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Summary: Plunging through time
Review: In the tradition of Vonnegut's works, _Slaughterhouse Five_ is part autobiography, part fiction. Recounting the author's World War 2 experience, the story is told through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim, a timid and hopelessly ill-equipped army private. As our docile hero is dragged along behind his fellow soldiers on their pilgrimage across the war-scarred German countryside, the reader is sent chronologically back and forth like the proverbial tennis ball (in a manner that will be revisited in Vonnegut's later novel _Timequake_) to experience snatches of Pilgrim's childhood, his old age, and his captivity on the alien planet of Tralfamadore.While a morbid fellow soldier rambles on about blood gutters and iron maidens, Billy's mind flees from the POW camp near Dresden and finds itself in it's host's future body, reclining in the nude under the protective dome of a Tralfamadorian zoo. From outside the cupola, plunger-shaped creatures scrutinizingly observe his every move. The bizarre extraterrestrials, oblivious to the concept of time, bestow Billy Pilgrim with the following information (which Vonnegut appears to have borrowed from Quantum Physics): "All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever." Yet despite his daughter's suspicions, Pilgrim has not lost his mind - and neither has Vonnegut, who, by using this surreal allegory, presumably seeks to issue a welcome reminder of the mental detachedness that is rendered by the atrocity called war.
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Summary: The Contrast of Duty Verses Self Preservation
Review: I felt this was a great book. It really made me think about how I felt about nationalism.Vonnegunt uses many puns and clever cynicisms to weave a great story. It was so good I read it in one sitting.
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Summary: Simply the best
Review: For Vonnegut so loved the world he gave us Slaughterhouse-Five. And whom-so-ever that reads it shall have their life changed forever. This is the best novel by the best author alive today. I will keep this review short, but I will say that SH5 is a book with many deep meanings. One of which is that war kills needlessly. It is not just an anti-war novel, but a plea that everyone no matter what should retain their humanity. We are "Bugs in Amber" trapped on Earth and the needless inhumane actions of man against man results in death. So it Goes.
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Summary: Comedy and Tradedy
Review: Death and comedy in the authors style meet head on, it describes the inhumanity of man but wraps it in a comedic wrapper that the author writes in. anti-war yes. Inteligent as well
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Summary: vonnegut rules
Review: this is without a doubt one of my all-time favorite books.I originally read this many years ago and thoroughly enjoyed rereading it.this is definitely one of the most original and interesting storylines you will ever read.just like Asher Brauner's "Love songs of the tone deaf" this book will take you on a great journey that you will never forget.this is a work of genius
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Summary: My Review of Slaughterhouse-Five
Review: I chose to read "Slaughterhouse-Five" because I thought it was science fiction, which I enjoy most. However, when I began reading I realized that Vonnegut used time travel and alien abduction as if it were the regular thing, not something futuristic or high-tech. Still, even though the book is not true SciFi I still enjoyed it. Billy Pilgrim, the main charictor, was in WWII and survived the bombing of Dresden. Later in life he was abducted by aliens who see time in a very unusual way. It is "structured", so that, while they can see everything happening at the same time, they can do nothing to prevent it. The experiences and knowledge Billy gains from these two events are what make up the plot. You travel with him troughout his life to see how he learns and deals with these and other events. Slaughterhouse-Five is suppost to be an anti-war book, but I do not see it as such. Vonnegut says throughout the book that war cannot be prevented, but instead that people should learn to deal with it. This is good advice that helps people cope with many events, not just war. Another thing that makes the book interesting is how Vonnegut puts himself into it. Vonnegut, like Billy, was a prisoner of war and survived the bombing of Dresden. The entire first and part of the last chapter are about him and he even mentions himself in the story line. This allows you to see how he feels about the war and also provides wisdom from someone who has gotton a lot out of live. The last thing that I enjoyed about the book was the historical information. Before reading it I had never heard of Dresden. I was upset to learn that 135,000 Germans, mostly civilians, were killed there by Allied planes, which is almost twice as many killed in Hiroshima by the atom bomb. This type of information seems like something everyone should know. This book would be good for people who like to look at things differently. The ideas in Slaughterhouse-Five are strange, but could possibly help you deal with your own life. The time travel and aliens serve only to promote Vonnegut's view and people considering this book should understand that it is not really science fiction. I do recommend this book, however, there is some vulgar language and situations. I could not see Slaughterhouse-Five as required reading for school.
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Summary: The Perfect Novel
Review: The Children's Crusade, as i like to call it- i believe the publisher forced the name change (read the first chapter)- is without a doubt the best book i have read. Along with Catch 22, it turned me from a child facinated by war and eager for glory into a young adult who is totally opposed to armed conflict. The writing style allows the reader to enter a dream, or trance like state, where events have no order, and things just happen. It helps you to empathise with billy pilgrim. you become billy pilgrim, and you end up with the same sense of helplessness. However, you don't end up with billy's lack of concern. I think that is the whole point of this masterpiece. A truly world altering book.
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Summary: Albert and Kurt, Together at Last
Review: If Albert Einstein had written a science fiction book, it would have been something like Slaughterhouse Five. I first read this over twenty years ago in high school and I still take it out every two years or so to enjoy again. Vonnegut isn't the world's best writer, but he is certainly one of the most imaginative and witty in a socially responsible way. As anti-war propaganda, I put this book square between All Quiet on the Western Front and Catch-22. But what I really enjoyed about Slaughterhouse Five (and imagine Albert would have liked to) is Vonnegut's imaginative use of time and space. Vonnegut presents philosophy (of a sort) as comedy and the result is one hell of a good book.
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Summary: Slaughterhouse-Five
Review: I enjoyed this book very much. Vonnegut wrote a great book with good use of words and a strong statement about war.I enjoyed Billy's strangeness very much. He developed the characters very well, and he made each of them round by showing different aspects of them. This is also a very good science fiction book that does not follow the exact mold of one. I say that because the aliens in the story have very little to do with Billy course (the time-traveling) through life. I also like how the book doesn't really follow any set plot line. It skips from one point in Billy's life to a different one without warning. This was an extremely enjoyable book with a lot of twists and turns, and any one who enjoys sci-fi books or just a good read will love this one.
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Summary: S-5: The Writer's Tragedy
Review: Slaughterhouse-Five deals esentialy with the tragedy of an artist (in the Aristotelian context of the mimetic representation of the physis -nature-, this time the human one) triyng to deal with a tragedy too much too near to be handled as raw matter for art safely and efectively, in proportion to the artist's pourposes. It's about the trial of living the darkest moments of a life and the trial of communicating them inside the artist's aesthetical rigeur, both concentrical and within the other, as a Russian doll. Vonnegut it's every word aware of the risk of his "duty with death". He wants to be the witness he was in the macabre Bombing of Dresden (as an American prisoner of German ascendance and all the tearing contradictions that circumstance implies), but he wants to tell the World about it as an artist, troughout the capacities of amplification and enhancement of ideas and concepts the creative act allows. Therefore, the Biochemist turned into a soldier, a prisioner, a journalist, a writer, disguises himself as a childlike young Champlain's help turned into a soldier, a prisioner, an opthometrist, and a voice of humanity among extraterrestrial beings, in order to talk in an apparently linear and childlike inocent way about a story he knows too much about, letting all the sad personas of the biographical being comunicate succesfully, due to the choice of images, the tragical esence of the pathos he had to live through. Not so long ago I was reading Italian writer Alessandro Baricco and saw a Vonnegutian way of telling a story in his writing.
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