Slaughterhouse-Five

Jun 15, 2012 Jason rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: dead-tree-edition, for-kindle, 2011, reviewed, thrill-me-chill-me-fulfill-me

A disturbingly comedic (or comically disturbing?) satire of the inevitability of war, the age old fate vs. free will argument, and the gross desensitization of death, Slaughterhouse-Five analyzes the effects of the Bombing of Dresden on World War II veteran Billy Pilgrim. Told in a nonlinear narrative that is common for Vonnegut, this novel employs the rare literary device I like to call “Twilight Zone–ish extraterrestrialism,” which serves to highlight both the absurdity of free will as well as...more

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Aug 15, 2012 Simeon rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literature, classic, sci-fi, apocalypse

There are some terrible reviews of SH5 floating around Goodreads, but one particularly awful sentiment is that Slaughterhouse-Five isn't anti-war.

This is usually based on the following quote.

"It had to be done," Rumfoord told Billy, speaking of the destruction of Dresden.
"I know," said Billy.
"That's war."
"I know. I'm not complaining"
"It must have been hell on the ground."
"It was," said Billy Pilgrim.
"Pity the men who had to do it."
"I do."
"You must have had mixed feelings, there on the ground."
"

...more There are some terrible reviews of SH5 floating around Goodreads, but one particularly awful sentiment is that Slaughterhouse-Five isn't anti-war.

This is usually based on the following quote.

"It had to be done," Rumfoord told Billy, speaking of the destruction of Dresden.
"I know," said Billy.
"That's war."
"I know. I'm not complaining"
"It must have been hell on the ground."
"It was," said Billy Pilgrim.
"Pity the men who had to do it."
"I do."
"You must have had mixed feelings, there on the ground."
"It was all right," said Billy. "Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on Tralfamadore."

For context, Mr. Rumfoord is an old military historian described as "hateful and cruel" who wants to see weaklings like Billy exterminated.

On Tralfamadore, Billy was introduced to the revelation that all things happen exactly as they do, and that they will always happen that way, and that they will never happen any other way. Meaning, time is all at once. The aliens, incidentally, admit to destroying the universe in a comical accident fated far into the future, and they're very sorry, but so it goes. <- passive acceptance

The entire story up to this point has been about Billy, buffeted like a powerless pathetic leaf in a storm, pushed this way and that by forces entirely outside his tiny purview. He lays catatonically in a hospital bed after the plane crash and the death of his wife, and all the time traveling back and forth from Dresden where toddlers and families and old grannies and anti-war civilians were burned alive in a carefully organized inferno (so it goes), and Billy is about ready to agree to absolutely anything.

It can't be prevented. It can't be helped.

You're powerless, after a while. What hope have we, or anyone caught in the middle of a war, or even the poor soldiers who are nothing but pawns and children (hence the children's crusade), to influence these gigantic, global events?

Therefore, Billy agrees with the hateful, the cruel Mr. Rumfoord, who is revising his military history of WWII, having previously forgotten to mention the Dresden bombing, which cost twice as many innocent lives as the nuking of Hiroshima. Women and children, not evaporated instantly, but melted slowly by chemicals and liquid flame, their leftovers, according to Billy, lying in the street like blackened logs, or in piles of families who died together in their little homes.

Incidentally, how can anything be pro-war or anti-war? Because being anti-war is a bit like being anti-conflict, anti-death, and anti-suffering. Is there a book that's pro these things? Is there a book that touches on the subject of war and is not against it?

We don't support wars, though we are sometimes forced to accept them. Anyone who thinks that the bombing of Dresden was necessary is delusional.

It's like saying, "yo, look how they bombed these innocents - that shit was wrong! Let's go bomb some innocents, too."

That's the sad truth of it.(less)

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Apr 04, 2013 Gavin rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi

There are only a few books that I ever really try to revisit. Sherlock Holmes and his stories are one. Some Shakespeare. And Slaughterhouse-Five.

I have read this book every year since my first reading almost ten years ago. I read it as an undergraduate; I read it as a graduate student. I've written three or four papers about it. And, yes, I have tried to pawn this book off on as many people as I could over the years.

You see, this book does something to me whenever I read it. It takes me places...more

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May 17, 2013 Garima rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: its-not-you-its-meta-or-gfhrytyt

I finally read Vonnegut. I finally read a war novel. And after a long time I finally read something with so many GR ratings and a decent number of reviews which is precisely the reason I have nothing much to add to the already expressed views here. So I urge you to indulge me to state a personal anecdote. Thank You.

My Grandfather was a POW during Indo-China war and remained in confinement for some six months. By the time I got to know about it I had already watched too many movies and crammed en...more

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Jan 02, 2010 Martine rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, modern-fiction, north-american, postmodern, science-fiction

I have to admit to being somewhat baffled by the acclaim Slaughterhouse-5 has received over the years. Sure, the story is interesting. It has a fascinating and mostly successful blend of tragedy and comic relief. And yes, I guess the fractured structure and time-travelling element must have been quite novel and original back in the day. But that doesn't excuse the book's flaws, of which there are a great many in my (seemingly unconventional) opinion. Take, for instance, Vonnegut's endless repeti...more I have to admit to being somewhat baffled by the acclaim Slaughterhouse-5 has received over the years. Sure, the story is interesting. It has a fascinating and mostly successful blend of tragedy and comic relief. And yes, I guess the fractured structure and time-travelling element must have been quite novel and original back in the day. But that doesn't excuse the book's flaws, of which there are a great many in my (seemingly unconventional) opinion. Take, for instance, Vonnegut's endless repetition of the phrase 'So it goes.' Wikipedia informs me it crops up 106 times in the book. It felt like three hundred times to me. About forty pages into the book, I was so fed up with the words 'So it goes' that I felt like hurling the book across the room, something I have not done since trying to read up on French semiotics back in the 1990s. I got used to coming across the words every two pages or so eventually, but I never grew to like them. God, no.

I found some other nits to pick, too. Some of them were small and trivial and frankly rather ridiculous, such as -- wait for it -- the hyphen in the book's title. Seriously, what is that hyphen doing there? There's no need for a hyphen there. Couldn't someone have removed it, like, 437 editions ago? And while I'm at it, couldn't some discerning editor have done something about the monotonous quality of Vonnegut's prose -- about the interminable repetition of short subject-verb-object sentences? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying all authors should use Henry James- or Claire Messud-length sentences. Heaven forbid. I'm actually rather fond of minimalism, both in visual art and in writing. But Vonnegut's prose is so sparse and simplistic it's monotonous rather than minimalist, to the point where I frequently found myself wishing for a run-on sentence every now and then, or for an actual in-depth description of something. I hardly ever got either. As a result, there were times when I felt like I was reading a bare-bones outline of a story rather than the story itself. Granted, it was an interesting outline, larded with pleasing ideas and observations, but still, I think the story could have been told in a more effective way. A less annoying way, too.

As for the plot, I liked it. I liked the little vignettes Vonnegut came up with and the colourful characters he created (the British officers being my particular favourites). I liked the fact that you're never quite sure whether Billy is suffering from dementia, brain damage or some kind of delayed post-traumatic stress disorder, or whether there is some actual time-travelling going on. I even liked the jarring switches in perspective, although I think they could have been handled in a slightly more subtle manner. And I liked the book's anti-war message, weak and defeatist though it seemed to be. In short, I liked the book, but it took some doing. I hope I'll be less annoyed by the two other Vonnegut books I have sitting on my shelves, Breakfast of Champions and Cat's Cradle.
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Apr 30, 2013 Samadrita rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Why haven't YOU read this yet?

Shelves: 1001-and-more, hugo-nebula-locus-awards, american-literature, metafiction, world-war-ii, cherished, humour-of-the-dignified-kind, brain-fodder, awesomesauce, sci-fi, satire, re-readable, disturbia

Neither does a war bring glory nor does a win in one ensure the moral infallibility of an ideology over a conflicting one. Because, essentially, war justifies countering genocide by perpetrating more genocide. We all know that, right?

But no, we don't. We only think we do.
And that is what Kurt Vonnegut wishes to tell his reader, in a calm, disinterested and emotionless voice in Slaughterhouse-Five.
He informs us, in a matter-of-fact tone, that we don't know the first thing about a war and proceed...more Neither does a war bring glory nor does a win in one ensure the moral infallibility of an ideology over a conflicting one. Because, essentially, war justifies countering genocide by perpetrating more genocide. We all know that, right?

But no, we don't. We only think we do.
And that is what Kurt Vonnegut wishes to tell his reader, in a calm, disinterested and emotionless voice in Slaughterhouse-Five.
He informs us, in a matter-of-fact tone, that we don't know the first thing about a war and proceeds to explain to us what it really is, by fashioning a narrative as abstruse, disjointed and meaningless as war itself.

I must make a confession despite how morbid this may sound. I have a thing for war books because reading about the two World Wars which helped define our identity as a civilization in the last century is endlessly fascinating. And despite the horrendous nature of crimes against humanity that were committed in both, these two wars held up a mirror in front of us, helped us recognize our own failings as human beings and rectify our mistakes.
Which is why I agree with Tan Twan Eng's views on World War II -

"Moments in time when the world is changing bring out the best and the worst in people."

But Vonnegut neither eulogizes war nor seeks to make our hearts bleed for the unimaginable loss and suffering it brings. Instead, he gives the traditional perspective on war a new twist by giving us a prolonged glimpse into the mind of a prisoner of war who was, perhaps, able to survive the brunt of it all, by detaching himself from his own reality and seeking solace in dimensions which only existed inside his head.
Billy Pilgrim's life or the way he viewed his own life in retrospect, appears to be as chaotic and nonsensical as the war he served in.
It is the sheer absurdity of the concept of war that takes center stage in this highly experimental novel - how the unfortunate victims of it carry on with their broken lives with a perverse sense of humor in the face of mindless brutality and utter madness.

I definitely look forward to reading more of Vonnegut now.(less)

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Feb 15, 2008 Kirstie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: people dealing with trauma

I read this book first in 1999 when my grandfather passed away. It was a bit of a coincidence as his funeral occurred between a Primate Anatomy exam and a paper for my Experimental Fiction class on Slaughterhouse Five. I was frantically trying to remember the names of all kinds of bones when I picked this up in the other hand and tried to wrap my head around it.

Basically, Vonnegut has written the only Tralfamadorian novel I can think of. These beings, most undoubtedly inspired in Billy Pilgrim's...more I read this book first in 1999 when my grandfather passed away. It was a bit of a coincidence as his funeral occurred between a Primate Anatomy exam and a paper for my Experimental Fiction class on Slaughterhouse Five. I was frantically trying to remember the names of all kinds of bones when I picked this up in the other hand and tried to wrap my head around it.

Basically, Vonnegut has written the only Tralfamadorian novel I can think of. These beings, most undoubtedly inspired in Billy Pilgrim's head by the scattered science fiction plots of Kilgore Trout, experience time as a continuum that is constantly occurring...and when they look at time, even though in their version of history, the world is in a constant state of being destroyed for example, they choose to see the things that make them happy...the good moments.

What Billy learns from these creatures is that each traumatic event that has happened in his life fits very precisely into a state of meticulous nature. It has always happened and always will happen and so it goes (on and on and on). What Billy Pilgrim truly experiences over and over in his life is Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. He exists throughout his memories traveling back and forth with the knowledge of what will happen and how precise it all is. Dresden is bombed in every moment and his friend Derby is put in front of a firing squad. At every second, he is the only survivor of a plane wreck, he is getting married, and he is fighting a Children's Crusade. It's the only way he can look at the despair that has happened and make sense of it.

When my grandfather died and I read this, I felt as if it was just what I needed because I could escape back into time and remember the good memories of my grandfather...if they existed (even if in some fourth dimension) then he was just as dead as he was alive and eating peanut butter chocolate ice cream. At the same time my grandfather had a heart attack, I was watching him play cards with my grandma at the kitchen table. But which one to think of? Well, that was easy. Death can't be prevented and so it goes but you can always try to change which moment you live in. It's a little bit different than a memory and if you go far into it, you'll end up like Billy Pilgrim, which is to say, you will go insane because the rest of the world sees time as linear and counts seconds and minutes and hours.

Once and awhile, it doesn't hurt. I re-read this again on the plane rides home and back before and after my grandmother's funeral on Monday and last night. My grandma was a strong and intelligent woman and she always read everything she saw. My recent memories of my grandmother were of her at the holidays. She always had her mind but her physical condition had deteriorated and she was dependent on oxygen. It made me sad to think of her like this a bit.

It's really hard for me to think that my grandma is no more but then I tell myself...well, it's silly for me to keep crying on and on about this. My grandma is right now reading at 4am in her living room chair and I am a child creeping down the stairs hoping she's still up. She is telling me that one day I'll come around and like green onions. She is reminding me to keep my feet off of the davenport and about being "tickled" by something. She lives in a jungle of houseplants and watches musicals all of the time, always pointing out when some distant relative of mine appears briefly in The Greatest Show on Earth. My grandma can't be dead and be doing all of those things, can she? It doesn't make sense. She will always be alive in some moments just like I will always be seven and nine and twenty eight and perhaps past thirty and forty. So, she'll always be here.

I just wish I could dream about her.
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May 02, 2009 Dave Russell rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels

Why do I love this book? I love it because of the villains. Not just the obviously villainous Paul Lazzaro--although he's one of the great villains of modern fiction. During the hellishness of war all he can think about is his own petty need to avenge slights done to him--but the larger, less obvious villains in this book: the Tralfamdorians. They’re not the type of villainous space aliens you see in most science fiction, arriving in flying saucers and hell bent on enslaving humanity, only to be...more Why do I love this book? I love it because of the villains. Not just the obviously villainous Paul Lazzaro--although he's one of the great villains of modern fiction. During the hellishness of war all he can think about is his own petty need to avenge slights done to him--but the larger, less obvious villains in this book: the Tralfamdorians. They’re not the type of villainous space aliens you see in most science fiction, arriving in flying saucers and hell bent on enslaving humanity, only to be stopped by some intrepid space cadet. (Vonnegut hated being categorized as "science fiction" because most science fiction at the time was just juvenile male wish fulfillment, which he clearly was not interested in. In fact he kind of satirizes that kind of thing in this book.) His aliens are much more fascinating than that.
The Tralfamdorians aren't much interested in Jesus Christ's message of universal love. They're more interested in the message of Charles Darwin, that beings die to improve the species. (At least that's the message as they see it. Like I said they're villains.) To them the idea of free will is silly. (Well, villains can be right sometimes.) The world is structured in a way that everything that happens is meant to happen and there's nothing we can do about it. Concern for human feelings is useless and therefore we shouldn't give a second thought to massacres and slaughter. Just say "and so it goes," and move on. This was certainly the feeling of the Nazis with their belief in the destiny of the everlasting Reich (or whatever the phrase is,) and the Communists with their belief that the road to the future must be built on the corpses of the present. (Stalin’s most famous saying—"One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic.")
To Billy--like Vonnegut, a witness to the slaughter at Dresden--they provide an escape. They put him in an enclosure where all his needs, material and sexual, are met and where he is protected from the poisonous gas outside. To mankind their philosophy provides an escape from moral responsibility.
In the first chapter of the book Vonnegut tells his friend he is writing an anti-war book. His friend responds that he "might as well write an anti-glacier book," and Vonnegut kind of agrees with him. Wars, like glaciers, can’t be stopped. And yet he wrote the book anyway. Yes, death is inevitable, but to Vonnegut humanity is also worth mourning. What happened to Edgar Derby is worth relating, and we should be moved by it. Vonnegut is not satisfied to sum up Edgar’s death with the phrase, "and so it goes." I love this book because Vonnegut conjures up this fascinating alien race with a view of life that provides an opportunity for escape, but then punctures the illusion by showing that it is as facile as it is attractive.
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Nov 11, 2012 Henry Avila rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Billy Pilgrim is not just another time travelling man, kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore and put in their zoo.He's an eyewitness to the destruction of Dresden, during World War Two.Billy an optometrist, marries the boss's slightly overweight daughter Valencia(who no one else wanted) .The couple have two children,Barbara and Robert.The fact that he becomes very rich doesn't make him a bad guy.Lucky, I guess.Billy is no prize either .Tall, skinny weakling, an ordinary man .With a te...more

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Mar 29, 2013 Nathan "N.R." Gaddis rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: es-wurde-einmal-gelesen, 100-mccaffery-read

A Living Room capitalist entity was purchased by a dot.com Bubble Surviving capitalist entity. Policy? It's the same that it's always been--the policy will change according the needs of your owners. goodreads does not, never has, operated with a constitution. amazon is not, but could become, a workers’ collective or consumer cooperative. None of the recent events should come as a grave surprise to any of us. The choice we may have are two. One, become a dirty fucking hippie and flee into the woo...more

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Apr 27, 2012 Sesana rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook, classics, time-travel, science-fiction

This is indeed a tough book to review. It's about time travel and aliens, and also war and life and death. It's cyclical, even repetitive, and certainly not linear. We know what happens in the last scene before Billy's story even begins. That's intentional, Tralfamadorian, and it's an effect that I can easily see would be annoying to some. But I thought that it was very effective.

Slaughterhouse-Five is described as an anti-war novel. And it is, in a way, but not in the usual way. It's an expres...more

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Jul 31, 2011 Lou rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

http://more2read.com/?review=slaughte...

Highly recommended novel that demands a re-read. I found a really good review that put it so much better in perspective. When I read it again in the not so distant future I will add my own thoughts but for now this readers review here does so much better justice to the story.

"Kurt Vonnegut uses a combination of dark humor and irony in Slaughterhouse-Five. As a result, the novel enables the reader to realize the horrors of war while simultaneously laughing...more http://more2read.com/?review=slaughte...

Highly recommended novel that demands a re-read. I found a really good review that put it so much better in perspective. When I read it again in the not so distant future I will add my own thoughts but for now this readers review here does so much better justice to the story.

"Kurt Vonnegut uses a combination of dark humor and irony in Slaughterhouse-Five. As a result, the novel enables the reader to realize the horrors of war while simultaneously laughing at some of the absurd situations it can generate. Mostly, Vonnegut wants the reader to recognize the fact that one has to accept things as they happen because no one can change the inevitable.

Although Slaughterhouse-Five may not be filled with delightful satire and comical scenes, there are accounts which the force the reader to laugh. In one instance, an extremely drunk Billy Pilgrim is searching desperately for the steering wheel of his car: "He was in the backseat of his car, which is why he couldn't find the steering wheel," Vonnegut writes (47). In another episode, Billy becomes "unstuck" in time while watching television, so that he sees a war film backwards and then forwards. The most humorous sequence takes place when Billy travels from the zoo on Tralfamadore to his wedding night with his wife, Valencia. He wakes up to find himself in the German prison camp. He then finds himself back with Valencia after returning from the bathroom. He goes to sleep, then wakes up on a train on the way to his father's funeral.

In any case, the reader encounters much dark humor in the novel. There is a sense of an embittered humor with the Tralfamadorian phrase, "So it goes," which is repeated over 100 times in the novel. John May says that Vonnegut's purpose in repeating the phrase after each statement of death is to build its meaning with each incremental refrain (Contemporary Literary Criticism 8: 530). At first, the saying can be looked upon as funny in an ironic way. However, as one reads further, the phrase becomes irritating and irreverent. The reader cannot fathom so many deaths meaning so little. According t o Wayne McGinnis, it is most likely Vonnegut's intent to cause such feelings from the reader (Contemporary Literary Criticism 5: 468). This punctuating phrase forces the reader to look at the novel's deaths one after the other.

Ultimately, the repetition creates a feeling of resentment that too many people are killed. The saying is a grim reminder that means exactly the opposite of what its words say. Vonnegut ends the novel with the reminder of the deaths of JFK, Martin Luther King, and all of those that died in Vietnam. As a result, the phrase that first caused the reader to smile leaves the reader on the verge of tears. It makes all who read this novel feel so powerless. So it goes.

Slaughterhouse-Five contains great irony as well. In his own mind, Roland Weary consistently saves Billy from death, when in fact Weary takes delight in beating Billy (Vonnegut 51). The only time Billy is actually saved from Weary is when the Germans capture the two. Also, it is the good soldiers who are killed, not Billy or Weary: "The two scouts who had ditched Billy and Weary had just been shot" (54).

An instance that sickens the reader is the shooting of Edgar Derby for stealing a teapot. Vonnegut writes, "One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his" (1). On the other hand, Billy gets away with keeping a diamond.

Finally, the most bitter and profound event in the novel is the bombing of Dresden. Dresden was a culturally invaluable city which had no ties with the German war effort, yet it was bombed by the Allies as a stimulus for the Germans to surrender.

Without Kurt Vonnegut's use of humor and irony, Slaughterhouse-Five would certainly not be considered such a creative accomplishment. It is because of these devices that Vonnegut's objectives are so effectively achieved. Through its dark humor, the novel forces the reader to become nauseated by deaths that are unnecessary. At the end of the novel, the reader despises war just as much as Kurt Vonnegut himself does, if not more."(less)

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Mar 21, 2012 Traveller rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: postmodernist, four-and-a-half-stars

Kurt Vonnegut experienced the WW2 fire-bombing of Dresden as a private in the US army.
He says of the experience: "There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre" - and this is effectively communicated in the deliberate anti-climax to Slaughterhouse 5.

I seem to find myself pretty ambivalent towards Vonnegut. I like his pacifist leanings, and I find his use of an anti-hero and anticlimax as well as his ideas on time interesting.

Vonnegut manages to convey the disorienting effect of horror p...more
Kurt Vonnegut experienced the WW2 fire-bombing of Dresden as a private in the US army.
He says of the experience: "There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre" - and this is effectively communicated in the deliberate anti-climax to Slaughterhouse 5.

I seem to find myself pretty ambivalent towards Vonnegut. I like his pacifist leanings, and I find his use of an anti-hero and anticlimax as well as his ideas on time interesting.

Vonnegut manages to convey the disorienting effect of horror pretty effectively with his impressionist style. Bernard Schlink and others examine in an intellectual fashion how the horrors of WWII slipped by everyone so effortlessly at the time, but Vonnegut makes the numbing effect of the horror easier for the reader to understand on a gut-level, by portraying how powerless the 'little people' must have felt when it came down to the nitty-gritty.

Interesting to note is the bleak fatalistic leitmotif "So it goes" whenever something or someone in the novel dies. (You hear the refrain quite often, and it creates a chilling tally of how often death rears its head.

The bleakness of Vonnegut's subject matter is offset by his offbeat black humor. An example of the playful quality of Vonnegut's sense of humor is demonstrated when he even adds the "So it goes" leitmotif to a bottle of Coca-cola going 'dead'. ( or flat)

But... his method of employing an anticlimax also made me feel a bit deflated with regard to the ending of Slaughterhouse 5, which, in a sense, is, I suppose part of what he tries to achieve, especially given the bit of background regarding the feelings of his friend's wife that Vonnegut gives in the informal prologue to Slaughterhouse 5.

In the end, I feel a bit confused as to if I should read more work by him, wondering if he will have more to say - not quite sure how to express this... on the other hand, the fact that he is more subtle in what he has to say, also makes him pretty appealing, since I don't particularly value authors who are in your face and whose work reads too 'easily', or who don't say anything that leaves you with something to chew on.

I do enjoy Vonnegut's dark humor; it's almost worthwhile reading him just for that alone. So.. like I said, - I feel pretty ambivalent.
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Apr 13, 2013 Cecily rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: american-canadian, sci-fi-or-futuristic

A strange and intriguing book that I found very hard to rate: a mixture of wartime memoir and sci fi - occasionally harrowing, sometimes funny and other times thought-provoking.

It is the episodic story of Billy Pilgrim, a small town American boy, who is a POW in the second world war, later becomes a successful optometrist and who occasionally and accidentally travels in time to other periods of his life, so he has "memories of the future". Oh, he also gets abducted by aliens, along with some fur...more A strange and intriguing book that I found very hard to rate: a mixture of wartime memoir and sci fi - occasionally harrowing, sometimes funny and other times thought-provoking.

It is the episodic story of Billy Pilgrim, a small town American boy, who is a POW in the second world war, later becomes a successful optometrist and who occasionally and accidentally travels in time to other periods of his life, so he has "memories of the future". Oh, he also gets abducted by aliens, along with some furniture. "So it goes." (That is the catchphrase of the book, and I found rather annoying after the umpteenth time. It's used, apparently deliberately, in Philip K Dick's Ubik (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...), which I assumed was a nod to Vonnegut, until I discovered both were published in the same year)

Spoons are mentioned oddly often, as a description of how people lie (lovers or fallen soldiers). Then, near the end, actual spoons are briefly important. I have no idea whether this is significant.

It starts with an old man reminiscing about his life. He is asked about the point of writing an anti-war book, "Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?" After that, it jumps about, much as Billy does, "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time... he is in a constant state of stage fright".

The most thought-provoking bits for me were Billy's mother who tried "to construct a life that makes sense from things she found in gift shops", the bathos with which some war events were described (e.g. being executed for stealing a teapot) and the Tralfamadorian's multi-dimensional and multi-sexual world. For instance, they have five sexes, but their differences were in the fourth dimension and they couldn't imagine how time looks to Billy (they also told him that seven sexes were essential for human reproduction!). A main message is surprisingly positive: if we could only see or feel the fourth dimension, we would realise that "when a person dies he only appears to die. He is very much alive in the past".

It has strong links with several other books: as it's Vonnegut, the "fictitious" sci fi writer, Kilgore Trout, gets several mentions; the mode of time travel clearly influenced Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife and when he watches a WW2 film in reverse, it's very like Amis's Time's Arrow. It also left me wanting to read a Tralfamadorian book with its simultaneous threads, "no beginning, no middle, no end... What we love in our books are the depths of many marvellous moments seen all at one time", which is surely what Vonnegut was trying to create for mere human readers.(less)

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Jul 29, 2011 Stephanie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: lit, favorites, re-read, sci-fi

I miss Kurt Vonnegut.

He hasn't been gone all that long. Of course he isn't gone, yet he is gone. He has always been alive and he will always be dead. So it goes.

Slaughterhouse-five is next to impossible to explain, let alone review, but here I am. And here I go.

What is it about?

It's about war.
It's about love and hate.
It's about post traumatic stress.
It's about sanity and insanity.
It's about aliens (not the illegal kind, the spacey kind).
It's about life.
It's about death.
so it goes.

"That's one th...more

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Aug 21, 2007 Steve rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Soon after Vonnegut died quite a few stories were circulated about his real-life experiences as a POW in Dresden during WWII. Billy, the book’s main character, survived the firebombing just as Vonnegut did. Both recognized the good fortune of their underground prison vantage point when the flames incinerated the city above. Both had plenty to cope with, too. In telling Billy’s story, Vonnegut connects several themes. Not surprisingly, “war is hell” is one of them. Some of the other points set th...more

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Jan 21, 2008 Shannon (Giraffe Days) rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi, time-travel, 2008, history, not-worth-it

Contains spoilers
Slaughterhouse-Five is about a man called Billy Pilgrim who time-travels frequently. He was in the Second World War and, captured, was sent to Dresden to work in a malt syrup factory before the city was bombed. He studied optometry and had a nervous breakdown. He married the daughter of a rich optometrist, and became rich as well. He was abducted by aliens called Tralfamadorians, who put him in a zoo with a young porn actress, Montana Wildhack, whom they also abducted. He had a...more Contains spoilers
Slaughterhouse-Five is about a man called Billy Pilgrim who time-travels frequently. He was in the Second World War and, captured, was sent to Dresden to work in a malt syrup factory before the city was bombed. He studied optometry and had a nervous breakdown. He married the daughter of a rich optometrist, and became rich as well. He was abducted by aliens called Tralfamadorians, who put him in a zoo with a young porn actress, Montana Wildhack, whom they also abducted. He had a daughter called Barbara and a son called Robert. He was in a plane crash that killed everyone except him and the co-pilot. Rushing to the hospital in frantic worry, his wife Valencia dies in a car accident. He gets to meet his favourite author, an unsuccessful sci-fi writer called Kilgore Trout. "Slaughterhouse-Five" is the name of the building where the American POWs lived in in Dresden.

Because the narration jumps around as frequently as Billy does, you learn everything early on and then simply revisit it all. The fractured narrative is worse than watching ads in a commercial break, or those horrible pop songs where the scenes and costumes change every two seconds - it gives you a headache. It's extremely boring, and hollow, and unsatisfying.

I'm not a huge sci-fi fan, as you know. But I do like time-travel stories. Billy is nothing like Henry from The Time Traveler's Wife. For a start, not even a second seems to pass in "real" time while he is travelling - no one ever notices. It seems less like time-travelling than like reliving the past, present and future of your life, all at once, because it's his consciousness that does the travelling. What isn't clear, at all, is which is the real Billy? He moves so much, you have to wonder how he doesn't become completely dislodged from his own corporeal self and go mad.

The time-travelling predates the abduction-by-aliens, but the aliens themselves see the past, present and future simultaneously, and teach Billy their philosophy of not really caring about anything, since nothing can be changed etc. etc. Fatalism.

I think I hated this book, but not quite. Hate is a strong emotion and I don't think it brought that out in me. It wasn't even frustrating, nor even particularly confusing, though the repetition of the Tralfamadorian expression "so it goes" was so irritating I saw red a few times. The bits about the 100 American POWs being welcomed by the British POWs in a German prison camp was delightful, though boldly stereotyped, and I loved the excerpts from the work on American soldiers and prisoners-of-war by the American-turned-Nazi, forget his name, something Campbell. A lot of it - and it's a small, short book - could easily be skipped. The temptation was very strong.

In short, it's a very "postmodern" story, and like all things postmodern, it's impractical, disjointed, a bit wanky, tries too hard, is extremely out-dated and, at the end of the day, rather useless. Vonnegut is also very heavy-handed and bangs you on the head with his messages. It doesn't really inspire me to read more of Vonnegut's work. I guess he's a love-him-or-hate-him kind of story-teller.(less)

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Jan 03, 2013 knig rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012

I feel bad about this. This book is a ‘classic’, coming in at number 18 of the 100 greatest novels of the 20c, its a firm favourite of nearly all my friends, and a whole lot of people I don’t know, yet it leaves me cold. Its a very mediocre book but. Darnit, it IS based on Vonnegut’s personal experience as a WWII POW from the Battle of the Bulge and subsequent bombing of Dresden, so one can’t very well apply the Nancy Pearl rule of 50 and be done with it: if for no other reason, then for the his...more I feel bad about this. This book is a ‘classic’, coming in at number 18 of the 100 greatest novels of the 20c, its a firm favourite of nearly all my friends, and a whole lot of people I don’t know, yet it leaves me cold. Its a very mediocre book but. Darnit, it IS based on Vonnegut’s personal experience as a WWII POW from the Battle of the Bulge and subsequent bombing of Dresden, so one can’t very well apply the Nancy Pearl rule of 50 and be done with it: if for no other reason, then for the historical reference, for teh children, and all that. I mean, who am I to judge, given the circumstances.

Thus do well intentioned survivors tales be exalted not for form but content. That Vonnegut struggled with this novel is no secret, as he admits it in chapters one and two, where its clear the story is burgeoning out of his DNA, like something out of Alien, for twenty years after the event with no clear outlet: until this. It feels like one day he just sat down, rolled up his sleeves, and said ‘lets do it, come what may’. Sometimes this will work, other times: its a premature birth. And it does feel, here, a little shy of full fermentation.
What was he even doing there? (being overseas). I have no idea what the subscription codicils were for lay Americans during WWII, but a side glean from Stoner shows it was voluntary, and another from Winesburg (yeah, OK, apropos WWI but same would still apply) that US citizens of (fresh) German descent were given the evil eye. Vonnegut was of clear German descent. Was it this which prompted him to ‘tuck in’? Did he have more to prove than most? He certainly gave it his best shot: apparently he never missed an opportunity to tell his German captors what he would do to them (in German), when the Red Army liberated him. And they never missed an opportunity to beat him black and blue. And so, perhaps this is why amongst all the other post war shock syndromes on exhibit we have in slaughterhouse5, there is never survivors guilt on the menu. Vonnegut had met the hydra head on willingly, and survived. End of. All dues duly paid.

So whats he doing in Slaughtehouse5? The usual. When something is too traumatic to relive, one detaches and maybe goes third person on it. Here, we have Tramalfadorians, whose UFO picks up Earthlings to...um...molest them. In the most delightful way. Billy Pilgrim (Vonnegut’s alter ego?) is beamed up on a spaceship and teleported or whatnot to Tramlafadore, where, in a zoo, he is mated with another Earthling, a drop dead gorgeous sex bomb. Which of course is heavenly. After which he starts a series of Doctor Who time sequence spurts (later fully exposed in the Time travellers Wife, a piece of drivel everyone seems to like as well), and so we achieve an irreverent reverent (if you see what I mean), retelling of purgatory, once removed. The usual. Yes, it has its moments.

There is something though which stays with me from this time travelling spaghetti memento mori: a brilliant passage from some Campbell scribe, who postulates on the concept of ‘poor’ as it pertains to American and European society. Which has nothing to do with the war, and everything to do with social anthropology, (which interests me). He makes the salient point that the poor in America are rather a despised bunch with no redeeming qualities, whereas in ‘old’ Europe poverty and intellectual attributes are a symbiotic mechanism irrevocably interlocked in the communal psyche: a poor man makes a better sage, as opposed to his American counterpart, whereby if he were so smart, why isn’t he rich?

Neway. Vonneguts grief is real, and it happened. I respect that. But. Who lets the dogs out, man?

(less)

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Mar 13, 2008 Danielle rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

So it goes.
I was a huge Vonnegut fan in high school, and had been looking forward to reading his magnum opus. However, I was disappointed.
I think the message of this book is valuable, and it would have lost some of it's power being told in any other way. However, I came away with a bad taste in my mouth. It felt like if I were listening to a rap song full of offensive language and references. Maybe the message of the song is meaningful, and valuable, but because of the presentation, I just can't...more So it goes.
I was a huge Vonnegut fan in high school, and had been looking forward to reading his magnum opus. However, I was disappointed.
I think the message of this book is valuable, and it would have lost some of it's power being told in any other way. However, I came away with a bad taste in my mouth. It felt like if I were listening to a rap song full of offensive language and references. Maybe the message of the song is meaningful, and valuable, but because of the presentation, I just can't appreciate what it's trying to say. I was so frequently offended by the content of this book, mainly the sex, some of the language, and the callousness toward human suffering, that trying to appreciate the larger picture was difficult for me.
Especially compared to other Vonnegut books, I felt like this was more the drunk ramblings of a dirty old man.
On the upside, though, some of that callousness is what makes the whole anti-war theme so poignant. I didn't enjoy the Holocaust museum, but it was a valuable experience. I definitely didn't enjoy this book, but in the future, I'll probably be more acutely aware of (and more quick to condemn) the kind of insensitive attitude toward life that permeated this book.
I'm not sure exactly what Vonnegut's intentions were, but for me, I saw a parallel between Billy Pilgrim's attempt to educate the world about the true nature of time, as imparted to him by the Tralfamadorians, and Vonnegut's attempt to convince the world of the true horrors of the Dresden fire bombing. At first, Billy couldn't talk about it at all, because the time wasn't ripe. Billy's hospital roommate alludes to the same being the case with Dresden when he says initially the US didn't even acknowledge the destruction of Dresden because of bleeding hearts who wouldn't understand it was necessary. By the time the truth came out, people didn't want to believe it. I think Billy's final scene of life is hopeful. Just as he eventually amasses devoted followers of his theory, Vonnegut is hopeful that eventually all the world will realize the utter futility of war, and it's the roommate warhawk general that will sound like the crackpot, rather than Billy Pilgrim.
I found Vonnegut's asides distracting, and thought the story would have been better off without the first-person narration. Also, the references to other Vonnegut characters (Elliot Rosewater, Kilgore Trout, etc.) threw me because I haven't read his other books recently enough to tell whether the stories actually fit together or not, so that was a little weird.
Anyway, if it weren't for the offensive material previously mentioned, I would probably read this book again in an attempt to better appreciate it. As it is, I'll leave it with the moral that war is pointless, and so it goes.(less)

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Nov 21, 2007 Debby rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

"I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone." I do not feel so all alone.

"Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time...He has seen birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all events in between."

"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops." Ah yes, the building blocks of life that make sense to Americans.

"She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embaras...more

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Apr 09, 2009 Daniel rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: re-read, 2009

Breaking with my usual habit of giving what I like to think are clear, well-reasoned explanations of why I did or didn't like a particular book, I'm giving "Slaughterhouse-Five" five stars with little elaboration. I'll simply say that this was my first time revisiting the book since first reading it in high school, and part of the reason for my high rating is that it held up incredibly well -- something I can say of few books I loved as a teenager.

Kurt Vonnegut's writing simply touches my reptil...more Breaking with my usual habit of giving what I like to think are clear, well-reasoned explanations of why I did or didn't like a particular book, I'm giving "Slaughterhouse-Five" five stars with little elaboration. I'll simply say that this was my first time revisiting the book since first reading it in high school, and part of the reason for my high rating is that it held up incredibly well -- something I can say of few books I loved as a teenager.

Kurt Vonnegut's writing simply touches my reptilian brain stem in a way few authors' books do. I don't know that I love "Slaughterhouse-Five" as much as I do "Breakfast of Champions" -- one's favorite Vonnegut book is often the one he read first, and for me that was "Breakfast" -- but it's still a great book.

In "Slaughterhouse-Five," Vonnegut makes mention that one of his recurring characters, science-fiction author Kilgore Trout, has great ideas but is a terrible writer. Fortunately for his readers, Vonnegut both had great ideas and was a wonderful writer. His exploration of the life of a character who spends his entire existence bouncing among various highlights of his life -- becoming, in Vonnegut's parlance, unstuck in time -- is consistently creative and insightful. One may be tempted to criticize Vonnegut for making Billy Pilgrim an overly passive character, for never having him take control of his life or fight back, but such passivity makes complete sense for someone who realizes he has no free will -- that the story of his life, and death, has already been written and nothing he does will alter it.

Despite its dark subject matter, "Slaughterhouse-Five" is occasionally quite funny, and not just sardonically so. Having forgotten the scene from my first reading of "Slaughterhouse-Five," I laughed out loud at Kilgore Trout convincing a less-than-brilliant woman at a party that all of his novels are completely true -- that it would be a violation of the law for him to write a story that was untrue.

It turns out I said more about "Slaughterhouse-Five" than I intended to. Be glad, though, that I managed to write this whole review without saying "so it goes." Well, until now. So it goes.(less)

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Aug 15, 2010 Amanda rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Amanda by: James Quin et al.

Shelves: 2009, recommended-by-others, shit-cool-kids-read

Finally, I have completed my first Vonnegut.

Amazing that an introduction can make the book that much more touching. As personal as a novel can get, I guess. And as I read, I envisioned my future and my present wrapped into one, my Zeke and me lying as lovers in our fifties and happy, staring into faces I know to be real. Maybe it IS smart to focus only on beautiful things and put wars away in closed dark cabinets.

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Sep 21, 2012 Sheila rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Readers interested in war stories and other hopeless situations told with humor

Recommended to Sheila by: Bennard

Shelves: boxalls-1001, reviewed, favorites

First reaction: Very readable, but the narrative is not simple. Any story about the effects of war is not simple.

This book is also a metafiction, to my surprise. The first chapter, for instance, is a preface, a long one. So expect to be rewarded by the intimacy of Vonnegut explaining to the reader why he wrote Slaughterhouse Five and how he wrote it in such a way that makes sense to him.

The story starts with Billy Pilgrim who goes to war as a chaplain's assistant and on an assignment, finds him...more

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Apr 19, 2012 Angus rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: all-time-100-novels, modern-library-100, radcliffes-rival-100, reviewed-and-blogged

Original post at Book Rhapsody.

***

So it goes and so on

Listen! This is the story of Billy Pilgrim, a war veteran who survives the bombing of a German town and who is able to live a comfortable life after it. How did he do it? He hid at the storage room of a slaughterhouse where he was taken as a war prisoner when the sky hailed bombs and set the city ablaze.

No heroic act involved, yes, but he manages to be quite successful. He gets married, has two kids, and becomes a leading optometrist. Things...more

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May 30, 2007 Kelly rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: everyone

Shelves: fiction, worlds-lost-dead-and-dying, owned, 20th-century-postwar-to-late

This was my first, and to date, only Vonnegut experience. I read this in my junior year of high school, tacked onto the end of the year. Mostly as an indulgence to my english teacher who was obsessed with Vonnegut and squeezing it in at the end of the year to have people to fanboy and geek out with after they'd read it. Then I read it and figured out why he was so obsessed. I have to say, this book yanked me firmly into modern literature. (At the time I was deep into my love for 18th and 19th ce...more

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Mar 18, 2009 Tara rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I pretty much thought this book was brilliant--I've read it twice now and I shall read it again. It is difficult to write about, and read about, a subject of horror. Because, c'mon, that's what it is. If the earth in Dresden becomes a veritable tomb for stinking, rotting corpses, and the few survivors have to spray fire into the holes to incinerate the rot because it is physically impossible to smell and touch the rot without hacking all your guts out...well, that's horrific. Yet Vonnegut mangag...more

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Apr 02, 2012 Michael Herrman rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is two books in one: a fictionalized wartime memoir combined with a sci-fi mind bender about aliens to whom time is a curious wrinkle of mind. To these aliens, death is nothing more than a single brush stroke among millions on a moving canvas; somewhere in the multi-verse the dead still live. For here and for now, when they die, it's just a hiccup seen by human kind, to paraphrase the novel, in the same way that a man on a moving flatbed rail car might view a mountain range through a long m...more

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Aug 19, 2008 Benjamin rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

At some point, every Vonnegut novel that I've read feels like it was written by a very intelligent twelve-year-old. The difference between his novels that I love and the ones that I find tedious is how much that child stays buried. This is the most successful. I really like this novel, and there are loads of phrases and scenes that are permanently burned into my mind. "What are you supposed to be?" It, like all of Vonnegut, is not for everyone. But I like it.

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Apr 21, 2013 Teresa rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013

Um livro de guerra
que começa assim:
“Billy Pilgrin tornou-se volúvel no tempo”
e termina assim:
“Piu-titi-priu?”

Billy é um Viajante do Tempo.
Vive entre o presente, as recordações do passado e os desejos do futuro - aquilo que Billy não podia mudar, apenas “visitar”.
Billy é um Viajante do Sonho.
Evade-se de uma realidade presente intolerável para o mundo imaginário de Tralfamadore – o planeta onde não há guerra, não há morte, onde tudo é perfeito. Mas... onde chegará o dia em que um engano, num teste...more

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Oct 04, 2012 K. Jared Hosein rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Science fiction fans looking for something a little different

And so it goes...

Slaughterhouse-Five is science fiction and farce book-ended with an autobiography. It is fiction between fact. The story opens with the despondent author of the book, Vonnegut, himself, as he sets out to write an "anti-war" novel. He realizes the futility of an anti-war novel, and says it would do him just as well to write an anti-iceberg novel, with reference to the Titanic. Sometimes you just cannot stop what is coming.

He intends to write a book about war because of his experi...more And so it goes...

Slaughterhouse-Five is science fiction and farce book-ended with an autobiography. It is fiction between fact. The story opens with the despondent author of the book, Vonnegut, himself, as he sets out to write an "anti-war" novel. He realizes the futility of an anti-war novel, and says it would do him just as well to write an anti-iceberg novel, with reference to the Titanic. Sometimes you just cannot stop what is coming.

He intends to write a book about war because of his experience in the Dresden bombings during World War II. The story of Billy Pilgrim, another prisoner-of-war at Dresden comes into the limelight now. Billy is described as being "unstuck in time", which means that he is unable to live his life chronologically. A few years back, after Billy's daughter's wedding, Billy had been kidnapped by a troupe of aliens called the Tralfamadorians. What is unique about these aliens is that they can see a fourth dimension: time, while we humans can only experience it. They can see all moments of their past and future. They even know how the universe will end.

Billy acquires this ability after being taken by them and sees all moments in his life, even his own death by assassination. Due to this, Billy develops a new relaxed outlook on death, characterized by the arc words splintered throughout the novel, "So it goes." These words succeed any death mentioned in the book, whether it be of microscopic organisms or the thousands who died brutally in Dresden. Billy sees the entire scope of time and space and thus, his mindset on everything changes.

Vonnegut describes mundane situations with a certain quirkiness and humour that I haven't found in other novels. It always strikes me that Vonnegut's books are written with an extraterrestrial readership in mind. The novel is both easy and difficult to read. Easy because of its short length and its straightforward writing style. Difficult because of its concept and its inclination to the non-linear. Due to the nature of the book, there is no climax. No denouement. No real conclusion. If you can see everything, past, present, future there wouldn't be. I guess that's understandable in this case.
(less)

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