Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
Fiction - published 1969
This is the story of Billy Pilgrim: blundering soldier, aging dentist,
and alien abductee. Although based on the real-life bombing of Dresden,
Germany during World War II, this book really isn't about that.
This 'true work of fiction' is about the difficulty of finding meaning
from the confusion, suffering, pleasure, success, excitement, terror,
beauty, mystery, loss, and sheer boredom of an individual human life. Slaughterhouse-Five is
a non-linear account of one ordinary man's life and the extraordinary
parts from which it is made. From one page to the next, the reader is
abruptly dragged from a WWII prison camp to the extra-terrestrial realm
of Tralfamadore to the quiet home of a dentist who increasingly
questions the nature of reality as he is whisked - like the reader -
back and forth through time from past to present to future (though not
necessarily in that order).
But that's not really what this book is about. As Billy Pilgrim learns
from the Tralfamadorians, who possess the ability to perceive time as a
fourth dimension in the way that we see height, length, and width, each
single event in life is only one of a series of interconnected events
with no beginning and no ending, each influencing the other, making it
impossible to judge any one event as being 'good' or 'bad' in the grand
scheme of things. This perspective is echoed throughout the book in the
phrase, "So it goes," a phrase the narrator repeats each time someone
dies. People live, people die, and ultimately we have little to no
control over the two. And so it goes . . .
I heartily recommend Slaughterhouse-Five to any reader interested
in offbeat humor, unique narrative voice, non-linear (and often
disorienting) storylines, military history, space-time travel,
philosophy, or the mundane but meaningful details of everyday life as a
human being.
reveiw by David Conrad
