Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel by Kurt Vonnegut
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Book Reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel
Book Review: How to Make Sense of a Slaughter
Summary: 5 Stars
How are you supposed to make sense out of a slaughter? Orderly, organized, logical books should not arise from the ashes of mass murder, which is inherently inexplicable, illogical, and horrid. Kurt Vonnegut's astounding novel, Slaughterhouse Five, recognizes the implicit absurdity of war, and responds with the absurdist tale of Billy Pilgrim's life. The central focus of Vonnegut's book is more or less the devastation of the German city of Dresden during World War II, from a bombing raid that killed between 24,000 to 40,000 civilians and destroyed 13 square miles of the city, but Vonnegut's novel goes far beyond one single act of banal human cruelty, focusing on various perceptions of time, human nature, and war.
According to Vonnegut, his novel, which follows Billy Pilgrim through his random shuffling in time, "is so short and jumbled and jangled... because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." This view is mirrored by Dresden-survivor Lothar Metzger, who recalls the attacks as "not possible to describe! Explosion after explosion. It was beyond belief, worse than the blackest nightmare." When Vonnegut writes about Billy and other Prisoners of War the day after the bombing raids, climbing "over curve after curve on the face of the moon," discovering "corpse mines" where bodies "were cremated by soldiers with flamethrowers," war is no longer an abstract, romantic concept. The chauvinistic Edgar Derby has been shot for stealing a teapot, and the war has become an incomprehensible saga of suffering and death, where invisible global forces and theoretical concepts like "war" engender unfathomable destruction.
After finishing Slaughterhouse Five, the reader feels at a loss, questioning what were once incontrovertible assumptions. The foundations of popular conceptions about time, truth, progress, and morality are fractured by Billy Pilgrim's odyssey, which reveals the absurd and repugnant, yet at times redemptive, characteristics of human nature. Characters like the pugnacious and choleric Paul Lazarro, and the vacuous and insipid Valencia provide subtle insight into the various characteristics of human nature, while Billy's experiences with the Tralfamadorians provide a new perspective about life on Earth.
Vonnegut's novel, with its rich symbolism, dark humor, and unique prose, provides a refreshing and welcome addition to modern literature. Slaughterhouse Five is a finely crafted story that combines moral statements with probing questions and tales of complete destruction with devastating humor to create a novel that can powerfully affect readers of all backgrounds.
Book Review: Slaughterhouse
Summary: 5 Stars
Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the greatest books I have ever read. Kurt Vonnegut narrates the partially autobiographical account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a fictional World War 2 veteran, as he struggles to make a life for himself after returning from bondage in Dresden, Germany. Vonnegut, known for his unconventional style of writing, fractures the story's time-line claiming that Billy Pilgrim has "come unstuck" and is traveling through time, showing us Billy's life as he sees it, not as we would. Using his overlapping time-line to effortlessly juxtapose civilian life after the war with serving as a prisoner in the soon to be incinerated Dresden and life in a zoo of the extraterrestrial plunger-like Tralflamadoreans, Kurt Vonnegut creates a literary masterpiece.
In World War 2 Billy Pilgrim finds himself friendless and lost behind enemy lines. Eventually taken as a prisoner of war, Billy finds himself working in a slaughterhouse in Dresden Germany making syrup to nourish pregnant women while he and his fellow soldiers starve to death. In the sixties Billy has returned to the general populous, become a successful optometrist, and after a brief stint in an asylum, married and started a family. Interrupting his life, Billy is abducted by the Tralflamadoreans, a satire of the univocal absurdity of war and human apathy, placed in a zoo, and mated with the movie star Montana Wildhack. As the order of events swirls seemingly capricious, these three plot lines, representative of past, present, and future, all confluence to the eventual climax of the fire bombing of Dresden.
Kurt Vonnegut plays with the readers emotions throughout the book forcing the reader's ruminate between laughing out loud and wanting to cry their eyes out. The three main story lines of the book, the war, life after the war, and Tralflamador, each invoke different emotional responses. After bombarding the reader with images of pain and suffering caused by the war, the time-line jumps and replaces the downcast imagery with the ironic story of Pilgrim's life as an optometrist or the ridiculous story of Tralflamador, eviscerating laughter and denying the cathartic reaction of crying just as the reader is about to breakdown. While this may seem hectic and sound cacophonous, Vonnegut pieces the story together in such a way that the ironies of a "normal" life and the satirical Tralflamadoreans blend together to heighten the sorrow evoked by the tragic plight of the American prisoners of war as they become emaciated echoes of the men they once were.
Book Review: The Why of Tralfalmadore
Summary: 5 Stars
Made In Hero: The War for Soap
Vonnegut joked that he didn't know if people read his books after high school. With that in mind, trying to get re-acquainted with SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE can bring up a vague feeling of dread. Like a lot of people who love this book, I first read it when I was an unsuspecting teenager. I loved the prospect of a planet Tralfalmadore. The creatures who live there aren't bothered by things--not bombs, not hunger, not crowds, and least of all, history--although Billy Pilgrim is plagued by them all.
That's because unlike Pilgrim (a fumbling soldier and an Earthling), the Tralfalmadoreans don't believe in free will. They don't even believe in Time. They claim it's all in our minds. To help us understand this, they compare Time to bugs trapped in amber. At any given point, "here we are, ...trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."
Upon getting sucked into the Tralfalmadoreans' flying saucer, Billy Pilgrim is compelled to relinquish his Earthling traits of free will and time stuckness. This is a mixed blessing mainly because he gets to relive the horrors of a prisoner of war train in Germany, and subsequently, the carpet bombing of Dresden. So it goes.
Beside the absurd and hilarious parts, there profound moments in this book. They tend to involve violence. In the German prison camp, a guard takes offense at a remark uttered by one of the American soldiers--and roughs him up. The prisoner is stunned, having intended no harm by what he said. Likely, though, it implied self-pity. Rising from the ground with two teeth missing, the boy asks, "Why me?" Shoving him back into the prisoner ranks, the guard replies, "Vy you? Vy anybody?"
Along with the raging humanity, Vonnegut offers self-mockery to spare. A bit turns up in the fictitious, embittered science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout. By happy coincidence, Trout lives in the same home town as Billy Pilgrim--one of his most avid fans. The problem is that the literary hero is a hack. "His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good."
SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE is still best read with a dose of innocence, at least enough to appreciate a name like Montana Wildhack (the porn star). But it's good to know I can re-read Slaughterhouse Five and still manage to laugh. It's the Tralfalmadorean spell. Time passes, and doesn't. The glob of amber is real.
Book Review: It had to be done
Summary: 5 Stars
Slush entombs his feet / Billy Pilgrim driven mad / It had to be done
I recently replaced a lost copy of Slaughterhouse Five, gave it a quick read, and wondered what all the fuss was about. It didn't have the same punch that it had when I first read it nearly 40 years ago. Then I gave it a close read, and another and found things that weren't there, for me, even that first time long ago.
The central structural feature of S5 is the time travel of Billy Pilgrim and, given its importance, it's puzzling how readers remember the details so differently. Billy first encounters the 'time window' when escaping from the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, in Luxembourg. He was 'bleakly ready for death' and stopped to lean against a tree to await his fate. He could not escape by going forward, going backward, or remaining still. He was in a double bind as R.D. Laing has described and his only escape was through time, his madness the 'perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.' Vonnegut describes Billy in this moment as 'like a poet in the Parthenon.'
The poet reference puts me in mind of John Keats, also called a poet in the Parthenon, writing his 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' after viewing the Elgin Marbles taken from the Parthenon. The vignettes of Billy's time travels are much like the verses of the Ode, much like the sculptures from the Parthenon. Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians 'can look at all the different moments [of time] just as we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains . . . can look at any moment that interests them.' Just as Keats could look at all the moments captured in the marble frieze.
One moment, or verse, that is particularly apt is this: 'Who are these coming to the sacrifice? / . . . What little town by river or seashore / . . . Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? / And, little town, thy streets for evermore / Will silent be; and not a soul to tell / Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.' An eyewitness, thinking back to Dresden on the Elbe, might very well dwell on this verse, on this urn.
'It had to be done.' Not because the Tralfamadorians say so, but because that's who we are. Billy Pilgrim survives the war, sires a son who goes off to his own war. Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Vietnam. If not war, 'there would still be plain old death,' the human condition, from which there is no escape. As Camus would have it, 'But the point is to live' and 'Live to the point of tears.'
Book Review: An Interesting Read
Summary: 5 Stars
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922 to 2007) was an American novelist known for works blending satire, black comedy, and science fiction, all intertwined. He was larger than life and very unconventional. He is recognised for three important novels: the present work, Cat's Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions. His main attribute as a novelist involved the ability to cross lines melding reality with science fiction and still have works that were considered important works of literature.
As a reader the most startling thing for myself was that he spends chapter one talking directly to the reader giving a background introduction to the novel, and then he uses an imaginative plot to make his point. I found the introduction a bit unsettling.
"I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big."
The book is based on his own experiences as a soldier and prisoner of war, and that had a profound influence on his writings. Vonnegut witnessed the bombing of Dresden which destroyed most of the city. Vonnegut was one of seven prisoners of war in Dresden to survive in an underground meat locker of a plant known as Schlachthof Fünf or Slaughterhouse Five.
The vehicle of the story is the life of the protagonist Billy Pilgrim who takes a trip back using time travel. He uses Pilgrim to discuss life and death, and his supposed visit to the planet of Tralfamador. Billy Pilgrim is a World War II veteran who survived the Dresden bombing as did Vonnegut.
The novel is a bit odd, unique, and entertaining. I thought that Vonnegut's introduction where he talks directly to the reader was not needed but harmless, and overall the novel was a bit short as a masterpiece. But it was a unique piece of literature that made point and was an interesting read that everyone should read.
Was it on par with other short works - that are considered to be masterpieces - such as Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych or Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men? The reader can decide. I thought it was better than Steinbeck but short of Tolstoy.