Slaughterhouse-Five

I purchases Slaughterhouse 5 for a gift for my grandson. He wanted this for his birthday and that was why is was purchased.

It is daunting to attempt to say anything unique about a novel that already has 700+ reviews on this site, but here goes.....

I somehow managed to get through all of high school and college without ever having been exposed to this great book. And in retrospect, I think that may have been for the better, as I believe that many of this book's themes would have been lost on a younger me. Mainly the theme of destiny versus freewill, and the idea that in becoming "unstuck in time," Billy Pilgrim has a better perspective on his life as a whole. That doesn't however, always translate into making better choices along the way, and hence the idea that destiny is ultimately inflexible.

This book is the perfect example of a modern classic and remains relevant in many ways that it might not have had it been written just ten years earlier.

In my opinion, the greatest novel ever written. Slaughterhouse-Five examines war, free will, and time. Vonnegut had the ability to send chills down your spine. R.I.P. (So it goes.)

This is a book I'd always put off reading because of the title. I couldn't figure out what it meant, and it sounded too weird for me. In fact it is more literal than I imagined: it refers to five army personnel who survive the bombing of Dresden by taking shelter in a slaughterhouse.
It must have seemed a very clever book back when it was written, some 40 years ago now, but all the time-travel and general avant-garde story-telling is so mainstream today that it hardly registers.
In other words, the impact has lessened, and it's probably even dated a little. I don't want to be too harsh, though. This is a very powerful work, and once you know for sure that the author's own experiences were the catalyst, you can't fail to be moved as the novel moves towards its astonishing climax. It's also very witty and laugh-out-loud funny in many places.

Slaughterhouse Five is the sad tale of Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany during the Second World War. The Dresden bombing caused nearly the same number of deaths as the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.

This novel is based on Kurt Vonnegut's own war experience and took him over two decades to finish it. Vonnegut is actually present as one of the characters; he was the constant cynical narrator who makes all deaths equivalent with his comment:" so it goes".
Interestingly, the novel was published during the Vietnam War, a war where technology was again used against nonmilitary targets in an unjust war.
Through the protagonist Billy Pilgrim, we are taken on a sad journey through the scarring traumatic horrors that war inflicts on both sides for generations to follow.

Sarcastically, Vonnegut used the Tralfamadorians, who are aliens shaped as toilet plungers, to demonstrate the linear progression of time as opposed to all moments existing simultaneously. Through the Tralfamadorians, free will is also presented as the ultimate illusion; Beginning with Billy's childhood, free will is a repeated theme throughout the novel.

Slaughterhouse-five, a remarkable novel that condemns war along with any bureaucratic attitudes that attempt to glorify war and its heroes, while ignoring its destructiveness and horrors.