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Slaughterhouse-Five Book Review

Slaughterhouse-Five is a 1969 science fiction anti-war novel by Kurt Vonnegut. It is a classic historical fiction that deserves all praise that it got.

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“All this happened, more or less“

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It follows Billy Pilgrim from his early years to his part in World War II to the time after the war. Billy occasionally travels through time due to his contact with the alien race called the Tralfamadorians. The centerpiece of the story is the firebombing of Dresden, which the author himself experienced.

It’s a surprisingly dense story for such a short book (around two hundred pages). The Dresden parts are clearly the most moving of the book and a very important reminder of this lesser-known, but very important WWII event where many innocent civilians were killed. The book is beautiful in its anti-war sentiments that are clear, piercing and still impactful to this day.

As for the science fiction elements, they are actually immensely intriguing conceptually and especially thematically. Although Billy Pilgrim has clearly created all of this up in his head due to trauma (a heartbreaking take on PTSD for sure), the novel can still be appreciated in this area, even if none of it is probably real.

That’s because the whole emphasis on four dimensions and the relativizing of time and death was incredibly well explored. Some have accused the author himself of believing in these radical, stone-cold ideas, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The opposite is the case. In so many passages it is clearly brought to home that these strange aliens propose that death is meaningless and that time is non-linear, but the human experience is vastly different from this way of looking at things, and a more sentimental viewpoint is essentially what makes us humans.

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Vonnegut’s style of writing is one that is rather idiosyncratic. Although that made reading it at first confusing, once you get to acclimate to the non-linear, time-jumping, disparate structure of the story being told, you can start to really appreciate what he did here. The meta approach where he references his writing process and thus himself as the character in the novel was also very revolutionary for this period along with the strange structure.

The humor is also very solid with the irony being strongly emphasized. The use of the phrasing “So it goes.” did become repetitive after being stated throughout the whole novel, but there is no denying the power that it holds thematically and emotionally at the same time. It’s truly something special and it hits you more often than it annoys you as a reader.

Slaughterhouse-Five explores war and death superbly. The book proposes that all life is valuable and that all death is shocking, albeit with the introduction of the extraterrestrial rationalizing of it some may think otherwise, but the quickness and brutality of the deaths in the novel is exactly the point – deaths in war come and go quickly, but the effects of them are forever lingering in the minds of the survivors, deteriorating their mental health in the process.

The religious metaphors did not work for me as much as these other ideas, but the idea that free will may just be an illusion was disturbing, but definitely thought-provoking and even relevant as this conundrum is continually being explored to this day and age. The dialogue in the novel is pretty good, but it is the descriptions that are the highlights along with the author’s very strong writing style that uses shorter, but undeniably powerful and forceful sentences, including that unforgettable opening line.

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Billy Pilgrim is a fascinating, ultimately tragic figure and the non-linear structure of storytelling only made us as the readers care more about this poor guy. Weary and Lazzaro are also very memorable presences as are the made-up Tralfamadorians, but for the most part the characterization is only serviceable and is the weakest part of an otherwise outstanding work.