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Slaughterhouse-Five (平装)
by Kurt Vonnegut
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Fiction |
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| MSL Pointer Review:
A great introduction to Vonnegut, this immortal work will make his name forever large in the pantheon of great writers. |
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AllReviews |
1 Total 1 pages 10 items |
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Publishers Weekly (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
"Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time." So begins Vonnegut's absurdist 1969 classic. Hawke rises to the occasion of performing this sliced-and-diced narrative, which is part sci-fi and partially based on Vonnegut's experience as a American prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany during the firebombing of 1945 that killed thousands of civilians. Billy travels in time and space, stopping here and there throughout his life, including his long visit to the planet Tralfamador, where he is mated with a porn star. Hawke adopts a confidential, whisper-like tone for his reading. Listening to him is like listening to someone tell you a story in the back of a bus - the perfect pitch for this book. After the novel ends, Vonnegut himself speaks for a short while about his survival of the Dresden firestorm and describes and names the man who inspired this story. Tacked on to the very end of this audio smorgasbord is music, a dance single that uses a vintage recording of Vonnegut reading from the book. Though Hawke's reading is excellent, one cannot help but wish Vonnegut himself had read the entire text. |
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Jesse Van Sant (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
I really enjoyed Slaughterhouse-Five from beginning to end. When I started reading it I didn't know much about Kurt Vonnegut besides the fact that Slaughterhouse-Five appeared on the Modern Library's list of best novels; I guess I sort of expected a gritty anti-war book that, although peppered with some funny moments, would lead inevitably to a sobering conclusion. Instead I found a truly original story, told casually through the detached, defeated eyes of someone floating through war without really caring if he lives or dies, hardly understanding a thing going on around him, not really wanting to understand. He's alive, and that's fine. He's dead, and that's fine too. So it goes. Pretty much everything is fine. As Vonnegut himself says of Billy Pilgrim, "he was unenthusiastic about living."
But why is Billy the way he is? It's true that Vonnegut was himself present for the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, that he was one of the few survivors of the attack which killed more people than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, that he survived only because he, like Billy Pilgrim, was locked up in an underground slaughterhouse as a POW. And in the auto- biographical first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut writes that "there would always be wars," and, even if there were no more wars, "there would still be plain old death." Can we therefore assume that Vonnegut believes the attitude we should take toward death and war is the same detached resignation displayed by Billy Pilgrim? I don't think so.
As noted by critic William Rodney Allen, "despite its mask of Tralfamadorian indifference, Slaughterhouse-Five conveys at times an almost childlike sense of shock that the world is such a violent place." More likely, then, Billy Pilgrim is simply another war-torn casualty, someone who cares so deeply about the indignity of the senseless death all around him that he is no longer able to care. Perhaps suffering from something like post-traumatic-stress disorder, he is forced to create an elaborate metaphysical scheme to explain what he has seen because, as Vonnegut writes, "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." Thus, although Billy Pilgrim survived, he is nevertheless haunted by "a great big secret somewhere inside," a secret that Allen described as "the awareness of the horrors of war and the certainty of death," an awareness that could not be covered up by the frantic materialism of postwar America.
In fact, according to Allen, when Billy Pilgrim is hunted and killed by the paranoid sadist Paul Lazzaro, someone Pilgrim had met decades earlier during the war, the experience can be seen as "an emblem of the fact that a soldier can never really escape his war experiences, that they will always `track him down' even years later." Ultimately, then, I agree with Allen: " Slaughterhouse-Five is built on the paradox that it appears to offer acceptance and even indifference as responses to the horrors of the twentieth century, when in fact it is a moving lament over those horrors, a piercing wail of grief over the millions of dead in World War II." |
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An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
Superficially, this book is a simple story about an American, Billy Pilgrim, who is captured by German forces and housed in a slaughterhouse in Dresden. There, he witnesses the horrible firebombing of the city by Allied forces. Eventually he returns home and marries and takes over the family optometry business.
A secondary stream flows underneath this basic story. Billy Pilgrim is purportedly able to travel through time. He is also abducted by aliens and kept in their zoo with a young starlet as his "mate".
Vonnegut's prose is simple, clear, and powerful. It is all plain English, and he doesn't make any effort to dress up the story with anything pretensions. Reading his work is refreshing because he never talks down to the reader, he just tells the story. (In this sense, he is a lot like Nabokov but with a smidgen less zest.)
Delve deeper into the meaning of the story, though, and you will find that the story is as deep as you want to go. Billy Pilgrim is obviously "shell-shocked" and suffering internally, though from all outward appearances he seems to be fine. In his own mind he thinks himself fine, though his frequent flashbacks to his past and his imaginary alien abduction tell otherwise. So what exactly is going on with Billy?
If all this is happening to Billy, what is Vonnegut trying to say? What are the demons that haunt him, the author? Vonnegut, too, was at the Dresden firebombing, and in a very real sense this book is his attempt at self-therapy. How much of Vonnegut is reflected in Billy?
The aliens are presented not as time travelers, but as beings that simply "are". They, as well as Billy, see time as a solid mass which can be examined in any order. Therefore, to them, wars are inevitable, as too are happy times. The key, they tell Billy, is to look at the happy times rather than dwell on the sad times. However, the realness of the aliens is certainly in doubt. Perhaps Billy created the aliens, or picked up the idea from a book, in order to help him cope with his internal pain.
The book has a strong anti-war message, but it doesn't beat you over the head with it. The most repeated phrase is "So it goes" which is a way to accept a preordained fate as it comes, but perhaps we don't have to accept that fate is preordained, that we have free-will to choose our fate. The aliens would scoff at this, but if Vonnegut meant for this to be an anti-war novel, then he must believe that we can control our fate enough to avoid war.
The book is a great read. It is easy enough for young students and meaningful enough for older folks. 5 stars, easily. |
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Lavinia Whately (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
I think young people may have trouble understanding this book, which is about the experience of life. Told with great compassion, Vonnegut, in fact and in fiction both, is a mature man looking back on the tragedies he saw in his youth. Being "unstuck in time" can be seen as a metaphor for intrusive post-traumatic memories, and dissociated dreams, both of which happen to someone who has undergone great trauma. Vonnegut had the horror of his mother committing suicide when he was home on leave in WWII, and going from there to being a prisoner of war, seeing his friends shot and being forced to dig for rotting bodies in Dresden. |
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Mark Wakely (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
This is a very funny novel that- in retrospect- breaks your heart; it's the blackest black humor you will ever read.
It must have taken great courage for Vonnegut- as talented as he is- to take the Allied bombing of Dresden Germany during WWII and make it the main stage for this theater of the absurd tale, particularly since he witnessed firsthand what happened to Dresden. Fail, and you risk being pummeled by the critics for trivializing a horrific, nearly unimaginable event. (For those who don't know, Dresden wasn't "just" bombed; it was turned into a raging firestorm, with hurricane-force winds dragging thousands of victims into the flames to be cremated, and depleting the oxygen in the underground shelters, leaving thousands more asphyxiated.) But Vonnegut didn't fail; he succeeded brilliantly in conveying the absurdity of war by not embellishing events, the tone of the book remarkably matter-of-fact as his main character- Billy Pilgrim- jumps through time and space, gaining a unique perspective on the follies of mankind.
The name of his main character is especially telling of Vonnegut's intentions. Perhaps the most famous Billy in literature is Melville's Billy Budd, an innocent soul whose fate is an unjust death that suggests life is predetermined. And Pilgrim brings to mind John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, an allegorical tale of the escape from the City of Destruction (Dresden) to the Celestial City of enlightenment (the home world of the superior Tralfamadorians, who explain human existence to Billy.)
Perhaps by writing Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut gained some measure of catharsis, found a way to deal with his memories of Dresden and its aftermath. Like many veterans whose refuse to discuss their war experiences, a more direct, "realistic" approach to the firebombing might have been too painful. By taking an indirect approach, however, he was able to open a door that otherwise would have remained locked. That's fortunate for us, since Slaughterhouse-Five rises above the historical account of that terrible event to address the larger issue of what it means to be human in a world where what humans do doesn't always make sense.
This is an insightful, important book, and one of Vonnegut's best. |
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Marc Lord (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
I had to read this book when I was a senior in high school, in Mr. Marcinec's AP English class in Johnstown High School, New York, geographically in the area where the book was written and situated. At the time I was trying to choose between going to West Point and the Air Force Academy, and reading Mr. Vonnegut changed my plans and my life. If it weren't for this book, I might well be directing operations against Iraqi civilians right now. Thank you, Kurt Vonnegut, thank you, thank you from here to Tralfamadore.
Subsequently I learned that wrapped up in science fiction's basic impulse was a response to the kind of atrocious killing first experienced during military conflicts of the twentieth century. The technologically dominated nature of those conflicts was very different, and what its victims experienced could not be accurately described by reaching back onto any touchstones of history because new realities had leapfrogged old language. Thus their horror could only be communicated at removes through epic myth, satire, or even by moving as Vonnegut did entirely outside the box of molecular matter itself. War veterans like Tolkien, Heller, and Vonnegut were pioneers in a new literary device, one which came to overshadow traditional literature by the latter half of the twentieth century in both cultural impact and book sales.
Vonnegut projects himself into the device and character of Billy Pilgrim, who serves as a gawkish hapless soldier and simultaneously lives a blessedly bourgeoius post-war existence in upstate New York; he writes outside time in order to make sense of the impersonal, mechanized brutality he experienced as a prisoner of war while digging thousands of dead, rotting civilians out of basements in Dresden, Germany for weeks after its fire-bombing.
In performing such grisly work, unendurable for any of us on a personal level, I believe Mr. Vonnegut had to leave his mind and senses in order to function, and that the protective mental refuge he went to formed the kernel of this indispensable book. While digging and removing himself from the present, he must have determined to write an anti-war story unlike any other to stand the tests of all time. Kurt Vonnegut succeeded, and 2,000 years from now when people study war (assuming we make it so long), Slaughterhouse Five will remain. It is the post-modern equivalent of the phrase, "Go tell the Spartans." |
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Tim Jackson (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
Kurt Vonnegut is back, and he couldn't have done better. Slaughterhouse-Five is possibly his most accomplished book, and may even be considered the best book of its time. This book has soared Vonnegut to the very top of the author list for many. It surpasses his former highest accomplishes and stands alone in a world of classic reads. The reader is sped down winding roads of space, time, and memory. A fast paced book fit for any age, Slaughterhouse-Five is entertaining, inspiring, and smart. Set in the main character, Billy Pilgrim's memory, Vonnegut bring us twisting through World War II, to present day, to planets as far away as Tramalfadore, where Billy had been abducted, and back again. We are pulled with Billy through his tribulations as he makes friends, and also as he makes a few enemies. The imagination weaved so richly and tastefully through the entire novel makes the reader at a constant hunger for more. Vonnegut's signature humor is nothing less than emanating from page 1 to the very end. Slaughterhouse-Five is on a deserving par to its peer novels such has Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and 1984 by George Orwell. It has become a classic American novel, and it is rightfully so. Vonnegut is not a "one book author". He is the type of author that makes his readers desperate for his entire collection. Slaughterhouse-Five, however must be a top priority and should be made the number one book on everyone's "To Read" list. |
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Meghan (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
This book was very strange but interesting. It was very hard to follow in how he jumped from what was actually happening to things that have happened in the past, and then jumping to the present then random years. I found it very interesting because what he was talking about was very interesting.
In the beginning of the book, he kept talking about how he always wanted to write a book about war, but could never think of enough details to put in it. He was also very humorous in telling random details about everything. He mentioned his wife and how he studied Optometry. How his daughter ended up marrying an optometrist so it stayed in the family.
This book was kind of crazy in the sence that he felt he was abducted by aliens. No one believed him. He ended up publishing letters in the newspaper. He thought that everyone would believe him if he kept writing letters.
I thought it was pretty cool how Weary was from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (my hometown). You never find how people in a book from your city in a city like this.
I didn't like, however, the random jumps of how he was in a different place he actually was there, and you didnt really understand how he got there and then he blinked and he was back into what he was doing before.
I think that i would have liked it a lot more if the things went in a chronilogical order instead of jumping from year to year so that i would be able to follow it better. I also think that if it was like that it would have ruined the whole effect of the book.
I like Vonnegut's style and i feel that i will read many more of his books. |
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Dennis Littrell (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
I know this novel fairly well having read it several times (once aloud to my students). It is about all time being always present if only we knew, or could realize it, or had a sense about time in the same way we have senses for light and sound.
It is also about the Allied fire bombings of Dresden which killed more people than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. (And so it goes.) Kurt Vonnegut begins as though writing a memoir and advises us that "All of this happened, more or less..." Of course it did not, and yet, as with all real fiction, it is psychologically true. His protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, an unlikely hero, somewhat in the manner of unlikely heroes to come like Forest Gump and the hero of Jerzy Kosinski's Being There, transcends time and space as he bumbles along. This is a comedie noire - a "black comedy" - not to be confused with "film noir," a cinematic genre in which the bad guys may win or at least they are made sympathetic. In comedie noire the events are horrific but the style is light-hearted. What the genres have in common is a non-heroic protagonist.
This is also a totally original work written in a most relaxing style that fuses the elements of science fiction with realism. It is easy to read (which is one of the reasons it can be found on the high school curriculum in our public schools). It is sharply satirical, lampooning not only our moral superiority, our egocentricity, but our limited understanding of time and space. And of course it is an anti-war novel in the tradition of All Quiet on the Western Front and Johnny Got His Gun.
Vonnegut's view of time in this novel is like the stratification of an upcropping of rock: time past and time present are there for us to see, but also there is time future. Billy Pilgrim learns from the Tralfamadorians (who kidnapped him in 1967) that we are actually timeless beings who experience what we call the past, present and future again and again. And so Billy goes back to the war and forward to his marriage, and to Tralfamadore again and again. He learns that the Tralfamadorians see the stars not as bright spots of light but as "rarefied, luminous spaghetti" and human beings as "great millepedes with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other." So time is not a river, nor is it a snake with its tail in its mouth. It is omnipresent, yet some things occur before and some after, but always they occur again.
And so it goes.
What I admire most about this most admirable novel is how easily and naturally Vonnegut controls the narrative and how effortlessly seems its construction. It is almost as if Vonnegut sat down one day and let his thoughts wander, and when he was through, here is this novel.
In a sense, Vonnegut invented a new novelistic genre, combining fantasy with realism, touched by fictionalized memoir, penned in a comedic mode as horror is overtaken by a kind of fatalistic yet humorous view of life. Note here the appearance of Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut's alter-ego, the science fiction writer who is said to have invented Tralfamadore.
Bottom line: read this without preconceptions and read it without regard to the usual constraints. Just let it flow and accept it for what it is, a juxtaposition of several genres, a tale of fiction, that - as fiction should - transcends time and space. |
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Wing Flanagan (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
Slaughterhouse-Five is brilliant because Kurt Vonnegut is NOBODY'S apologist. You may disagree with his politics (and I definitely do), but his story of Billy Pilgrim, a hapless World War II veteran who lives in several parallel timelines, is a masterwork.
Vonnegut was actually there. He was a POW in Dresden when it was bombed into the stone age. He witnessed its effects first-hand. He even wrote himself into Slaughterhouse-Five as a background character.
Personally, I think story-behind-the-story is that Pilgrim is the author, or a part of him that splintered off. Billy Pilgrim's was a fragile mind that came unhinged because he saw too much. His leaps of fancy, which are written as though real, are the product of a mind stressed beyond its breaking point.
Kurt Vonnegut, unlike Pilgrim, did not suffer a break with reality. Instead he chose to part with it on his own terms - as a novelist. I would imagine that there are only so many civilian corpses - woman and children chief among them - you can stack on bonfires before you start to question your own sanity - and the sanity of the people responsible.
What he offers in Slaughterhouse-Five (and in every novel of his I've read) is not a condemnation of a particular group (i.e., Americans) but of the human race as a whole. Necessity does not make atrocities any less horrific. Killing is killing. Though it may be justified in some sense (in the case of self-defense, or the defense of others), it is no less an act of destruction. Morally speaking, war punishes the victor, too.
Vonnegut's argument, as I read it, is that we need to stop thinking of any war as justified or necessary. War is neither. It is simply a fact of human nature that aggressors will attack others, and that we must sometimes act to stop them. That we shouldn't have to in the first place is, I think, the whole point of the book. It's insanity to incinerate people by the thousands. That the axis forces did it first makes it no less so. That it may have been necessary in some way only shifts the blame. No one who commits such acts - even for the greater good - has a clean conscience, except people who are clinically insane.
In short, there is a distinction to be made between the morality of going to war, and the morality of war itself. I think Kurt Vonnegut sees this. If you don't, then it's all the more reason to read this book.
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