Slaughterhouse 5
Ratings769
Average rating4.1
15
Ratings769
Average rating4.1
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 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.
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1 released bookCritical Insights is a 6-book series first released in 1968 with contributions by Kurt Vonnegut, Rodica Mihăilă, and 3 others.
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Like other books by Vonnegut focusing on the war, the humor in this book hits a little differently. As opposed to some of his other books which read to me like humor with bits of serious deep-cutting insight, this doesn't have the same baseline levity. It feels more like a long tragedy with bits of gallows humor paced throughout. Even the more fantastical parts of the story feel more eerie, perhaps because we know we're going to come back to the real world some day to finish living out the rest of the tragedy.
Some of this perspective no doubt comes because this is something like the fifth Vonnegut book I've read (after Galápagos, Breakfast of Champions, Player Piano, Mother Night, The Sirens of Titan) so I have certain expectations that you may not have if you're new to the author. It gave me a similar feeling to reading Mother Night (probably because they both deal with real-life tragedy of WWII), but for some reason I wasn't prepared for that.
Based on what little I had heard about the book (perhaps everybody supposing that it was required reading and I must already have read it), I was expecting something like a gritty memoire. Instead, I got a combination of post-modern framing, fantastical interludes, and humor about tragedy that feels unique to Vonnegut.
Read this one in high school and realized I hadn't yet rated.
read for english class
it's always difficult to attempt a more cursory statement on a work you've been picking apart for weeks, even a relatively short one such as this. but if anything i have to commend how this dissects traditional war fiction, beyond being obviously unglamorous it's a really incredible subversion if you're familiar with the genre. a lot of this lies in tralfamadorian philosophy, ie how it is juxtaposed over the war via billy pilgrim's perspective to convey how powerless the individual pawns are in the scale of global conflict. there are no heroes, not the apathetic billy nor the vengeance driven paul lazarro. the closest thing to a hero we have, at least a wholly patriotic and seemingly good-natured figure, is executed for taking a teacup from the crumbling remains of dresden.
there is a debate about what constitutes “anti-war” media, one i believe to be more prominent in cinematic discussion circles - the topic is inherently glamourized and/or aestheticized in a lot of films, and while i think it's more difficult to inadvertently do so in the written medium it's still a possibility. nonetheless i think this is one of the most potent anti-war works i've come across, in part due to the sentiment being clearly embedded in vonnegut's own experiences as a prisoner of war. he seems to be very conscious of how general media glorifies the topic. a recurring and utterly horrifying statement is that the soldiers of these wars are truly just children. not heroes, but children dehumanized, reduced to tools for conflict. in a novel full of incredible ideas, i believe that is what will stay with me the longest.
