I finally read Vonnegut. I finally read a war novel. And after a long time I finally read something with so many GR ratings and a decent number of reviews which is precisely the reason I have nothing much to add to the already expressed views here. So I urge you to indulge me to state a personal anecdote. Thank You.

My Grandfather was a POW during Indo-China war and remained in confinement for some six months. By the time I got to know about it I had already watched too many movies and crammed endless number of answers about when and where such n such war was fought. But I was naïve and let’s assume innocent and someone who was yet to learn to ask the right questions. So the fact that someone so close in the family had witness something I only read in schoolbooks was utterly fascinating for me. Thus began my streak of stupid questions.

Me: Did you kill someone? Did they torture you? Did you dig some sort of tunnel to escape? And so on.

My Grandpa gave this hearty laugh he is famous for and said that I’m missing one important question: Why the war happened at first place? I thought for a while and answered: Because it always happens.

I can’t recall properly what he replied to that but it was something on the lines of this: I wish the answer changes when you’ll grow up because as of now that’s exactly how it is. War always happens.

With books like Slaughterhouse-Five (Schlachthöf-fünf), it’s not the writing which matters but simply the ideas and thoughts it carries which transgresses the literary boundaries and create a place in the heart of the readers as a humble reminder that Love happens, Hate happens, Life happens, Death happens, Peace happens, War happens and sometimes Shit happens.

n  Bulgarian review below/Ревюто на български е по-долуn
‘The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.’
I heard this expression for the first time from a high school history teacher. We called him the Thug because he looked like a thug. I thought he had made the aforementioned conclusion himself as a historian and I was impressed. Years later I found out I had been very much confused and those were Stalin’s words, for he was more familiar with that kind of stuff… I’m tempted to say ‘So it goes’ but I’ll refrain for now.

You might think of ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ as a tragedy, an anti-war or even a science fiction novel. Once H. was looking for Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’ in a bookstore and he was asked the very logical question ‘Is this in the sci-fi section?’, so you can never be sure in anything. If you saw pictures of Dresden’s ruins, you would certainly find something fantastical about them. It’s difficult to believe that where there were people and hopes, and life, there are only debris left. Walking in this Moon landscape is enough to leave a hollow in your soul, huge as a lifetime.
‘But sleep would not come. Tears came instead. They seeped.’

Billy Pilgrim is a pilgrim in time – he continues his pilgrimage to those years where his ill-starred consciousness had frozen like the three ladybugs within the amber of his paperweight… I don’t know if Billy Pilgrim is mentally ill. I think he isn’t and he simply saw what the other members of the human race are capable of. If normal people do things like these, maybe it’s better not to be a human. It’s probably not that bad to be a filthy flamingo. Or to be abducted on Tralfamadore. Or just to be a ladybug. When I was in kindergarten there was this little girl who had particular sadistic pleasure while stomping precisely on ladybugs. I got carried away. So it goes. There, I wrote it.
‘There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.’

Some would say the subject of war has been overexposed, slightly worn out and covered many times and the readers don’t quite give two hoots about it. After all WWII was nearly 75 years ago. What’s there to thresh out that much or even about WWI before that? We get it, people suffered. They were scared, they died. Tens, hundreds of thousands died. Statistic says so. The subject have been developed in many books, war films have become increasingly popular over the past few years and you can go to the movies with some popcorn and a coke and watch them in a very civilized manner. Consume, soothe your ego that you’re a vigilant citizen and you feel sorry, but are somehow indifferent to the people dying on the screen, numb several million more neurons to the battling afflictions of some strangers and finally go to bed, oh, it was such a long day and I have to go to work tomorrow. Maybe repeat after some time.

People need emotions to connect. Personal touch. If someone tells us about the wretched life of another person, we cry. If we are shown a battlefield with thousands of corpses, our faces will set in a grim expression at best. The story of Billy Pilgrim is partly the story of Kurt Vonnegut and the emotions in ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ are real. They remind me of the Russian grandmother of a friend who survived through both World Wars (the grandmother, not my friend). When she watched reports on the Iraq War years ago, she cried inconsolably, because she thought WWIII was coming. Because she remembered the fear and the hunger. She remembered the war. I hope that she wasn’t right after all.

Several years ago I was in Dresden. No Moon landscape anymore. It’s Earth landscape and it’s splendid. Charred stone blocks have been weaved into the rounded Baroque body of the Dresden Frauenkirche, which follow you like black reproaching eyes. The black eyes don’t blink and they remember. War is not a statistic. The rest of us are a statistic, we, who consider such events distant and having nothing to do with us. The statistic of dumbfounded numbers.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

„Смъртта на един човек е трагедия, смъртта на милиони е статистика.“
За пръв път чух този израз от един учител по история в гимназията. Викахме му Главореза, защото приличаше на главорез. Мислех, че той сам е достигнал до горецитирания извод като историк и бях впечатлена. Години по-късно разбрах, че съществено съм се объркала и това са думи на Сталин, на когото от първа ръка са му били доста по-ясни тия неща… Изкушавам се да добавя „Така е то“, но ще се въздържа засега.

Възможно е да разглеждате „Кланица 5“ като трагедия, като антивоенен роман или дори като фантастика. Веднъж Х. търсил в една книжарница „Владетелят“ на Макиавели и му задали съвсем логичния въпрос „Това при фантастиката ли е?“, така че човек никога не може да е сигурен. А ако сте разглеждали снимки на дрезденските отломки, в тях наистина има нещо фантастично. Трудно е да повярваш, че там, където е имало град и хора, и надежди, и живот, в един момент са останали само развалини. И да вървиш сред този „лунен пейзаж“ е достатъчно да остави зев в душата, дълбок колкото цял живот.
„… сънят не идваше. Вместо него дойдоха сълзите. Те закапаха.“

Били Пилгрим е пилигрим във времето – той непрестанно прави своето поклонение до онези години, където злочестото му съзнание е застинало като трите божи кравички в кехлибара на преспапието му… Не зная дали Били Пилгрим е психично болен. Мисля, че не е и просто е видял на какво са способни останалите членове на човешката раса. Ако нормалните хора правят такива неща, може би е по-добре да не си човек. Вероятно не е чак толкова лошо да си нечисто фламинго. Да си отвлечен на Тралфамадор. Или просто да си божа кравичка. Когато бях в детската градина, имаше едно момиченце, което с особено садистично удоволствие обичаше да мачка именно божи кравички. Отплеснах се. Така е то. Ето, написах го.
„В този разказ няма почти никакви герои, почти никакви драматични колизии, защото повечето хора в него са толкова болни, и защото до голяма степен са безжизнени играчки в ръцете на огромни сили. В края на краищата един от главните резултати на войната е, че човек престава да бъде личност.“

Някой би казал, че темата за войната е преекспонирана, позахабена и въртяна доста пъти и на читателите вече не им дреме особено за нея. Все пак Втората световна война е била преди почти 75 години. Какво толкова има да я нищим, че и оная преди нея. Ясно, на хората им е било зле. Страхували са се, умирали са. Мрели са с десетки, със стотици хиляди. Така казва статистиката. Тематиката е развита в доста книги, военните филми набират популярност през последните години и можеш културно да идеш с пуканки и кòла да си ги гледаш на кино. Да изконсумираш, да си позагладиш егото, че и ти си буден гражданин и ти е мъчно, ама и някак равнодушно за мрящите на екрана, да ти се обезчувствят още няколко милиона неврона към баталните несрети на някакви непознати и да си легнеш накрая, ох, че дълъг ден беше, пък и утре съм на работа.

Ние, хората, имаме нужда от емоции, за да се свързваме. От лично усещане. Ако ни разкажат за нещастния живот на човек, плачем. Ако ни покажат бойно поле с хиляди умрели, в най-добрия случай гледаме мрачно. Историята на Били Пилгрим е отчасти историята на Кърт Вонегът и емоциите в „Кланица 5“ са истински. Те ми напомнят и за бабата рускиня на една моя приятелка, която беше преживяла и двете световни войни (бабата, не приятелката). Когато преди години гледала по телевизията за войната в Ирак, плакала неудържимо, защото си мислела, че идва Трета световна война. Защото помнела страха и глада. Помнела войната. Надявам се все пак да не е била права.


Преди няколко години се разхождах из Дрезден. Пейзажът отдавна вече не е лунен. Земен е и то разкошен. В реконструираното закръглено бароково тяло на Фрауенкирхе са вплетени обгорели камъни, които те следят като черни укорителни очи. Черните очи не мигат и помнят. Войната не е статистика. Тя е масова трагедия. Статистика сме ние останалите, които гледаме на такива събития като далечни и нямащи нищо общо с нас. Статистиката на онемелите числа.

Update: I decided to upgrade the rating to 5*. Still on my mind after more than 1 year.

This was such a pleasant surprise. This book has been on my to-read list since the beginning of my activity on Goodreads and I did a good job avoiding to read it. I was sure I would not like it since: 1. I am not a fan of books/movies about war and 2. I thought this science-fiction satire style was not for me. I only wanted to read it because it is a classic and I resolved to read more of those (modern or not). This book kept bumping on different lists so I could not escape its lure.

Oh, I judged this book so wrongly. Actually, I liked it a lot. I thought the time travelling, the fractured prose and the detached tone of the narrator were very effective to portrait the Dresden atrocities and how to witness this can impact your life forever.

A strange and intriguing book that I found very hard to rate: a mixture of wartime memoir and sci fi - occasionally harrowing, sometimes funny and other times thought-provoking.

PLOT
It is the episodic story of Billy Pilgrim, a small town American boy, who is a POW in the second world war, later becomes a successful optometrist and who occasionally and accidentally travels in time to other periods of his life, so he has "memories of the future". Oh, he also gets abducted by aliens, along with some furniture. "So it goes." (That is the catchphrase of the book, and I found rather annoying after the umpteenth time. It's used in Philip K Dick's "Ubik" (review here), which I assumed was a nod to Vonnegut, until I discovered both were published in the same year).

It starts with an old man reminiscing about his life. He is asked about the point of writing an anti-war book, "Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?" After that, it jumps about, much as Billy does, "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time... he is in a constant state of stage fright".

The most thought-provoking bits for me were Billy's mother who tried "to construct a life that makes sense from things she found in gift shops", the bathos with which some war events were described (e.g. being executed for stealing a teapot), and the alien Tralfamadorian's multi-dimensional and multi-sexual world. For instance, they have five sexes, but their differences were in the fourth dimension and they couldn't imagine how time looks to Billy (they also told him that seven sexes were essential for human reproduction!).

MESSAGE
A main message is surprisingly positive: if we could only see or feel the fourth dimension, we would realise that "when a person dies he only appears to die. He is very much alive in the past".

SPOONS
Spoons are mentioned oddly often, as a description of how people lie (lovers or fallen soldiers). Then, near the end, actual spoons are briefly important. I have no idea whether this is significant.

UPDATE: Thanks to a comment from Matthias on his excellent review (read it here), I have, not an answer, but a great spoon reference in The Matrix:
"Do not try and bend the spoon, that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: There is no spoon."
Spoon Boy

RELATED BOOKS
It has strong links with several other books: as it's Vonnegut, the "fictitious" sci fi writer, Kilgore Trout, gets several mentions.

The mode of time travel clearly influenced Octavia Butler's Kindred, review here,
and Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, review here.

When he watches a WW2 film in reverse, it's very like Amis's Time's Arrow, review here.

For a more linguistic and philosophical take on the implications of Tralfamadorians living in all time, simultaneously, see the heptapods in Ted Chiang's The Story of Your Life, review here.

Also compare it with the Borges short story A Weary Man’s Utopia, which is in The Book of Sand, review here


It also left me wanting to read a Tralfamadorian book with its simultaneous threads, "no beginning, no middle, no end... What we love in our books are the depths of many marvellous moments seen all at one time", which is surely what Vonnegut was trying to create for mere human readers.

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

Don't let the ease of reading fool you - Vonnegut's isn't a conventional, or simple, novel. He writes, "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick, and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters."

Slaughterhouse-Five is not only Vonnegut's most powerful book, it is also as important as any written since 1945. Like Catch- 22, it fashions the author's experiences in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of authority. Slaughterhouse-Five boasts the same imagination, humanity, and gleeful appreciation of the absurd found in Vonnegut's other works, but the book's basis in rock-hard, tragic fact gives it a unique poignancy - and humor.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt is to select your very favorite American novel in honor of the Fourth of July. Well! That would take a few zillion hours of internal debate, creation of endless lists, rebellious actions like breaking things down into genre lists, muttering over who counts as American (Teju Cole is, but Henry James isn't: Discuss), etc. etc.

Decision made for me, in this case, by the fact that I'm trying to strong-arm myself into making a dent in the embarrassingly long list of things I've read, re-read, or abandoned since I got all grumpus. And here we are!

If anyone has not read this book, and is under the age of 90 while over the age of 17/senior year of high school, go immediately forth, procure this book, and read it.

Why? Beacuse:

“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”

That is all.

“Everything is nothing, with a twist.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five



I've read Slaughterhouse-Five several times and I'm still not sure I know exactly how Vonnegut pulls it off. It is primarily a postmodern, anti-war novel. It is an absurd look at war, memory, time, and humanity, but it is also gentle. Its prose emotionally feels (go ahead, pet the emotion) like the tug of the tides, the heaviness of sleep, the seduction of alcohol, the dizziness of love. His prose is simple, but beautiful.

Obviously, part of the brilliance of this novel is born from the reality that Vonnegut is largely playing the notes of his own song (obviously, obscured by an unreliable narrator, time that is unstuck, and generous kidnapping aliens). It is the song of someone who has seen horrible, horrible things but still wants to dance and smile (so a Totentanz?).

Emperor, your sword won't help you out
Sceptre and crown are worthless here
I've taken you by the hand
For you must come to my dance

I had to work very much and very hard
The sweat was running down my skin
I'd like to escape death nonetheless
But here I won't have any luck

It is essentially art pulled out of the tension between despair and hope, grief and celebration, love and death. It is a classic not because it has a message about war, but because it has a message about life. Vonnegut aimed at war and hit everything.

No one really introduced me to this work, despite its resonant presence in the literary canon.

I adore books that reek of marvelous postmodern perfume. This is one original, enthralling, always-relevant novel. Vonnegut is brave & cowardly because he makes the material his own, yet he is but scenery... his main character is an Everyman who is sooo affected by the Dresden bombings that he "becomes unglued from time." Yes: war is complete, utter chaos... it becomes something more powerful than physics because it is so closely related to the complete termination of life, spirit, & earthly happiness.

"Maus" reminded me of this because it mixed humor with tragedy... something super hard to pull off because the events are real. The Children's Crusade is still being fought today & this personal statement cannot go out of style-- maybe presidents/dictators/rulers/monarchs should read it as a by law prerequisite?

Contains spoilers
Slaughterhouse-Five is about a man called Billy Pilgrim who time-travels frequently. He was in the Second World War and, captured, was sent to Dresden to work in a malt syrup factory before the city was bombed. He studied optometry and had a nervous breakdown. He married the daughter of a rich optometrist, and became rich as well. He was abducted by aliens called Tralfamadorians, who put him in a zoo with a young porn actress, Montana Wildhack, whom they also abducted. He had a daughter called Barbara and a son called Robert. He was in a plane crash that killed everyone except him and the co-pilot. Rushing to the hospital in frantic worry, his wife Valencia dies in a car accident. He gets to meet his favourite author, an unsuccessful sci-fi writer called Kilgore Trout. "Slaughterhouse-Five" is the name of the building where the American POWs lived in in Dresden.

Because the narration jumps around as frequently as Billy does, you learn everything early on and then simply revisit it all. The fractured narrative is worse than watching ads in a commercial break, or those horrible pop songs where the scenes and costumes change every two seconds - it gives you a headache. It's extremely boring, and hollow, and unsatisfying.

I'm not a huge sci-fi fan, as you know. But I do like time-travel stories. Billy is nothing like Henry from The Time Traveler's Wife. For a start, not even a second seems to pass in "real" time while he is travelling - no one ever notices. It seems less like time-travelling than like reliving the past, present and future of your life, all at once, because it's his consciousness that does the travelling. What isn't clear, at all, is which is the real Billy? He moves so much, you have to wonder how he doesn't become completely dislodged from his own corporeal self and go mad.

The time-travelling predates the abduction-by-aliens, but the aliens themselves see the past, present and future simultaneously, and teach Billy their philosophy of not really caring about anything, since nothing can be changed etc. etc. Fatalism.

I think I hated this book, but not quite. Hate is a strong emotion and I don't think it brought that out in me. It wasn't even frustrating, nor even particularly confusing, though the repetition of the Tralfamadorian expression "so it goes" was so irritating I saw red a few times. The bits about the 100 American POWs being welcomed by the British POWs in a German prison camp was delightful, though boldly stereotyped, and I loved the excerpts from the work on American soldiers and prisoners-of-war by the American-turned-Nazi, forget his name, something Campbell. A lot of it - and it's a small, short book - could easily be skipped. The temptation was very strong.

In short, it's a very "postmodern" story, and like all things postmodern, it's impractical, disjointed, a bit wanky, tries too hard, is extremely out-dated and, at the end of the day, rather useless. Vonnegut is also very heavy-handed and bangs you on the head with his messages. It doesn't really inspire me to read more of Vonnegut's work. I guess he's a love-him-or-hate-him kind of story-teller.

This novel has a pretty basic and consistent structure: a few paragraphs of humorous (I think) writing that has the presumed purpose of loosening you up before you get to the sucker-punch paragraph that contains something disturbing/death-related followed by "so it goes." And if the "so it goes" wasn't there to remind you that this is the part where death happens, Vonnegut hammers the point home by relaying it an inhumanly cool, dry, and nonchalant manner. How coy and provocative. Maybe Vonnegut could have helped the reader along a little more with a footnote: "See what I did there? By having my narrator relate stories of war and death in an apathetic manner, I made you really think about these issues. Didn't I? Huh? Huh?" Yes, we get it, Kurt.

Part way through reading this book, I was sharing my disappointment with a friend who mentioned that Vonnegut, like the narrator, had actually witnessed the Dresden bombings. This apologia left me momentarily chastened as I considered the sobering impetus for the story. Then I mentally slapped myself for even considering that sympathy could cover for the stylistic bludgeoning that Vonnegut inflicted. I suppose there was a well thought out reason for making the prose stuttering and choppy, but I can't imagine what that would actually be (nor would I care to). Interestingly enough, Vonnegut may have been aware of this stylistic shortcoming: speaking of Billy's favorite obscure sci-fi author, he writes that "Trout's prose is frightful. Only his ideas are good." Kilgore Trout and his writing apparently feature in other Vonnegut books, and a Washington Post reviewer in the mid 70s contended that "Trout's prose is at least as good as Vonnegut's." Exactly.

And were the philosophical musings on time and fate, revealed primarily through unimaginative and silly sci-fi ramblings, supposed to be novel or even vaguely interesting? It's like he took Tolstoy's ruminations on fate and free will in War and Peace and then removed all the complexities and internal dissonance.

In the second half of the story, I did find myself mildly interested in what was happening. Perhaps I became accustomed to the writing or the pain just dulled after a while. Regardless, this book crossed the overrated line so egregiously that I can't muster a second star. Heavy-handed, prosaic, unfunny. So it goes.

This was my first Vonnegut book, but it won’t be my last.

Back in high school, a friend gave me a paperback copy of Breakfast Of Champions, and I leafed through it, amused at the drawings, but didn’t read it. (I think I was going through my Salinger stage… or perhaps it was my Dickens stage.) Now I want to find it in my boxes of old things. I want to read more from this strange, misanthropic (?), genre-busting, inventive and oddly soulful and philosophical author.

Slaughterhouse-Five has expanded in my imagination. The more I think about it and revisit certain passages, the more I admire it and recognize it as a great 20th century novel.

Vonnegut writes these deceptively simple declarative sentences, jumps around in time, introduces characters who won’t reappear until much later (if at all), and sometimes stealthily buries the most moving and profound passages in the middle of some chapter that’s (seemingly) about something else.

I won’t bother with a plot summary. The main character is the sweetly-named Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist with a wife and two children. As a tall, thin, sickly and generally incompetent American soldier and POW during WW2, he miraculously survived the firebombing of Dresden in 1945. After returning to America and continuing his life, he became “unstuck in time” – time-travelling various episodes, without any reason. Oh yeah, and at one point he was also abducted by aliens.

Here is a picture of Dresden before the war. It was one of the most beautiful cities, often compared to Florence.



And here is a picture after.



The book is a puzzle it's up to the reader to figure out. How much is “real”? Are Billy’s memories caused by the aliens, by his experiences in the war? If you survived being slaughtered because of being hidden in a slaughterhouse, wouldn’t that kind of make you unhinged?

It takes a while to get used to the structure, which at first seems arbitrary. But the deeper you get into the book you realize it's anything but.

There are moments in the narration that take you aback, such as this one in Chapter 8:

And then it developed that Campbell was not going to go unanswered after all. Poor old Derby, the doomed high school teacher, lumbered to his feet for what was probably the finest moment in his life. There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

Right in the middle of a paragraph, the narrator brings up the very thing you’re thinking about its characters (or non-characters), the lack of dramatic incident and cause and effect! One of the main effects of war is that people are discouraged from being characters. Fascinating. How do you make sense of something as absurd and senseless as war? Does something like cause and effect even apply to this situation?

A page or two later, Vonnegut gives us this aside about the sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout, who I believe shows up in some other books:

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.
So it goes.

What an absolutely dead-on, if cynical, summation of the effects of a capitalist-driven society.

And in an earlier section about the aliens on the planet Tralfamadore, we’re given this, told to Billy by a Tralfamadorian "voice":

“There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you’re right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message – describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

Every word I’ve bolded applies to this book as well. In a way, many of them apply to life in general.

The phrase that Vonnegut uses when he mentions a death – of any sort – in the book is quite simple: “So it goes.” There’s something so ordinary, resigned, and absurdly all-accepting about these three little words. Sometimes the effect is annoying, sometimes funny, and sometimes just devastating.

Pay attention. We’ve been told how to read the book. When seen all at once, it “produces an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep.”

Indeed. Art is a profound act of optimism, especially in the face of acts of meaningless violence and slaughter. So it goes.

The God of Accidents

Only God knows all of time as if it were the same instant; only God can annihilate the Universe; only God knows our innermost thoughts: so contends Judaic, Christian, and Muslim theology. For God, therefore, there is no cause and effect; everything just is. And because there is no cause and effect, there is no issue of free will. Free will is an idea created by human beings who can't imagine any other way to escape the mechanical inevitability of causality.

In Slaughterhouse 5, the alien race of Tralfamadorians are not just god-like in their ability to transit the Universe, they are collectively God in their power over time and existence itself. The book is a subtle and very clever theology that has fundamental implications for morality and ethics.

Billy Pilgrim is the recipient of important revelations from the divine Tralfamadorians. The first revelation is that although death is a real certainty, it doesn't matter because one can revisit moments in one's life ad infinitum; resurrection is part of existence.

Second, God is neither external to the Universe, nor pantheistically distributed throughout it; rather God is a very discrete presence in the Universe, as well as in charge of it. Importantly for the fate of everyone, God is also as hapless as human beings; he can't change himself or his fate.

The most significant revelation is that Kilgore Trout, the famous science fiction writer and newspaper delivery boss, is God's prophet, whose every pronouncement is sarcastic.

It's difficult to say what portion of these revelations come directly from the divine source and what portion comes through Kilgore Trout's explorations into Billy's consciousness. Nevertheless the bottom line is clear: “Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does.” In other words, life is so screwy that it can neither be analysed nor rationalised. Not the best of all possible worlds, but the only one possible. Accident willing.

This is a simple story written in order to put the mind at thought in a way most complicated works won't be able to! At the heart of this novel lies the destruction of Dresden .. a German city, during the second world war. The most attractive thing about this book is the time structure that goes zigzagging all through the book.

The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, gets unstuck in time every now and then introducing us to characters, stories and timelines that tells us a hell lot of stuff about war and its effects on people, their minds and their lives. No doubt, war is a nasty business!

Another amazing feature of the book is the heartless humor Vonnegut uses describing the most cruel of scenes. It takes time to get into the essence of this book but once there you start enjoying the way of it. This book is deep and requires correct knowledge and information to appreciate even the satire in it.

"And so it goes..."

Loved spending time reading it.
5 stars!