Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel (Modern Library 100 Best Novels)

This is one of the best books of the 20th century and is widely recognized as such. But here's the beginning of the product description here:"Adapted for a magnificent George Roy Hill film three years later (perhaps the only film adaptation of a masterpiece which exceeds its source)"I was so intrigued by this weird description of a beloved classic as somehow inferior to a movie I didn't know existed by a forgotten director that I tracked down a copy of that George Roy Hill film. It's fine. It does some clever stuff. It's a decent attempt to make a movie out of a book that wants very badly to stay a book. It's ultimately pretty forgettable, even to people who remember George Roy Hill's better movies. It doesn't show any aliens or really even any bombing, so there's nothing to recommend it over the book. Congratulations to George Roy Hill's son or whoever wrote that description in getting to me to pick up a copy of the movie, though.

There are a few plot threads in this book, but they all weave around the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. The stories converge on Pilgrim from various times in his life. Having been abducted by aliens, the protagonist jaunts back and forth through various experiences of his life in a non-linear fashion. This might seem jarring, but Vonnegut’s straight-forward writing style makes the whole experience very manageable—no slogging through the muck here.From a science fiction perspective, the book has some neat passages about time travel, the fourth dimension and how life would be if time was perceived as a nonlinear experience. The result, in Vonnegut’s opinion, is a sort of melancholy yet content, fatalistic attitude.Contrasting Pilgrim’s time traveling adventure is the ever-present sense of claustrophobia. The protagonist is captured during World War II (as the actual author was in real life) and loses control of his mobility as a prisoner of war. He is also held in an exhibit at a “zoo” on a faraway planet, where he can be gawked at by the local alien population. In other scenes, while convalescing, he is bed-bound at a hospital. At times, Pilgrim expresses feeling trapped in his career as an optometrist and his marriage. Even as a widow, his daughter is constantly challenging his freedom. The time-travel experiences seem to be the only thing that transport Pilgrim out of these feelings, and give him a broader perspective.The aliens (Tralfamadorians) have a completely different perspective on time. They know all the horrible parts of life and all the good parts at once. They can cope with the bad by focusing on the good. Many parallels can be drawn between this and dealing with combat trauma.The jumping around of the plot, feels like flashbacks and sometimes there are flashbacks. However, there is also time-travel. The disjointed narrative seems to emulate symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which the character is experiencing and the reader is brought into (due to the structure of the book). Stories within stories, within stories hopping back and forth over Pilgrim’s timeline.Yet, there is a cohesive story underlying all the shifts in time and space. The framework of a life. And, maybe that’s what life is. A series of disjointed events that might not make sense individually, but when put together form an arc. When focus is pulled back and perspective is given, the entire story can be realized.While reading this book, it is hard not to think about how the author might have felt, surviving a horrific bombing in WWII as a POW “trapped” underground in a slaughter house. A situation Vonnegut was also not in control of, yet one that was deemed to be his own. Is this book trying to make sense of that experience—or perhaps the experience of all people caught in war?There is much made of this being an anti-war book, and certainly there is that aspect within the pages. Yet, the storyline, to me, seemed to be more along the lines of pointing out that in life, sometimes things are just really really really messed up. Sometimes things are bad and the reasons are not always so simple and straightforward or make a lot sense. Lines blur. Lives are lost. Vonnegut doesn’t seem to say we should not care about this. Instead, he seems to say that we must recognize these difficulties and give them there due. Reflect on them. Perhaps try to do better. Focus on the good.As others have noted, this story is told in Vonnegut’s characteristic style of simple declarative sentences. A breeze to read. And yet his writing is a perfect compliment to this non-linear device of story-telling. Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time, and you will too as you read this thoughtful tale of dark reflective humor.Podcast: If you enjoy my review (or this topic) this book and the movie based on it were further discussed/debated in a lively discussion on my podcast: "No Deodorant In Outer Space". The podcast is available on iTunes, YouTube or our website.

Way, way back, I barely knew the name of Kurt Vonnegut. He was not part of the science fiction “ghetto” - some SF fans will no doubt know what I’m talking about – so how could he be worth knowing? Then I grew up, read some of his work, admitted my mistake, and became one of his biggest fans.Yet, somehow, I kept missing what is no doubt one of his greatest books, SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE. Surely everybody now knows Vonnegut’s take on the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II while Vonnegut was a prisoner of war.The genius is that the story Vonnegut tells resembles war itself: a kaleidoscope of insanity, a series of Cubist paintings set in motion, with little apparent rhyme or reason. Vonnegut seems to have written himself into the story, though the main character, Billy Pilgrim, is presumably made up. One would assume this of Billy’s adventures: Randomly slipping in and out of time, visiting with an extraterrestrial race from the planet Tralfmadore that kept him in a zoo where he mated with a young starlet, and so on.Billy is, truth be told, like most of us: Nondescript, mainly ineffectual, stumbling through a series of random events swirling around us in confusing ways. Much of the book consists of events during World War II – leading up to the firebombing of Dresden and its aftermath, though they mingle with Billy’s life before and after the war.Vonnegut does offer a few observations, though they can be depressing. One of my favorites is: “…there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.” In a similar vein, but less depressing: “The nicest veterans … I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.”One of the things I like about Vonnegut is how he often provides a philosophy that sounds as if it should be true. In this book it is the teachings of the extraterrestrials. Billy says at one point: “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist… It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’”I haven’t decided yet if that passage is depressing or not.And there is this piece of Tralfamadoran advice: “That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.”Actually, that might indeed be pretty good advice.SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE is full of such moments.Or, as Vonnegut might say, “So it goes.”