“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
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.
