• Full Title: Slaughterhouse-Five: or The Children’s Crusade
• Author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
• Year: 1969 (mine was a 1997 hardcover reprint)
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Publisher: Random House
• ISBN 978-0-307-29203-2 (hardcover reprint)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia Page

 

Summary

An actual circuit judge in a real court case called this book “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar, and anti-Christian” in 1972, and about 15 years later, when I first considered reading it, a friend told me basically the same thing, so I didn’t read it. Unfortunately, both that judge and my friend were either lying or had been sorely misled.

Okay, to be fair, there are some anti-Christian sentiments in it. And a handful of scenes are “vulgar” by most definitions. Nothing about the book could be described as psychotic, though some might suspect the main character is. But immoral and depraved? No. If there’s any moral theme at all to the book, it’s anti-war — which is arguably far more moral than a pro-war stance. And “depraved” is just a fancy way of saying “immoral”, so...

No, this is just an oddly written novel about some American soldiers in the second World War, specifically about Billy Pilgrim, who becomes detached from the normal timeline and wanders back and forth through his life’s events in no particular order. Vonnegut weirdly wrote the first and last chapter in the first person, as if they were non-fiction and autobiographical, but wrote the rest of the chapters in the third person, about fictional Billy. Except for a few spots where he interrupts the third-person narrative to interject something in the first person. As I said: oddly written.

 

What I Liked Least About It

Other than the odd narrative form mentioned above, there is nothing specific to dislike about this book. It’s unsettling, but it’s supposed to be, I think.

 

What I Liked Most About It

It’s been a long time since I read 275 pages this quickly. It flew by. The book is very easy to read — and is in fact shorter than most novels today, not only in page count but in words-per-page. And: “the novel is simple in syntax and sentence structure, part of Vonnegut’s signature style”, according to Wikipedia. It is also mildly repetitive — the phrase “so it goes” appears more than 100 times — which I thought would be annoying but instead turned out to be weirdly comforting, adding a sort of rhythm or mantra to the story.

The tale itself is humorous in places, morbid in others, but mostly sad. One can’t help but come away with a somewhat dimished view of the human race (unless one already has this view, as I do).

 

Of Note

I checked several lists of “best novels of the 1960s” and this book is on most of them. I was surprised at how many of the other books on those lists that I’ve never heard of, but there were also several that I’ve read and enjoyed, including To Kill A Mockingbird (1960), The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich (1960), Stranger In A Strange Land (1961), Catch-22 (1961), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), Fail-Safe (1962), Charlie And The Chocolate Factory (1964), The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (1966), Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (1968), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and The Andromeda Strain (1969), among others. I couldn’t help but recall some of them as I went through this one, though I tried to keep myself from comparing/constrasting. Slaughterhouse-Five is not like any of those books, in almost any way.

Slaughterhouse-Five is on Time’s list of 100 best novels since 1923, and it’s ranked number 18 on Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list. But I’m not sure it should be. It was enjoyable and thought-provoking, as a good novel should be, but it wasn’t as powerfully well-written as, say, 1984 or Brave New World, nor as epic or sweeping as many others on the lists.

 

Conclusion

I assume most of the people who are going to read this book have already read it — I recognize that my demographic (voracious readers who skipped the world’s most famous books) is rare. But if you haven’t, and especially if you (like me) were warned away by liars, then I highly recommend it.

 

 

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