Slaughterhouse 5
Ratings1,450
Average rating4.1
I think I went into this book not knowing what to expect. I've finished it, and I'm still not quite sure what I read. It's one of those books that makes me either think I'm too shallow to get the point, or perhaps I get the point but I'm too jaded (or emotionally guarded) to feel it. Perhaps I actually expected too much or too less than what the book was willing to give, and in some form of ironic justice I'm inexplicably disappointed that I didn't get whatever I expected.
All I know is that this book moved me in some way. I cannot say what way it was. Maybe I need to read it again. Maybe it'll come to me in an hour or a day or a week. I'm not sure I want it to, because there's something incredibly powerful there. It's a little frightening.
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.
One of my favorite books of all time. Kurt had a way of being unbearably bleak but still managing to find humor in the darkest of subjects. Here, he battles with the horrors of war, solitude, masculinity, depression, and aging. The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is thrown about space and time because Vonnegut seldom used a direct approach to face his demons. If you've never read Vonnegut, I'd highly recommend this one to start with.
My friends think I was born a smartass. I really learned everything I knew from Kurt Vonnegut. RIP, Man.
I read this novel as a young man and again later in my 30s. I thought I'd give it another read to see if it's as strange as I'd remembered. What a weird and quirky novel. Part war story, part science fiction, and part bizarro, observational comedy, I couldn't explain it concisely if I tried. The disparate plot (what little there is) tells the strange life of Billy Pilgrim, a WWII veteran who lived through the bombing of Dresden, one of the most horrific events of WWII. But he soon becomes “unstuck in time” and we careen back and forth throughout his life: his time as an optometrist, his time in WWII, the time he was abducted by aliens called Tralfamadorians, who see the entirety of time all at once. Strange story. Is Billy's unstuck state an analogy for insanity? Could be. Vonnegut (he is the narrator of the novel and appears in the Dresden part of the story) tells this strange story with an empathetic lilt as he retells many of the disturbing events that Billy and the other characters endure, punctuating any mention of death with his well-known phrase, “So it goes.”
Since the Tralfamadorians see time as a whole and not in a linear fashion, I imagine that's how Vonnegut approached this story. Told in sections that are out of order (literally and figuratively), the one thing that is a constant is Vonnegut's narrative voice. How to describe it? Silly, empathetic, philosophical, observant, whimsical, searing, unapologetic. A hilariously observant passage finds Billy Pilgrim in a train car filled with war prisoners during WWII. He's sitting next to a hobo who is not a prisoner; he's just on the train for the ride. The train car is filthy, despondent, cold, and the prisoners are hungry, tired, dejected. The hobo tells Billy, “This ain't bad. This ain't nothing at all.” It's all in your perspective, Vonnegut seems to offer the reader. So it goes.
I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and I highly recommend it. I would give this novel 5 stars.
Perhaps it was because I had to read it for school over the summer. Perhaps it was because I was fourteen years old at the time. Whatever the reason, this seems to be one of those books that you either get, or don't get, and I have to be honest; I didn't really get it. My brain was hurting and my hand was cramping from the notes I had to take. However, I have to admit that it was interesting, even if I'd never read it again.
More often than not, a picture of Kurt Vonnegut is often followed by the simple sentence “So it goes.” This is the birthplace of that phrase.
Vonnegut takes you on a trek through his mind and memory of what he calls the “Children's Crusade,” the bombing of Dresden during WWII. If follows classic Vonnegut style in dealing with time no longer being a linear though so much as a web. As he describes it in this book, becoming “unstuck” in time.
This concept made me a bit wary to begin with. Many novels that venture to “swing” back and forth between time periods become confusing and muddled. Somehow, Vonnegut uses this method to help us become closer to to the characters. By the end of it, you understand why everything is the way it is... because that's the way it has to be. So it goes. :)
I have to admit, its not my favorite Vonnegut novel (that blessing is bestowed upon my first... you never forget your first) but it has been one of the best ones I have read.
The full review is available at The Gray Planet.
I suspect most readers either love or hate Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. They either think he is silly or profound, a doddering fool or a wizard. The same is true of his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
His style is at times simplistic, even childish. His prose is sparse, his paragraphs and chapters short. He skitters from scene to scene with abandon, like a child exploring the world. He uses varieties of humor to make tolerable the horror of his subject.
And yet, the effect of this simplicity, childishness and funny stuff is a novel that is profoundly dark, filled with portent and laced by lessons the world and the people in it must learn or forever be doomed. Vonnegut is a trickster, a clever wordsmith who distracts you with a smile and then hits you with a hammer.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, the Vonnegut's topic is war, and particularly the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II, which resulted in the deaths of 25,000 civilians (although Vonnegut, writing in the 1960s, references then contemporary estimates in the hundreds of thousands–an exaggeration which emphasizes his point). Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut's main character, is a POW in Dresden at the time of the bombing. Vonnegut himself was a POW in Dresden and he speaks, through Billy Pilgrim, with authority about the horrors, injustices, and terrible consequences of war.
For Vonnegut, there is no making sense of this war, nor of this bombing, nor, by extension, of the human condition. And so, Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time and flits back and forth throughout his life, visiting moments here and there, now and then, reflecting on the absurdity of war, the inevitability of death, the chronic sadness of life and the futility of any attempts to make sense of it all.
To add to the absurdity, Pilgrim is abducted by aliens, the Tralfamadorians. The Tralfamadorians are strange-looking creatures with their eyes in the palm of their hands so they have to hold up their open hands to view the world, as if they were saluting, or waving.
The Tralfamadorians have solved all the problems Billy sees–they simply ignore them and remember the good times. But even though Billy may want to do this, it doesn't work for him. He cannot control his skipping through time and this results in reliving moments where he is witness to horror and death because that is what happened. There is no escape for Billy. In the unreality that Vonnegut creates where Billy moves spontaneously from one time to another and where he is a specimen in a Tralfamadorian zoo, he cannot escape the reality of his own experiences and of his own world. He is unstuck in time, but stuck in his own life and his own world as he experienced it. He cannot change it, as much as he might desire to.
That Vonnegut can create such complexity and depth of meaning with simple prose and absurd action is wizardry. We read breezily through the asynchronous events of Billy's life, flying along through short chapters and brief paragraphs, but long before we arrive at the end, we realize that this is a tragic story, and it is our story, everyone's story. So it goes.
Is this science fiction? Yes, but not really. There are certainly science fiction tropes here: time travel; aliens with a unique culture; even virtual space travel. But none of these are the focus of the novel as they are in real science fiction. The science fiction elements of Slaughterhouse-Five are simply plot devices, tools which Vonnegut uses to expand and elaborate his themes.
LeGuin, in The Left Hand of Darkness creates an alien culture and uses it as a means of exploring human sexuality. For LeGuin, the story follows from the world she has created, and the story cannot exist without the science fiction element. Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five tells a mundane story of a man devastated by the experience of war and the manifestations of his trauma include experiences that he describes in science fiction terms. This enhances the unreality of Billy's experience, and allows Vonnegut to point out how absurd his reality is–that World War II and the Dresden bombing have caused him to become unstuck in his own mind and to retreat to a fantasy of alien abduction to save his sanity. This juxtaposition of fantasy and reality and the ill-defined border between the two for Billy provides Vonnegut with a means of framing his anti-war polemic. How can it be, Vonnegut asks, that human beings can treat each other so? Do we not see the unreality and absurdity of it? Do we, like the Trafalmadorians, simply ignore it and therefore trivialize it? So it goes.
In this sense, time travel is not important to the story, it is a plot device used by Vonnegut to illustrate the profound effect that Billy Pilgrim's war experiences have on his psyche–Billy Pilgrim is not really unstuck in time, this is just a manifestation of trauma he has experienced–his center cannot hold and his mind flits randomly from memory to memory.
Nor is the story built upon the existence of the Tralfamadorians, they are a foil to provide Billy Pilgrim with simple but effective answers to the question of how to live with his trauma–remember the good times, ignore the bad. Similarly, Billy's kidnapping by the Tralfamadorians and his time in the Tralfamadorian zoo with Montana Wildhack are Vonnegut's method of providing Billy with some relief from his despair and confusion. On Tralfamadore, with Montana, Billy is content in a way he is not in his own world. He treats Montana with respect and is rewarded. In the zoo on Tralfamadore with Montana is the only time that Billy is content. But this contentment comes with a price–Billy is unable to change anything, because, as the Tralfamadorians explain, everything has already happened.
The result of all of this is a novel that stays in one's mind long after reading it. Where other novels, as compelling as they may be, fade away after a few months, Slaughterhouse-Five blazes like the afterimage of actinic light on your retinas even after fifty years.
I could do a short review along the lines of 'people died' So it goes. Which trust me if you had read the book - would make sense. I understand it is a classic and certainly the non linear narrative fits the story within the story, and the aspects of meta narrative employed eg the author appearing in the story for 1969 would have been remarkable. It was a bookclub choice so I am grateful that it meant I have read another significant piece of modern western literature. I recall I watched the movie that was made of this and being more excited about the science fiction aspects.
“Slaughterhouse Five” stands the test of time as a personal, humorous, and deeply emotional work that explores the tragedies of war.
This was entertaining to the point it fel like a fever dream the whole way through. I was definitely in for a ride reading this book.
Summary: In this explicitly anti-war novel, Vonnegut tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, who, at a young age, becomes a soldier in WWII. After the war, Billy becomes an optometrist, and he claims to have experienced an alien encounter that enlightens him as to the nonlinear nature of time. For that reason, the book is told in a nonlinear fashion. Billy is portrayed as both a relatively innocent and absurd kind of person, and the telling of the events that surrounded his and his comrades’ time in combat make the senselessness and evil of war abundantly clear.
Not much needs to be said about one of the iconic works of American fiction. I first read this not too long after it came out as one of those university students who thought they were so cool for being abreast of modern literature. Or, as Vonnegut once said about his writing, "It's all just horseshit." Or something close to that.
Vonnegut gathers all his chaotic black humour into one place for this book. Billy Pilgrim's time jumps scatter his story back and forth, from childhood to the day he will die, from being abducted to another planet to watching his interplanetary lover in a porn film in a New York adult book shop, from running scared through a German forest before his capture to being a wealthy optometrist in the US.
It's an insight into Vonnegut's state of mind following his return from war and surviving the Dresden bombing, well before the term PTSD was coined or the condition even understood.
Kurt Vonnegut's 6th and most famous novel is less satire and sarcasm and more commentary on man and war with very black humour.
When I think back to my youthful reading, my biggest recall was of the sci-fi elements that took protagonist Billy Pilgram to another planet and the vague thought that it was an antiwar novel. With this read, very much later in my life, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder felt very much the major theme. Much has been written about that, but it was not something I would have recognised in my youth. The bloke who I worked with as an apprentice got blown up in Korea and shook with fear, the old bloke on the corner who shaped up to everyone passing, this was shell shock but the fact they were inevitable victims of events that they had no control over? That never entered my youthful mind.
Antiwar The Children's Crusade A Duty-Dance certainly is, but the feeling is there that it is also a comment that war is an inevitable human condition. “So it goes” said Vonnegut after every death in this book, therefore “so it goes” could be the comment about every reoccurring human conflict over what others have claimed are generally tribal property rights. We have no choice but to be what we are. I suppose that I will get up on Monday morning and go to work. “So it goes”.
Is that free will, or do I have no choice? To be honest with myself, as much as these questions make for fascinating thoughts, I am not that intelligent to really digest or understand what direction I think they should take.
“Poo-tee-weet?”
I make the same comment as I did for the previous review, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. This is a wonderful book and stands the test of time. It is a read that is far better than I recall from my youth and is with that highly recommended.
In order of publication and my reading of Vonnegut's novels.
My review of number 1 Player Piano here.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6205354368
My review of number 2 The Sirens Of Titan here. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6267103559
My review of number 3 Mother Night here.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6287961968
My review of number 4 Cats Cradle here.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/231371451
My review of number 5 God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater here
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/231371734
Vonnegut uses non-linear storytelling to describe severe, war-induced PTSD in a unique and imaginative way.
Interesting read but lacking the impact it must have had when it first came out.
Discovered Vonnegut in college and he became one of my favorite authors. This is the second book of his I read.
I gotta be honest I hated the first two chapters of this book. The way Vonnegut writes from his own perspective is insuferable to me. Something about his attittude screams “Funky uncle who would have loved Warhol” and its absolutley the most annoying thing Ive ever read in my life. All this being said, anytme that the perspective shifts to the book within a book (It only goes back to Vonnegut for more than a sentance twice after this) , it's amazing. Theres a lot to be said about this book but I actually decided Im gonna save long reviews for when I get really passionate.