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Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Why we're reading this: #19 on NPR's Top 100 SF/F novels of all time (2011 poll) http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/1390858...
#31 on L…more
[close] #19 on NPR's Top 100 SF/F novels of all time (2011 poll) http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/1390858...
#31 on Locus Magazines Best SciFi novels of the 20th century http://www.locusmag.com/2012/AllCentu...

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Sep 18, 2023 Sean DeLauder rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Slaughterhouse Five is a book in which Billy Pilgrim suffers the uniquest form of post-traumatic stress disorder, seemingly enduring not just flashbacks but flash forwards. He's become "unstuck in time," washed from one place along his own timeline to another, often transported from one traumatic or significant memory to another.

One does not know (or, at least, I don't remember) when Pilgrim first becomes unstuck, whether it is caused by aliens or if some awful event blasts him off his temporal Slaughterhouse Five is a book in which Billy Pilgrim suffers the uniquest form of post-traumatic stress disorder, seemingly enduring not just flashbacks but flash forwards. He's become "unstuck in time," washed from one place along his own timeline to another, often transported from one traumatic or significant memory to another.

One does not know (or, at least, I don't remember) when Pilgrim first becomes unstuck, whether it is caused by aliens or if some awful event blasts him off his temporal railroad track, and ultimately it doesn’t matter. His entire life happens out of order, with no beginning and no end, as the Tramalfadorians might say, only bouncing hither and thither across his timeline between the starting and endpoints of his birth and death. He has foreknowledge of his entire existence, knows everything that has and will happen, and seemingly goes through the motions, an actor in a play of his own life. One in which, Vonnegut points out, he has perpetual stage fright because “he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.” And Billy Pilgrim’s life is filled with many terrifying moments.

It’s difficult to determine whether Pilgrim is genuinely transported in and out of time, or if his mind was broken by his experiences. Pilgrim is a thin glass pane of a human being, easily shattered by the slightest pressure. Harvard history professor, and post-plane crash hospital roommate, Bertram Copeland Rumfoord says he “could have carved a better man out of a banana.”

Pilgrim has undergone significant and repeated psychological pressures (as a soldier and prisoner of war, surviving the firebombing of Dresden and aftermath, surviving a plane crash, surviving the death of his wife, etc.), enduring them because he had no other alternative and is so utterly dumbfounded by their horror that he reports them with almost complete emotional detachment.

The question I kept returning to while reading was: had Pilgrim become unstuck in time and was he abducted by aliens, or was this an amalgamation of his shattered brains and the consequence of assimilating the works of obscure sci-fi author Kilgore Trout into his own self image? Vonnegut delights in this uncertainty because, due to the way Trout is described, one doesn’t know if Billy Pilgrim gets his ideas from Trout or if Trout has taken some of his ideas from Pilgrim.

That tiny bit of uncertainty is what elevates the story from a work of bizarre speculative fiction to a work of art: like the ambiguous Mona Lisa, it’s open to interpretation and there doesn’t seem to be a correct answer. If there is one, Vonnegut kept it to himself.

Or, considering how long Vonnegut thought about this story before writing it (some 20 years), maybe he doesn’t know which came first either.

(Note: I didn't read any other reviews, or consult anyone about the work--in fact I've remained nigh impossibly ignorant to any input apart from general opinion with respect to the book. So if I've made any observations that have proven in the past 60 years of scrutiny to be wrong or obvious or boneheaded, I apologize. I went into this as I do most things: completely oblivious.) ...more

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