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Slaughterhouse-Five

By Kurt Vonnegut

(470)

| Paperback | 9780440180296

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Book Description

Slaughterhous-Five is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.

Critics

Easy Writer

There are many types of social fantasts in literature, but the quality common to them all is a suspicion that the accepted customs of human society, if carried to their logical conclusions, would prove to be grotesquely absurd. Thus Swift, who, next ... (read full critics)

nybooks published on Thu, 26 Aug 2010

Bleak House, or Funny No More Share

Kurt Vonnegut is a socialist pacifist with a romantic/tragic view of life forever haunted by the specter of suicide: his mother's in 1944, his own failed attempt in 1984. As such, his view of life and mankind has grown succeedingly more dim over time ... (read full critics)

blogcritics published on Thu, 30 Jan 2003

22 Reviews

1 person find this helpful

Peculiar. Is it a war book, as I read elsewhere? Or rather science-fiction? Or maybe both, and none?
I enjoyed it: charming, deep, and inspired.

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Ficie said on Sep 19, 2009 | Add your feedback

1 person find this helpful

Still ruminating over this one... Kurt Vonnegut tells us that this is an anti-war novel, but it's not what you would expect. No preaching, no anguish, no weeping, no angry disavowals of war. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, gets unstuck in time and pilgrims through time and space. War as a defined ... (continue)

Still ruminating over this one... Kurt Vonnegut tells us that this is an anti-war novel, but it's not what you would expect. No preaching, no anguish, no weeping, no angry disavowals of war. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, gets unstuck in time and pilgrims through time and space. War as a defined moment in time slowly comes unravelled as Billy's war experience bleeds into and merges with the rest of his life. The absurdity of the ocean of war spills to the farthest shores where it wettens and is absorbed by the sands normal life, which is itself abnormal.
Not really a novel to find meaning in, at least not the meaning of allegory. The jumps in chrnology can seem not worth it at the beginning, but read on to the end. It's more about the effect. A difficult but worthwhile book.

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Josh Herr said on Dec 30, 2007 | Add your feedback

1 person find this helpful

Essentially Kurt!
One of his best!

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Angel-a said on Jun 11, 2007 about the Hardcover edition | Add your feedback

to read

Tragic and funny at the same time. I was expecting a kind of chronicle of Dresden bombing. Instead I found a collection of war related events, told with a good dose of dark humor and seen through the eyes of the disenchanted Billy Pilgrim.

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Roberto Pizzicannella said on Apr 13, 2012 | Add your feedback

Brilliant! The writing, the story, the ideas and phylosophies, and most of all the structure.
"So it goes".
[This particular edition was probably scanned from another one, and has several misspelled words... a bit annoying but not a problem for the comprehension.]

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maCmq said on Aug 27, 2011 | Add your feedback

A crusade of words, truly telegraphic and schizophrenic, yet with an incredible flow. A constructed reality which reminded me of Hemmingway and Kafka, probably offending all three authors (or at least one). A true work of art. And a great vacation read (should check on The Extraordinary Popular Delu ... (continue)

A crusade of words, truly telegraphic and schizophrenic, yet with an incredible flow. A constructed reality which reminded me of Hemmingway and Kafka, probably offending all three authors (or at least one). A true work of art. And a great vacation read (should check on The Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay).

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Jw. said on Aug 21, 2011 about the Unbound edition | Add your feedback