Slaughterhouse Five

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Kurt Vonnegut’s novel about the bombing of Dresden in the waning days of WW2 is a classic of American literature which I have now read twice.

The first time I read it, I was a teenager who was enamored of its sci-fi element. This time, I saw the sci-fi part as a vessel for Vonnegut, who was trying to make sense of something that he witnessed as a soldier in Germany.

Billy Pilgrim’s journey through time where he lives his life out of order but with full knowledge of all events allow him to skip to events before the war, during the war where he and others are kept as prisoners in an old abandoned slaughterhouse (hence, the title of the book). Then he is flung forward to his time as an inmate in a zoo on another planet…and at the center is always the destruction of war and the men who face it all with a sort of shrugging acceptance at the death that it brings. So it goes…

Within the tale are other elements that reappear in Vonnegut…Kilgore Trout, the fictional sci-fi writer; Eliot Rosewater, the man who introduces Billy Pilgrim to the works of Mr. Trout. Vonnegut’s unique style is conversational and understated. Every death is summarily reported and accepted with the words “so it goes…” (you might get a little tired of hearing those words, but I think that is exactly the point) The first chapter feels like Vonnegut was just taking the first twenty minutes of his writing shift to himself. Talking about how he wants to talk about the Dresden bombing and how he wasn’t to write this book about it…TBH, the story doesn’t really start until Chapter Two when Billy Pilgrim comes in as a Vonnegut stand-in…

And within the book are some brilliant observations disguised as dialogue and monologue from the characters: aliens and humans alike. A whole section about the immorality of the wealthy caused my jaw to drop. And it holds up even so many years later.

The skipping around and the short sections really help to move it along and liven it up. It is an easy read, which I always appreciate. But that does not mean it is simple.

Slaughterhouse Five is first on my meandering quest to read or re-read all of Vonnegut’s novels. And it’s a good place for anyone to start.





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