How bad is it

[Cassandra]

Easytarget wrote: "This last line is precious given we're talking about the meaning of a work of fiction."

You wouldn't resort to the condescending accusation that I'm being "precious" if you could actually show how Vonnegut was expressing fear, horror, or anything but numb indifference.

[Therese]

I don't Think it is that horrible, nor is it anything special. For me it was okay, interesting characters and some inspiring monologues/dialogues.

[Jeff]

I love Slaughter House 5, but I can see how it's not everyone's cup of tea. I often times dislike novels that everyone else loves, like Patterson, or King.

[Samuel]

It is certainly not a favorite, and gets worse over time for me. I read Slaughterhouse-Five and initially rated it "4 Stars" on Goodreads, which in retrospect feels very generous. My rational for a 4 star rating is typically a book that, in either style, subject, or form, strikes me as wholly, even bracingly unique and interesting, if not being quite perfectly engaging overall. Slaughterhouse-Five was my introduction to Vonnegut's signature, earnest but bitingly sardonic style, and so at first I was spurned on by the familiar thrill of a new writer's voice. Even then, however, I was somewhat bothered by the easy, platitudinal nature of his moral judgements and apparently unreflective appraisal of other people's beliefs and actions. Biographical material written about Vonnegut, particularly since his death, reveal him to have been a fairly nasty guy in his personal life -- not unusual for postwar American male writers, to be sure, but especially disquieting given Vonnegut's grandfatherly, "humanistic" posturing, which has only been fortified by most popular critical appraisal of him. What's more, Vonnegut included a figure in Slaughterhouse, something in the ballpark of 120,000, for the death toll of the firebombing of Dresden which he got from the book The Destruction of Dresden (which Vonnegut sites in S-5), by infamous British Holocaust denier David Irving. That figure has since been discredited as being potentially four times too large, and linked to pro-Nazi propaganda from the end of the war in Europe. Yet, despite David Irving having been publicly discredited as a Holocaust denier, Nazi sympathizer, and virulent antisemite, Vonnegut never bothered to have the book republished with the new figure. Why that is is anyone's guess, but my theory is that Vonnegut knew his book's message - the fairly audacious suggestion that the Allied powers, in their own way, were nearly, if not just as bad, as Nazi Germany (he refers to Dresden as the worst war crime of World War II, or something of that nature) - would not work if the fatality figure were in the range of 20,000 instead of 120,000. I have always been distrustful of people like Vonnegut, a devout critic of the West and capitalism, whose memoir was titled "A Man Without a Country", who make bold public overtures to human rights and human decency, but seem not to have been especially empathetic or decent in their personal lives. It strikes me as a critical moral flaw that renders their prescriptions for a better world completely suspect. Vonnegut's steadfastness in maintaining a central historical untruth in his seminal anti-war novel seems to confirm my suspicion. This is all besides the fact that I find the book only periodically funny or engaging. I have read books by authors extremely critical of America, capitalism, and the West and enjoyed them greatly, even finding them edifying, but Vonnegut's famous satire of human cruelty and indifference is not among them.

[Tom LA]

A very flawed, very messy book, absolutely overrated. “So it goes” is a shallow gimmick. The time displacement is empty, there is absolutely nothing behind it aside from “the confusion that PTSD might induce in a man”. The only interesting part, which is Dresden, is extremely limited. The sci-fi is screamingly unoriginal and juvenile. As for the sense of humor, that is often subjective. I didn’t find it amusing in the least.

[Achi]

Just finished it, what a waste of time. The worst book I've read in a long, long time. Humour, if I can call it that, felt forceful to the level, that I could barely finish the chapter from time to time.