . . sad and delightful . . . very Vonnegut.”—New York Times
“Splendid art . . . a funny book at which you are not permitted to laugh, a sad book without tears.”—Life
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.
Reading updates
-
Started reading
-
1 January, 2012:
Finished reading
-
1 January, 2012:
Reviewed