Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel
by Kurt Vonnegut
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Book Reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel
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: Cynical, Defeatist, Predestination Slant
Summary: 1 Stars
This is supposed to be a classic, and I finally got to around to reading it. I did not find it to be good satire, good science fiction or good anything. Not even a good read. Not particularly profound. It is graphic and profane at times. It is too cynical and defeatist for my taste. The point I got is: no sense in trying to change anything, things are going to happen the way they're going to happen and nothing is going to change them. The "war is bad" message in chapter one is lost in the confusion of the remaining chapters. I might have liked it better in college when being cynical and blase was cool.
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
The story is mostly narrated from the point of view of Billy Pilgrim. The storyline goes something like this: Billy is drafted into service during WWII. His father dies while he is in training. He loses his mind less than a month after being put in the warzone (during the Battle of the Bulge), is taken prisoner, and is sent to Dresden as a prisoner of war a month before it is firebombed. He survives the firebombing, is put to work in the corpse mines in its aftermath, and is a prisoner there until the end of the war.
The narrative is disjointed because it jumps to other points in Billy's life before and (mostly) after the war. A six page summary of his life at the beginning of chapter two helps the reader keep it straight. The rest of the story, as near as I could put it together, follows. Billy resumes his college education after his discharge from the army. He is briefly committed to an insane asylum near the end of college (the doctors attribute the breakdown to a couple instances of childhood trauma, not the war), and a fellow patient introduces him to the work of an obscure science fiction writer whose works influence his future delusions. He finishes school, gets married, becomes a successful and wealthy optometrist, and has two children. In 1964 he meets the obscure science fiction writer working in newspaper circulation (bullying paper boys and girl), and invites him to his 18th wedding anniversary. In 1968 he survives a plane crash that kills his father-in-law, and his wife dies of carbon monoxide poisoning when she reaches the hospital. That seems to be when the time traveling, alien abduction delusions begin and are interwoven into his memories; his daughter said he'd never mentioned alien abduction and time travelling before the crash. After he is released from the hospital, he sneaks off to New York City determined to tell his alien abduction story on TV. He picks up an article on a missing porn star whom he works into his delusion. He also picks up a couple books by the science fiction writer, which he works into his delusion. He gets on a radio program for a while but is kicked off during a commercial break when he starts talking about aliens. His daughter goes to New York and takes him home. Then he starts sending news article about aliens to New York. His daughter starts taking over his practice and his life because she assumes, probably correctly, that brain damage from the plane crash is making him delusional.
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.
Book Review: Amazing!
Summary: 5 Stars
Slaughterhouse Five is like no book I have ever read or heard of. It is mesmerizing, thought provoking, and lugubrious. Kurt Vonnegut is finally able to write about some of his experiences of firebombing Dresden Germany during World War II in a cathartic way in Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut claims most of what is written is true especially the parts about war. Slaughterhouse Five is eye opening. Written in an insipid and mix of autobiography, science fiction, and in an anti- war tone it is nothing short of magnanimity. Slaughterhouse Five is told in the voice of Vonnegut and makes the reader feel there is a strong connection with Vonnegut's own pensive experiences. Though the connection is between the narrator and character is intriguing I am vexed as to why Vonnegut fails to go deeper into his own personal tale.
The main character of Billy Pilgrim is born in 1922 in Illium New York and through his journey in life has been an optomologist, family man, police reporter, student of anthropology, public relations worker, among other occupations. After fighting in World War II and being captured by aliens called Tralfamadorians the main character Billy Pilgrim becomes "unstuck in time". Taken to their planet of Tralfamadore he fornicates with a famous porn star, Montana Wildhack. The aliens observe the two as extraterrestrials. Due to Pilgrim being "unstuck in time" he is able to discursively travel from periods of his life though he is unable to control what period he travels to. After a death in the novel the quote 8 0so it goes" always follows. It doesn't matter the circumstance. It doesn't matter who died. There is always a tone of inevitability. The Tralfamadorians believe though you can die in one moment you can be alive in othermoments which can be visited through time travel. A main theme in Slaughterhouse Five is the inevitability of death, the vacuous of life, and the pernicious nature of war.
The uninhibited way Slaughterhouse Five is written caused me to ruminate over every event. I found the idea of time travel inundate and loved that it was the impetus that kept the story going full throttle. You can't help but feel horrible when you read of the tempestuous time travels of Pilgrim and try to understand the exhaustion he must feel from his circumstance. Though Pilgrim's tale could be viewed simply as balderdash one has to wonder if his demeanor is due to a combination of post traumatic stress disorder and brain damage. Viewed in this light, Billy is a strangely confused man. Though I enjoyed the amazing story of Billy Pilgrim I would have liked to see Vonnegut deeper discus the real sto ries he has to tell- ones that don't involve aliens or porn stars but the history of a brilliant author. In the end, Vonneguts history is sadly neglected, Pilgrims unbelievable story is told, and I was left quite satisfied. I have always sought a book that would blow me away with its strangeness but never found it. Until I read Slaughterhouse Five. In short you need to read this book. You need to experience it for yourself.