Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel by Kurt Vonnegut
|
List Price: Our Price: $5.68 You Save: $9.32 (62%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $3.87 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel
Book Review: Tour de Force of wit, imagination, and outrage
Summary: 5 Stars
Kurt Vonnegut hardly needs my praise. It could be sufficient for me to say that "Slaughterhouse Five" is a wild ride through absurdity, and full of wit, anger, and vision. But I'd like to look at three aspects of the book that, from my perspective, make it an experience that will resonate with readers, and help to explain why the book should be read by anyone who wants to understand America after World War II and through to today.
First, there's Vonnegut's imagination. I read fiction fairly regularly, but it's usually earth-bound fiction; that is, books that hew pretty closely to what could actually happen, and which tell a story in approximately chronological order. Vonnegut is coming from another place. His books depart from many novelistic conventions and veer into absurdity of time, place, events, character, etc. It makes for invigorating reading and opens up undreamed-of possibilities (and, not incidentally, it helped to show writers how far they could go and still attract a mass audience).
In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut chronicles the life and the thoughts of a man (Billy Pilgrim) who himself is unhinged from time. Pilgrim remembers events, but he also foresees events. He travels through time, and he also travels through space. In fact, Billy becomes a featured creature at a zoo in another galaxy. It's tough to tell which things happened, and which didn't -- and that's one of the ways Vonnegut keeps you on the edge.
The second point I want to make is that Vonnegut is angry. This is one of the angriest books I've ever read. It's a brutal anti-war diatribe, and it also skewers middle-class life in America, religion, and much more. Billy Pilgrim has no business being in WWII, and he is supposed to be a non-combatant, a chaplain's assistant. But he becomes a POW, and he's treated with contempt by his fellow Americans, as well as his German captors. Through his plight as a POW, he sees horrors, such as shootings, hangings, and the bombing of Dresden (never commits violence -- his worst offense is bumping into people). When he's back after the war, he just stumbles towards middle class success as an optometrist and upstanding citizen, while growing increasingly disengaged from his life. Vonnegut is angry about the emptiness of all of it -- of alleged valor, of material success, etc.
The third and final point I'd like to address is free will. It's been said that the book is about free will, and I'd agree. But I'm not sure where Vonnegut comes down on the issue: Do we have it or not? Billy Pilgrim just stumbles through life and lets things happen to him. Perhaps has free will and chooses not to use it, or perhaps his life is predestined. Meanwhile, others act on him, using their free will (apparently), yet forces act on them that are unavoidable.
In this way, Vonnegut is telling us something about the absurdity and pointlessness of life. For example, he writes about an American corporal who survived the battles and was actually a pretty good commander, but who, in a moment of weakness, stole a teapot in Dresden. He was executed by his compatriots just two days after the Americans bombed Dresden and incinerated 130,000 innocent inhabitants. Was it free will that led the corporal to steal the teapot? Did he have to be shot for his crime (a crime, by the way, that many others also committed)? Did Dresden have to be bombed in the first place? These are the kinds of things that the reader of Slaughterhouse Five will have to wrestle with long after reading this compelling book.
Book Review: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
Summary: 5 Stars
Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed in a hail of heavenly fire and brimstone. The reasoning was simple. According to the Bible, the inhabitants were vile and inexorable. So why did Dresden, a gem of Europe, perish along with its 130,000 inhabitants? Vonnegut investigates the purpose for the bombing of Dresden in a satirical allegorical manner that is unrivaled by any author since Mark Twain. Vonnegut shares Twain's genius for describing a situation simultaneously as comic and grave. In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut is able to describe the German concentration camps with the morbid clarity of Elie Wiesel's Night. However, he juxtaposes human tragedy with ripping one liners. How does he get away with such irreverence without coming off as a complete jerk? That's the genius of Vonnegut.
The book is structured in the quintessential style of Vonnegut's mid career novels. Each chapter is comprised of small, digestible vignettes ending with a joke or one-liner. This manner makes his novels easy to digest, like the sugar over the bitter pill. However, reflection over what was said is emotional on a visceral level. In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut takes on all the sacred cows: money, Christianity, nationalism, sanity and, of course, war. Each is presented to its most absurd extent.
Billy Pilgrim, the unheroic hero, involuntarily follows a convoluted story line that is a combination of recollection, psychotic episode and dream sequence. The story starts with Billy being "unstuck in time" and the story sequence loosely linear within ongoing backtracks and foresights. A perverse kind of black humor prevails in most scenes. For example, the only time Billy Pilgrim laughs during the novel is when he is being beaten by a fellow American soldier in the solitude of the Luxemburg frontier. The two had been abandoned behind enemy lines; one for his petulance and the other for his incompetence. Both outlive their abandoners. Throughout the novel, life is fragile, death is capricious and events are immutable.
In keeping a promise to a war buddy's wife, Vonnegut portrays Billy Pilgrim as a "ludicrous waif" and antithesis of John Wayne or Frank Sinatra. He is unglamorous and pitiful. Through mental illness, a plane crash, and the destruction of Dresden, he just wants to die. Billy Pilgrim is the one who wants to be left behind, but he keeps surviving when all around him die. Absurd.
For Vonnegut, war seems analogous to the namesake of the book's subtitle, The Children's Crusade, described by Vonnegut in Chapter One. Under the auspice of serving Christianity in Palestine, The Children's Crusade occurred in 1213 when several monks recruited 30,0000 children to be killed or sold into slavery in North Africa. Regarding the Children's Crusade, the presiding Pope of the time, Innocent the Third, was cited with the following remark regarding the deaths of the 30,000 children: "These children are awake while we are asleep." What is the significance of The Children's Crusade to the World War II? Most telling is Vonnegut's repeated restatement of the quatrain from the Christmas carol "Silent Night:" "The cattle are lowing, The Baby awakes. But the little Lord Jesus no crying he makes." Although not explicitly stated, one has to wonder to the extent that Vonnegut finds Christianity to be a mitigating factor in the deceit (especially self-deception) that he attributes much of the bigotry and hatred in the world that leads to war. If not guilty by fault, Christianity is guilty by negligence. Where was Jesus? No crying he makes.
Book Review: Good read
Summary: 5 Stars
Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" is my favorite book. It is a black comedy sci-fi story that takes place throughout the main character Billy Pilgrim's life, from birth to death. The majority of which is during three eras: near the end of World War II in the German city of Dresden, his middle life at the time he spent as the exhibit of a zoo on the planet of Tralfamadore, and his later life as an optometrist in New York. The basic summary of the plot is that Billy Pilgrim was born in Ilium , New York . After graduating from his High School, he studied Optometry for one semester, then was drafted to the military in World War II. He served with the infantry in Europe , and then was taken prisoner by the Germans. He was in Dresden when it was firebombed. After the war, he went back to New York and became a successful optometrist and married a woman named Valencia . They had two children. Later, Billy was the only survivor of a plane crash on top of a mountain in Vermont . While he was getting treatment in the hospital, Valencia was killed in the car with carbon monoxide on the way to see him. He then spent time on the planet of Traflamadore as a zoo exhibit with Montana Wildhack. He was returned to the planet and wanted to tell the world of his findings. Later, Billy was assassinated, but he had seen his death many times and there was no way to stop it. The whole time when telling this story, it is constantly jumping around in time. Billy became "unstuck" in time.
It seemed like writing this book for Vonnegut was cathartic. He needed to write it to help himself forget. I'll warn you, you have to be vigilant when reading this book because it constantly changes time periods. Although some don't like it, that's what I love about the book. It uses smooth transitions through time. At one time he was talking about how he was drunk and passed out in his car at an optometrist party, much time after the war, then got shaken awake and it was his World War II acquaintance Ronald Weary shaking him; which I thought was the coolest thing ever. I was excited reading the book, patiently waiting for the next time Billy would go through a rift in time. On Tralfamadore Billy learned an interesting theory about death, and learned that when someone would die, the Tralfamadorians would just say "so it goes", because that person will always be alive in the past. I enjoyed the use of him constantly saying "so it goes" after anything that died.. Things I wouldn't expect that he wrote it after, like the dead champagne bottle. Vonnegut is like a sardonic clown at a funeral. He makes the worst of things funny. It shouldn't really be considered as a comedy, but I did laugh out loud at certain points. It's a fiction novel, but it isn't all fiction. Vonnegut obviously used things from his past that he had seen in Dresden and the way he was taken captive to his advantage. He used imagery to describe things clearly and to get us to picture it how he did. I can see the zoo exhibit in Tralfamadore, and the little two feet tall green Tralfamadorians and can hear the booming explosions of grenades and rocket launchers going off as he ran with Ronald and the two others. I personally thought the book was fascinating and, without a doubt in my mind, give it five stars.
Book Review: Life Less Ordinary
Summary: 5 Stars
There are two words to describe this book: weird and wonderful. You could substitute "quirky" for weird if you want, because that's what "Slaughterhouse Five" is: a very quirky, oddball adventure through time and space. And it contains a valuable message if you decide to believe in the Tralfamadore view of things. I rather like their perspective that because someone was alive at some point then they are ALWAYS living, at least somewhere. (Though I suppose it's only comforting when you apply that to good people, because that definition also means that Hitler and other evildoers are always living somewhere too.)
The novel begins with the author struggling to find a way to tell the story of his experience in World War II as a prisoner of war and witness to the firebombing of Dresden, which took more lives (at least immediately) than the atomic bomb. He visits a friend and finally turns in a jumbled-up mess to the publisher.
This jumbled-up mess is the story of Billy Pilgrim who is (or thinks he is) unstuck in time. Because of this, his life is in shuffle mode, so to speak, where he randomly shifts from one point in time to another. At one point he might be standing in a field in Germany during the war, at another he's talking to the Lions club in upstate New York, and at another he's a baby in his mother's arms. Told chronologically, Billy enters the war near the end, gets captured, witnesses the bombing of Dresden, gets repatriated after the war, marries a large, rich woman named Valencia, has a couple kids, runs a successful optometry business, and gets taken to the Tralfamadore homeworld to be put in a zoo with a porn star. Billy even sees how he is going to die.
If the book were related chronologically and if Vonnegut didn't have such a way with language--his sentences lack poetic prose, but have the same quirky, seemingly random rhythm as the plot--then this book wouldn't have been nearly as interesting. The way it's jumbled up forces the reader to keep putting the pieces together, although Vonnegut has a tendency to over-foreshadow some things like the teapot incident. And the style makes reading a breeze because it's very relatable for the average vocabulary--no big words to confuse people.
The only real flaw is the overuse of the expression "so it goes" to mark anytime a person, place, or thing dies. Wikipedia's article on the book says there are 106 references. It seemed like many more. I understand what Vonnegut was going for, but it did get irritating before long.
I should warn you, though, that even if the sentences are easy to read, you do need to be the type of reader who can put up with the quirky nature of the book to read it. So it's not recommended to everyone. If you're up to putting together a puzzle and like a little sci-fi with your literature, then you'll be fine. Maybe you won't agree with Vonnegut and the Tralfamadore's view of the universe--maybe you like to believe in free will--but you should still be able to appreciate what a creative feat this book was and what a great author wrote it.
That is all.
Book Review: Significant for this Nuclear Generation and the Next
Summary: 5 Stars
Kurt Vonnegut's picaresque prose lacks parity with any mainstream literature. His unique style is inundated with seemingly random circumstances that are simply dripping with deeper meaning. Slaughter House Five is most closely identified as an anti-war novel because of its intimate descriptions of the Dresden fire-bombings. Much like critically acclaimed novel, The Things They Carried, Vonnegut takes a more personal approach to his overall work of fiction. Vonnegut devotes numerous pages to the back story of his decision to write what he calls his, "Dresden novel" which is told in the first person, yet the other side to the novel is the narrative of the life of Billy Pilgrim presumably the fictional representation of the author. Changing perspective and the clever fusion of reality with blatantly fictional additions to the storyline make slaughter-House five a work of literary genius.
Vonnegut breaks the monotony of literary single-point perspective and uses the change from a more personal account of events to a narration of the more ethereal plot progressions to make his novel both personal and at the same time intensely metaphorical. The start of the novel is primarily a first person account of Vonnegut's struggle to come to terms with his experiences in Dresden and finally sit down and write a novel that adequately addressed his experiences. The outcome of his decade long struggle was his ground-breaking novel, Slaughterhouse Five and the extra time that was taken is apparent in the refined nature of the novel. Vonnegut uses the majority of the novel to develop the story of his literary incarnation, Billy Pilgrim from the third person. The story of Billy Pilgrim presumably follows the story of Vonnegut's experiences in WWII however; the story of Billy Pilgrim has some important fictional qualities which make up the largest part of the novels metaphorical quality. As one reviewer aptly stated, "Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know." The story of Billy Pilgrim reflects not only our own voyages through time but more importantly, Vonnegut's and it is this infusion of the narration of Vonnegut's personal struggle to come to terms with Dresden that makes this novel one for the ages.
Slaughterhouse Five open's the eyes to the unseen atrocities of war and allows for even the most distant reader to become sympathetic to the effects of war on the body, soul, and mind. This novel challenges the reader to take a journey into the depths of their own mind and to find those things that they struggle to understand. Vonnegut's challenge to the reader has more sway because of the way he demonstrates his personal struggle with understanding the Dresden massacre. Without Vonnegut's narration of his own struggle with Dresden, Slaughterhouse Five would remain significant as an anti-war novel, but with his personal account this novel touches the heart and mind of any who are willing to let the novel challenge their way of thinking.