Rating: 
Summary: Modern Masterpiece
Review: After introducing himself and his own war story, Vonnegut narrates the war stories of fictional Billy Pilgrim, who like himself survived the firebombing of Dresden, Germany. Like a storyteller commanding his audience's attention Vonnegut begins: "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." He has taken his own true story of Dresden and painted fictional Billy Pilgrim into the frame. But he has also constructed the rest of Billy's life and the devastating consequences of witnessing that massacre. And just as Billy has "told" it to him, Vonnegut tells us Billy has begun to move freely and involuntarily in Time. He says now that he's done this for years. He says.There is something wrong with Billy and he doesn't know what. He finds himself weeping silently and he doesn't know why. He's almost catatonic emotionally but he doesn't see it. When a barbershop quartet triggers a memory of Dresden and he nearly collapses from the sudden emotional load, Billy begins to understand. "Billy thought he had no secrets from himself and now here clearly was a great big one." Not long after, Billy suffers a terrible head injury in a plane crash and begins talking of aliens and time travel and the wonderful things he has learned from the Tralfamadorians: that nobody ever dies but lives on forever in another moment in time. It's not hard to understand how a man who witnessed the massacre of Dresden (among other things) could find himself rationalizing so much death by simply denying that Time exists, so that no one is ever truly dead or gone. Slaughterhouse-Five is well deserving of its reputation as one of the great works of the 20th Century. While superficially farcical sci-fi, the careful reader will find a tale that is devastatingly sad--and not science fiction at all. Billy's madness might seem comic on one level but it is also heartbreaking. Vonnegut's unconventional story structure is richly layered and as fragile as Billy himself, and the time travel allows Vonnegut to relate events from the war against events in Billy's later life directly, in adjacent paragraphs if he wishes, so that as the boxcars of war prisoners move steadily towards Dresden our understanding of Billy's madness becomes clearer until finally the reader is flashing back and forth between the night of the bombing and its aftermath on one hand and on the other Billy going public with his delusions for the first time, explaining time and Tralfamadore to a late-night radio audience many years later. (And unconsciously borrowing details from Kilgore Trout to flesh out his story.) Vonnegut's prose is flawless, handling the strange structure with utter clarity and weaving together a devastating and subtle fictional portrait of a man unglued with an important factual historical document about Dresden. In war scenes Vonnegut refuses to make heros out of anyone. These soldiers, for the most part, are babies, teenagers, lost and starving and freezing to death far from home. There are no parts for John Wayne, as the author says. By the same token Slaughterhouse-Five doesn't need to create a laughing nut out of Billy and his delusions, and Vonnegut doesn't try to. This is a character whose humanity has been completely destroyed by the violence and death he has witnessed. He emerges helpless and plaintive, wanting desperately to understand. And while his new understanding of Time may have amusing qualities, at it's heart it is profound sadness. We weep silently with Billy, both for him and for ourselves.
Rating: 
Summary: Over-rated
Review: I must say the book does not work for me. It is funny in spots, and the prose has a Hemingwayesque terseness and sparsity, and so on. Or so it goes. I don't understand the sci-fi part, or how it relates to the anti-war theme. Bill Pilgrim had the time-travel talent _before_ he witnessed the Dresden inferno; so it could not have been a post-combat stress syndrome. (Or maybe he acquired afterwards, which in turn allowed him to travel back in time. I wasn't clear, but give that possibility. Even that being the case, I don't feel it is as directly a protest on organized violence, as what are shown in Catch 22). Because of this incomprehension, my reading was jarred by the distraction, and that might have prevented me from appreciating the book more. Also the alien part, read in its own right, is mediocre, neither funny nor relevant nor conducive to fantasy.
Rating: 
Summary: "Slaughterhouse Five" the Good, the Bad, or the awesome
Review: This story, "Slaughterhouse Five," has basically one character that Vonnegut hasn't removed from the story at one time of another. "Slaughterhouse Five," is however, filled with antagonists. Valencia, his wife, has appeared throughout the story for brief moments in time. The schoolteacher, Derby, has too been mentioned and appeared on numerous occasions in the book. Kilgor Trout also is a character that is there, but not all of the time. The story takes place in many settings. The main setting, however, is Dresden, Germany. Throughout the story the narrator travels through time to many locations. He could be in his hometown of Ilium one moment and then be whisked away to the far away planet of Tralfamadore. He has been to the Swiss Alps and to Canada. The story's setting changes many times, but always comes back to Germany. Kurt Vonnegut intends to convey the anti-war theme in "Slaughterhouse Five," by showing the horror of war. He does this by describing the Dresden fire bombing during World War Two. Vonnegut uses many literary devices to convey his theme. He definitely uses flashbacks through time. He also repeats one single phrase throught the story, he always says "so it goes," right after or before someone dies. Vonnegut does describe the war very well, and certainly conveys his ideas. In my opinion this book was a little hard to read and to keep up with, but it was overall a fairly good book.
Rating:
Summary: Slaughterhouse 5 ranks alongside Catch 22.
Review: Slaughterhouse 5 is every bit as good as it's reputation suggests. It is witty, observant, humane, and clever. Vonnegut writes in a deceptively simple prose, but which must have been difficult to have pulled off: namely, the way the story flits from the present to the past and to the future, very often in a single page, but manages to do it without disturbing the effortless flow of the narrative. No mean trick for a writer. A favourite book of mine. I can also recommend some of his earlier books: The Sirens of Titan; Piano Player; Mother Night, and Player Piano. His later books are not so hot; but Slaughterhouse 5 is his masterpiece. Like Heller's Catch 22, with which it has something in common, it is fun to read. My only gripe is with the cover, which is dull beyond belief. Leo and Diane Dillon: We need you. Where are you?
Rating:
Summary: Slaughterhouse-Five
Review: Although Slaughterhouse-Five was somewhat graphic, it was well written. Throughout the story, three different time periods were going on all at one time, but the story still flowed well. You were able to get inside the mind of the author, which was not a place I would like to be very long. The book was different than any I've ever read, but we all need variety on our bookshelves, don't we?
Rating:
Summary: An Anti-War Book?
Review: On February 13-14, in the year of 1945, 65,000 incendiary explosives were dropped upon the peaceful and beautiful German city of Dresden by British and American forces, burning 135,000 men, women, and children to death (15,000 more than the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima). So it goes.
The author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, was one of the 100 people to survive the bombing, and then only because he was deep under the ground in a slaughterhouse being held as a prisoner of war. For the main character of the story, Kurt Vonnegut invented Billy Pilgrim, the imaginary protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five, to also witness the somewhat unknown firebombing of Dresden. The damage that the event inflicted upon Billy's mind becomes apparent throughout the course of the book, beginning with the fact that he experiences time by jumping from event to event in his life, similar to a severely shell-shocked individual.
The story is presented in a calm and informative manner, with absurd, disturbing, and often unexpected events mixed with the often mundane and uneventful story of Billy's life. It is through these bizarre events that many of the book's main points are presented; for instance, aliens known as the Tralfamadorians (who view the universe through the fourth-dimension) kidnapped Billy Pilgrim in his warped mind and showed him that the true way to view the universe was to see it all at once, as a huge picture, and then to focus only on the times that were pleasant.
In my opinion, Slaughterhouse-Five is a book that should be read by every human being on the planet. Who knows, maybe people might realize that destroying people's lives and minds over issues they don't have anything to do with won't make the world a better place.
Rating:
Summary: A Good Book
Review: "The cattle are lowing, the Baby awakes. But the little Lord Jesus no crying he makes." This poem has great significance to Slaughterhouse-Five. The main character in the book is Billy Pilgrim and the journeys and everything he experienced. The poem has to do with Billy because when something bad happens in his life he does not cry over it, he just kind of has an acceptance of this horrifying event. Billy can travel to the past and to the future in a blink of an eye. That is why I believe that Billy has an understanding towards a tragic event. He is able to see the bad events in his life before it really happens to him. Therefore he knows it will happen and there is nothing he can do about it accept to accept it and move on. Billy can travel from World War II to when he is an optometrist in 1967. He travels to the past and future many times throughout the book, when he was a child, when he was in the war, or after the war. He has also seen his death many times.
Kurt Vonnegut, JR. creates this alien world where Billy is transported after he gets kidnapped by the aliens. This world was called Tralfadore. I believe that this world that Kurt Vonnegut, JR. creates is a replica of Billy's mind. I believe this because the people on Tralfadore have a great acceptance towards events that happened. The only concept Billy doesn't have is that everything and every event was structured to be and you cannot change that.
I believe that Slaughterhouse-Five is a great book and it states its moral well. I would recommend this book to people who want to learn good and interesting concepts and lessons in life.
Rating:
Summary: SlaughterHouse-Five
Review: Have you ever felt you could stop a glacier? Harrison Star, from the book Slaughterhouse-Five, told Billy Pilgrim that glaciers would be as easy to stop as wars. Billy, the main character, was considering writing an anti-war book. Billy is an interesting fellow. He believes in aliens, thinks he has visited their planet, and furthermore, believes the reason humans are such a sad race is because they can't see the fourth dimension. Billy is different, Billy can see in the fourth dimension. Or, at least more than any other human can. Throughout the book Billy travels to different times in his life, this way seeing the fourth-dimension like no other human.
Kurt Vonnegut, the author of the book, has a vivid imagination and a sense of humor like no other. Vonnegut blends humor throughout the book in a perfectly hilarious manner. For example: Billy learns from the Tralfamadorians that when people die, they keep on living in the past. Because of this, there are no funerals on Tralfamadoria, and whenever one of their friends die they say, "So it goes." Every single paragraph that includes the death of someone ends with the same sentence. So it goes. Reading over this, it doesn't seem very funny, but while I was reading the book it just started to hit me and I began laughing. Maybe most of Vonnegut's jokes require you to spend some time reading his books, but that's fine because this book is certainly worth reading. And I recommend it to anybody who feels they are up to a nice challenge. This book requires some thinking, actually a lot of thinking. Some of which I didn't do, and still thought it was a great book. So, read this book, think a little.
Rating:
Summary: Engaging book
Review: 'LISTEN: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.' The hero of Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim, is never sure what part of his life is going to occur next. Kurt Vonnegut's genius, creative, and moving novel tells Billy Pilgrim's story in just that way. Billy's life begins in the upstate New York town of Ilium in 1922 and ends more than 50 years later, when he is a prosperous bourgeoisie optometrist. However, the book swings back and forth through time revealing pieces of his life one by one. The novel is a strong anti-war story, dominated by the horror of the experience of Dresden. However, these facts are broken and reorganized by another component in Billy's strange life. Aliens from the planet Tralfamadore abduct him late in his life. They teach him that they can see time all at once. This is how Billy comes to experience his life as unstuck in time. Warping from his death to his childhood and from the ever-present experience of Dresden to his abduction.
Slaughterhouse-Five was a terrific book. The pages would not stop turning because I wanted to see what piece of Billy's life I would see next. I recommend this book to anyone that likes to be engulfed in a book.
Rating:
Summary: Vonnegut's Victory
Review: ... Slaughterhouse-Five is a convoluted tale, and thus difficult to describe. On first inspection, it is the story of Billy Pilgrim, a drafted soldier who survives the infamous firebombing of Dresden. It¡¦s the meaning, however, the overall effect of the book, that is important. The novel is not actually about a man who lives his life out of chronological order, or a man who was abducted by aliens from the fourth dimension, or even a lost soul in a world full of pain and countless sufferings. It is about an average man, a boy really, trying to cope with war, who¡¦s horrors nobody can easily endure. In his creation, Vonnegut highlights the same twisted humor that must have been shared by anything that created such a world. Billy is representative of every poor person forced to face offhanded death and hatred. It is a moving experience to join this category so vividly, as you will be while Vonnegut¡¦s work unfolds.
Kurt Vonnegut dispenses entirely with a beloved part of great writing: foreshadowing. Somehow, Vonnegut tells you the whole story in the first few pages and then keeps you enthralled for two hundred more. Slaughterhouse-Five is not simply the story of a young optometrist turned soldier. It is about the inescapable desensitization to death and the unhealthy alterations the mind of a human must undergo to make sense of so much destruction.
Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the defining postwar novels. Gripping yet horrifying, this astounding novel will be embraced by any reader looking to be moved to a whole new perspective on war, humans, and life in general. -...
|
