Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Nov. 24th, 2007 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
There is no descriptive Blurb on the Back, instead we get the following quotes:
“One of the master alchemists of modern American fiction.”
Sunday Times
“Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller – these are the life roles of Billy Pilgrim, hero of this latter-day Pilgrim’s Progress, a miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse, in the most original anti-war novel since Catch 22.
An extraordinary success. It is a book we need to read and re-read ... Funny, compassionate and wise.”
New York Times Book Review
“A work of keen literary artistry.”
Joseph Heller
A peculiar mix and subversion of memoir, science fiction and war story, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut follows Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist from New York, who “first came unstuck in time in 1944”. The plot is non-chronological, jumping backwards and forwards between key moments in Billy’s life including his marriage to the obese Valencia, his experiences as a POW in Germany (including in the “Schlachthof-funf” from which the title is derived), his time in a mental patients’ ward after the war and his kidnapping by the Tralfamadorians who make him a zoo exhibit on their home planet. This could be disjointing but Vonnegut makes sure that the reader knows exactly where and when they are, at one point seamlessly transporting Billy between a traumatic childhood swimming lesson, a visit to his elderly mother in 1965, a Little League banquet in 1958 and a New Year’s Eve party in 1961 in the space of three pages.
“Tall and weak and shaped like a bottle of Coca-Cola”, Billy is no war hero and indeed, he cuts a pathetic figure at times. His “constant state of stage fright” makes him innocently reckless as to what could happen to him, for example, when he tells “stupid, fat and mean” Roland Weary and two unnamed scouts to go on without him, even though he won’t make it across German lines without them, but he’s nevertheless a survivor, making it through the war, the firebombing of Dresden, and even a later plane crash. Whereas Billy clearly believes that his time-travelling is real, Vonnegut invites the reader to question whether Billy’s experiences are the result of a psychological breakdown brought on by what happened to him in the war. There are hints throughout the book, for example when Billy goes into an adult book store he sees a magazine article suggesting that Montana Wildhack (who he knows to be living on Tralfamadore with their baby) is actually a murder victim and we’re told that a creature “shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian” appears in an awful science fiction novel written by Billy’s friend, Kilgore Trout.
By bookending the story with his personal experiences, Vonnegut adds a strange authenticity – Chapter 1 purports to be an account of how the book came to be written, whilst the final chapter mentions a trip that O’Hare and Vonnegut took with a war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare back to Dresden. In-between Vonnegut appears during Billy’s POW experiences, for example, as the American who “wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains”. Just as Vonnegut subverts the science-fiction element by casting doubt as to whether Billy is a time-traveller, he also subverts the memoir element by turning his memories into Billy’s memories and also by turning the men he really knew to have been shot for stealing a teapot and threatening to have men killed into “poor” Edgar Derby and Paul Lazzaro respectively.
Death features heavily in the novel, usually marked by the words “so it goes”. However, for a novel inspired by Vonnegut’s experiences in the aftermath of the Dresden bombing, the reader is not really exposed to the full horror of the “corpse mines” until the last page and even then, Vonnegut doesn’t belabour the point. In fact, far from being a bleak book, the story is rich in sometimes absurd, sometimes very dark humour, for example in Kilgore Trout’s novel ‘The Gospel From Outer Space’, the lesson learnt from the crucifixion of Christ is: “Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected”.
Slaughterhouse Five has been described as an anti-war polemic, although Vonnegut himself dismisses the notion on the basis that you can be no more anti-war than you can be “anti-glacier” (a point that’s reinforced in Billy’s conversations with the Tralfamadorians who tell him that they have wars too but because “there isn’t anything we can do about them ... we simply don’t look at them”). Vonnegut seems more interested in the inevitability of death and his message appears to be that death happens and war happens and so it goes but he delivers this in a thought-provoking way that leaves the reader questioning whether changes can be made or whether everything is inevitable.
The Verdict:
One of the classics of 20th century literature, this is a must-read book that's thought-provoking, original and just incredibly well written.
There is no descriptive Blurb on the Back, instead we get the following quotes:
“One of the master alchemists of modern American fiction.”
“Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller – these are the life roles of Billy Pilgrim, hero of this latter-day Pilgrim’s Progress, a miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse, in the most original anti-war novel since Catch 22.
An extraordinary success. It is a book we need to read and re-read ... Funny, compassionate and wise.”
“A work of keen literary artistry.”
A peculiar mix and subversion of memoir, science fiction and war story, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut follows Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist from New York, who “first came unstuck in time in 1944”. The plot is non-chronological, jumping backwards and forwards between key moments in Billy’s life including his marriage to the obese Valencia, his experiences as a POW in Germany (including in the “Schlachthof-funf” from which the title is derived), his time in a mental patients’ ward after the war and his kidnapping by the Tralfamadorians who make him a zoo exhibit on their home planet. This could be disjointing but Vonnegut makes sure that the reader knows exactly where and when they are, at one point seamlessly transporting Billy between a traumatic childhood swimming lesson, a visit to his elderly mother in 1965, a Little League banquet in 1958 and a New Year’s Eve party in 1961 in the space of three pages.
“Tall and weak and shaped like a bottle of Coca-Cola”, Billy is no war hero and indeed, he cuts a pathetic figure at times. His “constant state of stage fright” makes him innocently reckless as to what could happen to him, for example, when he tells “stupid, fat and mean” Roland Weary and two unnamed scouts to go on without him, even though he won’t make it across German lines without them, but he’s nevertheless a survivor, making it through the war, the firebombing of Dresden, and even a later plane crash. Whereas Billy clearly believes that his time-travelling is real, Vonnegut invites the reader to question whether Billy’s experiences are the result of a psychological breakdown brought on by what happened to him in the war. There are hints throughout the book, for example when Billy goes into an adult book store he sees a magazine article suggesting that Montana Wildhack (who he knows to be living on Tralfamadore with their baby) is actually a murder victim and we’re told that a creature “shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian” appears in an awful science fiction novel written by Billy’s friend, Kilgore Trout.
By bookending the story with his personal experiences, Vonnegut adds a strange authenticity – Chapter 1 purports to be an account of how the book came to be written, whilst the final chapter mentions a trip that O’Hare and Vonnegut took with a war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare back to Dresden. In-between Vonnegut appears during Billy’s POW experiences, for example, as the American who “wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains”. Just as Vonnegut subverts the science-fiction element by casting doubt as to whether Billy is a time-traveller, he also subverts the memoir element by turning his memories into Billy’s memories and also by turning the men he really knew to have been shot for stealing a teapot and threatening to have men killed into “poor” Edgar Derby and Paul Lazzaro respectively.
Death features heavily in the novel, usually marked by the words “so it goes”. However, for a novel inspired by Vonnegut’s experiences in the aftermath of the Dresden bombing, the reader is not really exposed to the full horror of the “corpse mines” until the last page and even then, Vonnegut doesn’t belabour the point. In fact, far from being a bleak book, the story is rich in sometimes absurd, sometimes very dark humour, for example in Kilgore Trout’s novel ‘The Gospel From Outer Space’, the lesson learnt from the crucifixion of Christ is: “Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected”.
Slaughterhouse Five has been described as an anti-war polemic, although Vonnegut himself dismisses the notion on the basis that you can be no more anti-war than you can be “anti-glacier” (a point that’s reinforced in Billy’s conversations with the Tralfamadorians who tell him that they have wars too but because “there isn’t anything we can do about them ... we simply don’t look at them”). Vonnegut seems more interested in the inevitability of death and his message appears to be that death happens and war happens and so it goes but he delivers this in a thought-provoking way that leaves the reader questioning whether changes can be made or whether everything is inevitable.
The Verdict:
One of the classics of 20th century literature, this is a must-read book that's thought-provoking, original and just incredibly well written.
