Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel
by Kurt Vonnegut
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kurt VonnegutEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-01-12
ISBN: 0385333846
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780385333849
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel
Book Review: An anti-glacier book...
Summary: 5 Stars
Following "Slaughterhouse Five," Kurt Vonnegut swore off novels. In the introduction to his 1970 play, "Happy Birthday, Wanda June," Vonnegut quotes himself: "I'm left-handed now, and I'm through with Novels. I'm writing a play. It's plays from now on." Thankfully he didn't keep this promise. "Breakfast of Champions" appeared a mere three years later. An eye blink in time. Maybe Vonnegut thought he couldn't outdo his 1969 masterpiece? His Everest was conquered, so to say. Understandable, because "Slaughterhouse Five" remains his most quoted, chatted about, and revered book. And though it fits square-peg square-hole right into his body of work, he never wrote anything else quite like it. Next year it turns 40. It has had a difficult life. Some potty-mouthed irreverent language made it anathema to didactic schoolmarms and the straight-laced. But controversy usually bites back, and the book entered the national spotlight. Censorship has always fueled sales. Even back then. Business 101.
"Slaughterhouse Five" tells the story of a secular messiah optometrist, Billy Pilgrim. Like Vonnegut, who appears as the "I" and "me" throughout the book, Pilgrim was in a bomb shelter when Allied forces firebombed the cultural haven of Dresden to absolute smithereens. Historical descriptions are ghastly. Though the German government later revised the initial estimates of 135,000 dead to around 35,000, it remains a brutal massacre nonetheless. Pilgrim comes to Dresden via the Battle of the Bulge where he and his companions are captured and shipped in miserable rail cars to a prison camp. There, proud and hearty British officers feed and entertain them until the Nazis transfer Pilgrim's unit to Dresden as laborers. Once there, they sleep in "Schlachthof-fünf," or "Slaughterhouse Five," where meat was once processed. Soon after, the city gets drenched in flames as the prisoners sit helplessly in subterranean bomb shelters. Horror awaits them when they emerge. Dresden now looks like the surface of the moon.
Though Dresden's destruction undoubtedly provided the inspiration for Vonnegut's magnum opus, the story focuses more on the life of Pilgrim and his revelations on temporality. But being a "witness" to Dresden carries far-reaching implications. And there is nothing linear about this narrative or its implications. It begins, famously, with the line "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." Like Christ, on who he's loosely modeled (hints abound throughout the text, though this is by no means a religious book), Pilgrim has "good news" for humanity. Good news about time and the impact of death. We've been wrong all along, it turns out. After surviving Dresden, becoming a rich and successful optometrist, Pilgrim gets abducted by aliens in 1967. They take him 446,120,000,000,000,000 miles from earth. There he becomes the center of attention, the supposed "perfect specimen" of humanity. Even his urinating causes cheering. In short, he's in an alien zoo. These aliens, known as Tralfamadorians, give Pilgrim a new view of time. Time isn't linear, they tell him. It's total. Every moment has always existed and always will exist. So we live forever. On top of that, in the zoo Pilgrim gets to mate with a human hottie: Montana Wildhack (as opposed to Valencia, the unattractive woman he marries for money and stability). All of his dreams come true. He no longer fears death (presented as violet light and a hum). He's free, and he wants to tell the world. Of course humanity, including his own daughter, consider him nuts. Pilgrim has internalized this philosophy of time, and he jumps from one episode of his life to another, seemingly at random. Only Kilgore Trout seems to understand.
Pilgrim's view of time provides the novel's main tension and theme: the old hoary question of free will and determinism. The Tralfamadorians are deep determinisists. In fact, Earth represents the only planet they know of where talk of "free will" occurs. They provide the mouthpiece for one of Vonnegut's most poignant lines: "Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why." Such passages have led to debates concerning the novel's view of free will. Was Vonnegut denying free will? Does he think we have any control over our destiny? The novel doesn't take sides. Instead, it presents a middle path in the form of a brilliant Vonnegut cartoon. A locket hangs between two potato shaped breasts - Montana Wildhack's breasts. It reads: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference." So are we free or determined? Both. The most important thing humans can do is know the limits of our powers. Some things we can change, other things we cannot. With this masterstroke, Vonnegut also helps redeem the often disparaged medium of cartoons.
Finally, no discussion of "Slaughterhouse Five" can ignore the book's most ubiquitous phrase: "So it goes." Vonnegut inserts this laconic quip whenever a death occurs. Some have interpreted this move as making light of or as dismissing the impact of mortality. But this repetitive leitmotif can also produce the opposite effect: it can magnify death's impact by simple repetition. After finishing the book, "So it goes" will likely linger in the head for days. Though "so it goes" represents and calls attention to death, it nonetheless reads as humor, but as "naughty humor" evoking hesitant or guilty laughter. Many critics have described Vonnegut's work as a perfect combination of funny and sad. This aptly describes the effect of "So it goes." Likely "Slaughterhouse Five," a deceptively easy read, will stand as Vonnegut's major work as long as people continue to read twentieth century literature. Sadly, Vonnegut passed away in 2007. One is tempted to say "so it goes," but unaccompanied by laughter. All one can say is thanks for this book, Kurt, and everything else.
Summary of Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel
Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world?s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim?s odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most.Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.
Don't let the ease of reading fool you--Vonnegut's isn't a conventional, or simple, novel. He writes, "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick, and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters..." Slaughterhouse-Five (taken from the name of the building where the POWs were held) is not only Vonnegut's most powerful book, it is as important as any written since 1945. Like Catch- 22, it fashions the author's experiences in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of authority. Slaughterhouse-Five boasts the same imagination, humanity, and gleeful appreciation of the absurd found in Vonnegut's other works, but the book's basis in rock-hard, tragic fact gives it a unique poignancy--and humor.
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