I read this book in Germany because it's about the bombing of Dresden, and I thought we were going to Dresden. We didn't make it, but the book was still a worthwhile read.

I have to admit that Kurt Vonnegut's cynical writing style does not enamor me the way it enamors a lot of other people who seem to think that cynical = smart. It annoyed me that he wrote, "So it goes," every time he mentioned someone dying. And yet, despite the flippant narrative style, the book is anything but flippant. In following the life of Billy Pilgrim, a World War II Veteran who somehow bumbled himself through to survival from the War, Vonnegut explores the inescapable mark, or damage, that war leaves on individuals and the world -- and most of all, the absolute senselessness of it all (even in a war that most people perceive as "justified.") The more fantastical elements (Billy's time travel and abduction by aliens) were easier to swallow than one might think, especially since you were really left to make your own judgment about whether these occurrences were "real" or not. Vivid, depressing, and sometimes beautiful. ( )

Vonnegut's meditation on war and the desctruction of Dresden. Painful and magical.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1364667...

Rereading this classic, which combines the horrors of the 1945 bombing of Dresden with the sfnal captivity of the hero by the aliens of Tralfamadore. Having first come to Vonnegut via Cat's Cradle and The Sirens of Titan as a teenager, I wasn't really sure what to make of this. Coming to it again a quarter-century later, I have a much deeper appreciation of Vonnegut's savaging of the surrealism of war, and of how trauma throws the rest of your life into a weird perspective. But I also find his attitude to women much more annoying - at least, to the women in the main part of the story, the mothers of Billy Pilgrim's children, Valencia Merble and Montana Wildhack (and Pilgrim's daughter Barbara). Having said that, the sanest character in the book is probably Mary O'Hare from the ostensibly autobiographical foreword; and it must also be admitted that most of the male characters are pretty unpleasant too.

Anyway, I can't think of many other sf novels which take the Second World War as their subject, and this is probably the best in that rather small set. ( )

My first Vonnegut novel, but certainly not to be my last I think. I'm not sure how I managed to go just under twenty-five years without reading one of his books, but clearly that was just under twenty-five years wasted, wasn't it?

Magnificent! Profoundly moving and thought provoking! ( )

I was pointed to this book as a science fiction novel dealing with time travel. You can describe it as such, but I would classify it as general fiction, about a man dealing with the trauma of the Dresden bombings as POW and his life afterwards. The writing might confuse some readers, I didn't have any problems. A very impressive book. ( )

This is a bizarre story of time travel featuring Billy Pilgrim a German American who serves in the Second world war and is abducted by aliens. This is in part autobiographical as Vonnegut a POW witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden and many of the descriptions are directly from his experiences. I enjoyed the book and parts are very funny if not weird when it shifts to his abduction to Planet Tralfamadore but highlights the effects that war experiences have on memory and a persons state of mind. It works on several levels with great writing and interesting subject matter. This was my introduction to Vonnegut and I will be interested to read more of his work. (Recommendations anyone ??) ( )

I haven't been able to stop thinking about this book since I finished it lastnight. Yes, it's got a quirky plot and, yes, it takes a certain type of person to understand and agree with what the author is really saying underneath it all, but that's Kurt Vonnegut for you. I loved it and plan to read it again. ( )

An OK novel but very much overrated also the bombing of Dresden is pretty stale. ( )

Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time. In short, events are not told chronologically. Things generally revolve around the bombing of Dresden during World War II, with side trips to Billy's childhood, hospitalization, and abduction by aliens. This is a novel often assigned in school, and I almost wish that is where I had read it, because if there was a point to this story I sure missed it. ( )

Part science fiction and part memoir, Slaughterhouse-Five is based on Vonnegut's experiences as a POW during WWII. He was held captive in Germany, where he witnessed the bombing of Dresden that killed thousands of civilians and much precious artwork.

Billy Pilgrim is a man who has become unstuck in time and we follow him on his travels through time and space (including his experience in Dresden). This anti-war novel uses humor to make us examine the utter absurdity of war.

An easy and entertaining read that will make you think. One of my all-time favorites. ( )

This was very, very good. I found myself going to bed early so I could get some significant reading in. ( )

Slush entombs his feet / Billy Pilgrim driven mad / It had to be done

Slaughterhouse Five is considered a war book, more particularly, an anti-war book, but it is a war book only in the sense that War and Peace is a war book. War is an essential element in both stories, but each is more about life than about war. As to anti-war, in some sense it makes no sense to be anti-war if war is as inevitable as the creep of a glacier, the point that Harrison Starr makes in Chapter 1. You may as well be anti-death, you will be equally ineffectual.

Is war inevitable? Or does Vonnegut think it so? Vonnegut describes the Serenity Prayer that Billy Pilgrim has framed on his office wall:

GOD GRANT ME / THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT / THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE, / COURAGE / TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN, / AND WISDOM ALWAYS / TO TELL THE / DIFFERENCE.
Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.

Billy Pilgrim was insane. This insanity burst upon him in the Argonne forest in December, 1944. Leaning against a tree, he was facing death, his own death. He could not go on, he could not go back, he could not stay where he was. Vonnegut describes him in this moment as a 'poet in the Parthenon', perhaps thinking of these words of Keats, another poet in the Parthenon, When old age shall this generation waste, / Thou shalt remain. Billy Pilgrim is in the 'double bind' of R.D. Laing and his insanity is the 'perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world'. Billy Pilgrim escapes the bind through a hitch in time.

Billy survives the forest, the firestorm of Dresden, while others around him fall, for capricious reasons as often as not. To Billy, 'Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on Tralfamadore.' Billy goes on to father a son who goes on to his own war. So it goes.

If that's all there is, why go on? You may think of Peggy Lee singing about another fire, Is that all there is, is that all there is / If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing / I know what you must be saying to yourselves, if that's the way she feels about it why doesn't she just end it all? Oh, no, not me. I'm in no hurry for that final disappointment. Alan Watts retells this koan:

In Buddhism there is no place for using effort. Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you're tired go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.

And in between times, we'll just keep dancing. Everything is all right. ( )

http://writatlarge.blogspot.com/2009/... ( )

Slaughterhouse Five is a semi-autobiographical account of Vonnegut's time in a prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. But mainly it is the story of Billy Pilgrim, a time traveling man who alternately visits his life as a normal man, an alien captive, and a prisoner of war.

When Vonnegut was all the rage and those who attempt to be trendy literates were scooping up his novels right and left, I hid in a no-Vonnegut-allowed literary hole and refused to even look at the covers of his books. My bad. This book was excellent.
Vonnegut quite cleverly gives readers an inside look into the world of war without making it a Book About War. He also includes an alien planet preceded by an alien abduction without making it a Book About Aliens. And finally, while Billy slips in and out of different times in his life, this is not a Book About Time Travel. Now if you were to ask me exactly what this book is about if it's not about war, aliens, or time travel, I may not have a perfect, definitive answer.

For me, the book was primarily about hope, for a better future, a better life, a better moment. Many events and quotes in the book lead me to believe this, but one main theme really struck this chord with me. Billy is trying to teach the world the Tralfamadorian perception of time which is completely non-linear. The Tralfamadorians know and can literally see that all moments are occurring at all times. Every person is existing in the now, the then, the everytime. This is why Billy can travel to his past, present, and future. This is why he can see his birth and his death.

To me, the belief and acceptance of this perception is about hope. If we are existing at all points of our lives, then death has no hold over us, nor do present-time pains and difficulties. While Billy is being held captive behind enemy lines, he gets to slip back in time to his wedding night, to his mother washing him when he was a baby. He gets to escape.
Slaughterhouse Five has more to offer than this, but it was what came to mind while writing, so there you have it. Read the book. You'll like it. ( )

well-written, but after hearing so much about kurt vonnegut, I must confess that I was disappointed. His hodge-podge style might have been original at some point, but everyone's doing it by now, so instead of new and interesting, it seems more like a cop-out to me: the lazier way to tell a story. Plus, WWII is such an overdone topic, I'm rather sick of it. ( )

I really did read this book about 4 months ago. I can't remember a single thing about it, or my impressions of it, other than I thought that the title was misleading. Why I thought that is now beyond me.

So I thought I'd look over the other reviews to see if they reminded me of the book's plot or characters, or something - thinking that maybe I just got the memory of this book blurred from all the books I've read since.

Nope. Read 10 or so reviews and still have absolutely no recollection of the story or characters or "moral" in the book. But I really really did read it. You'd think for such a well-known book it'd have been a little more memorable?

I entered my star rating closer to the time I read it, it's just my review that was delayed, so I'll leave it at 3.5 stars 'cause I must've had a reason to give it that many. ( )

Slaughterhouse-five is a very interesting book. Possibly not a very good book, but a very interesting and thought-provoking book. It tells the story of one Billy Pilgrim, a weakling who was sent to the Second World War at the end of the war to act as a chaplain's assistant. He later became a war prisoner, and lived through the fire-bombing of Dresden. Oh, and he time-traveled and met some aliens from Trafalmadore along the way.

Slaughterhouse-five is an anti-war book. This is made clear in many points, but perhaps most vividly in this quote by Billy: "I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee." One of the persons in the book in the prologue asks Vonnegut about whether he is writing an anti-war book. When Vonnegut admits to it, the man asks him: "Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?" He refers to the inevitability of wars.

Free will and the inevitability of actions are the carrying themes in the book. The aliens Billy encounters see all of time at once, as they were "looking at the range of Rocky Mountains". Everything that happens, must happen. As Billy is taken to Trafalmadore by the aliens, he too starts to adapt this determinism. The most important thing that the book makes the reader think, is whether some actions REALLY are necessary or not. Most notably, in this case, the bombing of Dresden. This is most nicely put by Vonnegut in the following dialogue between Billy and a retired brigadier general at the end of the book:

'It had to be done,' Rumford told Billy, speaking of the destruction of Dresden.
'I know,' said Billy.
'That's war.'
'I know. I'm not complaining.'
'It must have been hell on the ground.'
'It was,' said Billy Pilgrim.
'Pity the men who had to do it.'
'I do.'
'You must have had mixed feelings, there on the ground.'
'It was all right,' said Billy. 'Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on Trafalmadore.'

Are we just machines carrying out the inevitable, as the Trafalmadorians would have it?

The book's message is condensed into the prayer commonly known as Serenity Prayer, quoted at the end of the book:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom always to tell the difference.

This message the book delivers, once the reader reaches the end and starts to think about whether we should accept all things as given, or whether we should try to do something to avert the things we deem wrong.

As I said, the book has its flaws, and could have perhaps conveyed its wisdom in a more elegant manner. It is, nevertheless, a short and easy (and often funny and heart-warming) read. And, if for nothing else, Slaughterhouse-five is a very important book for making the reader think for themselves, and not take everything for granted. ( )

Some things cannot be undone, but it is feels good to imagine that they could. I was listening to Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. It had been some time since I read the book. I downloaded the book from Overdrive. While I was listening to the book, I hadn't realized that the sequence of the book had been altered. The book is divided into six one-hour parts. As I listened, I actually heard part six instead of part three. It is a coincidence that this happened since the book itself are snippets of the main character, Billy Pilgrim, slipping back and forth through different times of his life. He becomes "unstuck in time". Time interpreted in the book is one in which we are all stuck, like flies in amber. So by listening to the book out of order, it was like becoming unstuck. It becomes important because in the "middle" of the book there is commentary by the author with a war buddy much in the same light as the author in the book discussing Billy Pilgrim. More importantly, there was a song on the audiobook. I could not find this song anywhere, but it seemed to enchant me. It seems to speak to me at a time I need to hear the idea of undoing something. The reference specifically is one of war, but the general theme is that instead of destroying something, or having something destroyed, something becomes restored. I am posting the song with this famous quote from Slaughterhouse Five. The text his here: Billy Pilgrim could not sleep on his daughter's wedding night. He was 44. The wedding had taken place that afternoon in a gaily striped tent in Billy's backyard. The stripes were orange and black. Billy padded downstairs on his blue and ivory feet. He went into the kitchen where the moonlight called his attention to a half-bottle of champagne on the kitchen table all that was left from the reception in the tent. Somebody had stoppered it again. "Drink me" it seemed to say. So billy uncorked it with his thumbs. Didn't make a pop, the champagne was dead. So it goes. He went into the living swinging the bottle like a dinner bell. He became slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this : American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed." ENDMost people refer to this passage as one of Vonnegut's best. It conveys an apt anti-war message and is one of the best examples of Vonnegut's style and humor to convey a very important message.It affected me differently. It wasn't anti-war, but the undoing of things. Better, a restoration of things that have happened. In war, you cannot take back bullets or restore lives. In life, you cannot change what has happened. Sometimes things don't work out the way it should. Sometimes things go off track and you wonder how that happened and wish it could be undone. It cannot be. However, to read this passage it is a reminder of what can and cannot be restored. ( )

REVIEW OF SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE

On page 208 of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator says “There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations…” Those are precisely the reasons that, for me, the novel is not one of the 100 greatest novels of the last century as some critics have claimed. Many of the characters who inhabit the novel are quirky, budding characters like Roland Weary, the anti-tank gunner who both bullied and saved Billy Pilgrim (the stand-in for Vonnegut whose real-life experiences have been fictionalized) after the Battle of the Bulge in World War II Germany. Vonnegut never brings Weary to life, nor “poor Edgar Derby” who was tried and shot for plundering a teapot from the ruins of Dresden. Valencia, whom Pilgrim married after the war, was the most interesting character, a woman always with a candy bar in her hand or mouth, who thought Pilgrim the greatest man ever in part because she never thought anyone would marry her. When your protagonist is the least interesting, least compelling character in your novel, you’ve got a problem keeping this reader.
So it goes.
Billy Pilgrim believed that he bounced around in time from his birth to his death experiencing all of his life and death many times over. He also believed he’d been abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. Yet, again for this reader, Billy personally is a rather boring person.
Why a writer would create a novel with World War II as its primary focus with “almost no dramatic confrontation” is beyond me. Such a novel has little going for it.
So it goes.
I almost wonder if Vonnegut, like Billy Pilgrim, bounced back in forth in time, ending up in the 1980’s long before he wrote Slaughterhouse-Five. If he got a sneak preview of MTV That would explain the quick cuts from short scene to short scene.. The longest scenes in this novel would be brief scenes in most other novels. The reader doesn’t have a chance to sink into the story, to bond with any of the characters, to experience what they experience.
There’s no sense of place. Vonnegut gives the reader very few descriptions of anywhere. We’re floating above the story, not sure what is below us. I’m a reader who doesn’t need much description, in fact many novels give too much for me like The Big Sky by A.B Guthrie, Jr. His descriptions are wonderful, prose poetry, but there’s just too much of them. Still, I do need some description.
So it goes.
The first 28 pages of Slaughterhouse-Five are the musings of the narrator, supposedly a fictional character, Vonnegut in reality, about how he came to write the novel and how he felt about it. I’d have preferred an author’s note afterwards with a straightforward account directly from Vonnegut.
On the book’s cover: The Boston Globe called it “…hilarious.” I found it amusing at times. The New York Times called it “…delightful.” I feel if you want delightful read Dandelion Wine or almost anything by Ray Bradbury. It was also called sad. If you want sad in a book about World War II, read The Execution of Private Slovik by William Bradford Huie, a true account of the first soldier to be executed by the U.S. Army since the Civil War. (This book is mentioned in Slaughterhouse-Five.)
So it goes.
Vonnegut is lucky he died before I read this novel because about the 275th time I read “So it goes.” I would have hired Paul Lazzaro from the novel, who threatened to have all his enemies killed after the war, to kill Vonnegut.
Did I like anything about it? The writing was clear, the tone was amusing, and I learned that, according to Vonnegut, American firebombing of Dresden devastated that city more than the atom bomb devastated Hiroshima.
So it goes.
Would I recommend Slaughterhouse-Five? Oddly, I would. It is considered an American classic by an important American writer. It’s a quick read. And it’s inoffensive.
Imagine, a war novel inoffensive.
So it goes. ( )

People have been telling me for years I should read Vonnegut, so I finally did, and I wasn't all that impressed. Slightly overrated, in my opinion.

I absolutely loved this book. The choppy sequences emphasize Billy Pilgrim's travels through the fabric of time without getting the reader lost. Thoroughly engrossing page-turner. ( )

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade is a witty, comedic, yet sad satire of war. The story follows Billy Pilgrim during World War II, as he becomes "unstuck in time". His life jumps around; he is able to see his death but not be dead and relive moments of his past and experience moments of his future long before they take place. Some of those moments include his experience in World War II, the bombing of Dresden, and living on the distant planet Tralfamadore - yes, that is correct. Vonnegut blends science fiction into his anti-war satire. The result is a highly entertaining read, with moments of comedic bliss quickly followed by sad futility on an insight into humanity (and Tralfmadorianity). ( )

Slaughterhouse Five
By: Alex Hatch

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut in my opinion was a very good book except for a few flaws. The first problem I had with the book was that at certain times the author would try to be funny in a serious situation, like when American soldiers were being taken prisoner by the Germans the author would make fun of what the Americans looked like. Another thing that I didn’t like about the book was that the author was sometimes too descriptive. One example would be when he was talking about a wagon in the street that had absolutely nothing to do with the story, he wrote a paragraph just to describe the wagon, seemingly for no reason.
However there were some things about the book that made me want to keep reading. One of these was that at times he would write just a few words to describe something that would bring it to life. An example would be whenever he described the smell of rotting dead bodies he would say that they smelled like “mustard gas and roses”, which for me made me feel like I was there on the battlefield with him. Also I liked the fact that the author didn’t really care about having the book chronologically organized. I liked that because whenever I read a book that is too organized I get bored because it becomes predictable.
This book is centered on the life of a single main character, named Billy Pilgrim, who was a chaplain’s assistant during World War II. When he was sent to Germany he had no weapons or training, all he could do was pray and play his small organ. Before the war he had been studying to be an optometrist at a night school, and he got his degree and opened up a practice after he came back from the war. He was a tall man, about six foot three inches tall, but he was very skinny, the book says that his chest and shoulders were as big as a box of kitchen matches.
There are two main settings in this book, one is Dresden, Germany and the other is Billy’s house in Ilium, New York. Dresden is a horrible place during World War II, full of death and suffering. The place where all the American prisoners live is a slaughterhouse that was made into barracks by their German captors. The slaughterhouse has a giant stone basement that used to store meat, but in the book it is used as a makeshift bomb shelter by the Americans. Billy’s house in Ilium is however very different, it is a huge peaceful home. The only thing that is bad about it is that Billy is the only one that lives there since his wife died and his children grew up and left.
The point of view in the story is from that of an all knowing narrator, who follows Billy throughout his whole life. The theme of the story is that even though war is portrayed on television as an interesting thing, when in reality it is just a lot of “children” fighting for a cause that sometimes they don’t believe in.

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