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Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel; 50th anniversary edition Hardcover – February 1, 1994
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Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time
Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.”
An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it. Authors as wide-ranging as Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Tim O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J. K. Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonnegut’s words. Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as “the kind of writer who made people—young people especially—want to write.” George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be “the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us . . . a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.”
More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut’s portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.
- Print length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherModern Library
- Publication dateFebruary 1, 1994
- Dimensions5.46 x 0.94 x 8.33 inches
- ISBN-100385312083
- ISBN-13978-0385312080
- Lexile measure850L
The chilling story of the abduction of two teenagers, their escape, and the dark secrets that, years later, bring them back to the scene of the crime. | Learn more
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“A free-wheeling vehicle . . . an unforgettable ride!”—The New York Times | “Marvelous . . . [Vonnegut] wheels out all the complaints about America and makes them seem fresh, funny, outrageous, hateful and lovable.”—The New York Times | “[Kurt Vonnegut’s] best book . . . He dares not only ask the ultimate question about the meaning of life, but to answer it.”—Esquire | “Vonnegut is George Orwell, Dr. Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer . . . a zany but moral mad scientist.”—Time | “[Vonnegut] at his wildest best.”—The New York Times Book Review | A collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s shorter works. “There are twenty-five stories here, and each hits a nerve ending.”—The Charlotte Observer |
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“Very tough and very funny . . . sad and delightful . . . very Vonnegut.”—The New York Times
“Splendid . . . a funny book at which you are not permitted to laugh, a sad book without tears.”—Life
“Funny, satirical, compelling, outrageous, fanciful, mordant, fecund . . . ‘It’s too good to be science fiction,’ [the critics] would say. But Vonnegut doesn’t care, and you won’t care, either, because this is a writer who leaps over genres.”—Los Angeles Times
From the Inside Flap
"From the Paperback edition.
From the Back Cover
From the Paperback edition.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names.
I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in 1967. It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground.
I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, and we made friends with a cab driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoners of war. His name was Gerhard Müller. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while. We asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said that it was terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because there wasn't much shelter or food or clothing. But things were much better now. He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes.
He sent O'Hare a postcard at Christmastime, and here is what it said:
"I wish you and your family also as to your friend Merry Christmas and a happy New Year and I hope that we'll meet again in a world of peace and freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will."
I like that very much: "If the accident will."
I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big.
But not many words about Dresden came from my mind then -- not enough of them to make a book, anyway. And not many words come now, either, when I have become an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls, with his sons full grown.
I think of how useless the Dresden part of my memory has been, and yet how tempting Dresden has been to write about, and I am reminded of the famous limerick:
There was a young man from Stamboul, Who soliloquized thus to his tool: "You took all my wealth And you ruined my health, And now you won't pee, you old fool."
And I'm reminded, too, of the song that goes:
My name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin, I work in a lumbermill there. The people I meet when I walk down the street, They say, "What's your name?" And I say, My name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin..."
And so on to infinity.
Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.
I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised his eyebrows and inquired, "Is it an anti-war book?"
"Yes," I said. "I guess."
"You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books?"
"No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?"
"I say, 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?' "
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.
And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.
When I was somewhat younger, working on my famous Dresden book, I asked an old war buddy named Bernard V. O'Hare if I could come to see him. He was a district attorney in Pennsylvania. I was a writer on Cape Cod. We had been privates in the war, infantry scouts. We had never expected to make any money after the war, but we were doing quite well.
I had the Bell Telephone Company find him for me. They are wonderful that way. I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.
I got O'Hare on the line in this way. He is short and I am tall. We were Mutt and Jeff in the war. We were captured together in the war. I told him who I was on the telephone. He had no trouble believing it. He was up. He was reading. Everybody else in his house was asleep.
"Listen--" I said, "I'm writing this book about Dresden. I'd like some help remembering stuff. I wonder if I could come down and see you, and we could drink and talk and remember."
He was unenthusiastic. He said he couldn't remember much. He told me, though, to come ahead.
"I think the climax of the book will be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby," I said. "The irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And he's given a regular trial, and then he's shot by a firing squad."
"Um," said O'Hare.
"Don't you think that's really where the climax should come?"
"I don't know anything about it," he said. "That's your trade, not mine."
As a trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and wonderful dialogue and suspense and confrontations, I had outlined the Dresden story many times. The best outline I ever made, or anyway the prettiest one, was on the back of a roll of wallpaper.
I used my daughter's crayons, a different color for each main character. One end of the wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and then there was all that middle part, which was the middle. And the blue line met the red line and then the yellow line, and the yellow line stopped because the character represented by the yellow line was dead. And so on. The destruction of Dresden was represented by a vertical band of orange cross-hatching, and all the lines that were still alive passed through it, came out the other side.
The end, where all the lines stopped, was a beetfield on the Elbe, outside of Halle. The rain was coming down. The war in Europe had been over for a couple of weeks. We were formed in ranks, with Russian soldiers guarding us -- Englishmen, Americans, Dutchmen, Belgians, Frenchmen, Canadians, South Africans, New Zealanders, Australians, thousands of us about to stop being prisoners of war.
And on the other side of the field were thousands of Russians and Poles and Yugoslavians and so on guarded by American soldiers. An exchange was made there in the rain -- one for one. O'Hare and I climbed into the back of an American truck with a lot of others. O'Hare didn't have any souvenirs. Almost everybody else did. I had a ceremonial Luftwaffe saber, still do. The rabid little American I call Paul Lazzaro in this book had about a quart of diamonds and emeralds and rubies and so on. He had taken these from dead people in the cellars of Dresden. So it goes.
An idiotic Englishman, who had lost all his teeth somewhere, had his souvenir in a canvas bag. The bag was resting on my insteps. He would peek into the bag every now and then, and he would roll his eyes and swivel his scrawny neck, trying to catch people looking covetously at his bag. And he would bounce the bag on my insteps.
I thought this bouncing was accidental. But I was mistaken. He had to show somebody what was in the bag, and he had decided he could trust me. He caught my eye, winked, opened the bag. There was a plaster model of the Eiffel Tower in there. It was painted gold. It had a clock in it.
"There's a smashin' thing," he said.
And we were flown to a rest camp in France, where we were fed chocolate malted milkshakes and other rich foods until we were all covered with baby fat. Then we were sent home, and I married a pretty girl who was covered with baby fat, too.
And we had babies.
And they're all grown up now, and I'm an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls. My name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin, I work in a lumbermill there.
Sometimes I try to call up old girl friends on the telephone late at night, after my wife has gone to bed. "Operator, I wonder if you could give me the number of a Mrs. So-and-So. I think she lives at such-and-such."
"I'm sorry, sir. There is no such listing."
"Thanks, Operator. Thanks just the same."
And I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me. He doesn't mind the smell of mustard gas and roses.
"You're all right, Sandy," I'll say to the dog. "You know that, Sandy? You're O.K."
Sometimes I'll turn on the radio and listen to a talk program from Boston or New York. I can't stand recorded music if I've been drinking a good deal.
Sooner or later I go to bed, and my wife asks me what time it is. She always has to know the time. Sometimes I don't know, and I say, "Search me."
I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for a while after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.
Another thing they taught was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, "You know -- you never wrote a story with a villain in it."
I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war.
While I was studying to be an anthropologist, I was also working as a police reporter for the famous Chicago City News Bureau for twenty-eight dollars a week. One time they switched me from the night shift to the day shift, so I worked sixteen hours straight. We were supported by all the newspapers in town, and the AP and the UP and all that. And we would cover the courts and the police stations and the Fire Department and the Coast Guard out on Lake Michigan and all that. We were connected to the institutions that supported us by means of pneumatic tubes which ran under the streets of Chicago.
Reporters would telephone in stories to writers wearing headphones, and the writers would stencil the stories on mimeograph sheets. The stories were mimeographed and stuffed into the brass and velvet cartridges which the pneumatic tubes ate. The very toughest reporters and writers were women who had taken over the jobs of men who'd gone to war.
And the first story I covered I had to dictate over the telephone to one of those beastly girls. It was about a young veteran who had taken a job running an old-fashioned elevator in an office building. The elevator door on the first floor was ornamental iron lace. Iron ivy snaked in and out of the holes. There was an iron twig with two iron lovebirds perched upon it.
This veteran decided to take his car into the basement, and he closed the door and started down, but his wedding ring was caught in all the ornaments. So he was hoisted into the air and the floor of the car went down, dropped out from under him, and the top of the car squashed him. So it goes.
So I phoned this in, and the woman who was going to cut the stencil asked me, "What did his wife say?"
"She doesn't know yet," I said. "It just happened."
"Call her up and get a statement."
"What?"
"Tell her you're Captain Finn of the Police Department. Say you have some sad news. Give her the news, and see what she says."
So I did. She said about what you would expect her to say. There was a baby. And so on.
When I got back to the office, the woman writer asked me, just for her own information, what the squashed guy had looked like when he was squashed.
I told her.
"Did it bother you?" she said. She was eating a Three Musketeers Candy Bar.
"Heck no, Nancy," I said. "I've seen lots worse than that in the war."
Even then I was supposedly writing a book about Dresden. It wasn't a famous air raid back then in America. Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance. I didn't know that, either. There hadn't been much publicity.
I happened to tell a University of Chicago professor at a cocktail party about the raid as I had seen it, about the book I would write. He was a member of a thing called The Committee on Social Thought. And he told me about the concentration camps, and about how the Germans had made soap and candles out of the fat of dead Jews and so on.
All I could say was, "I know, I know. I know."
World War Two had certainly made everybody very tough. And I became a public relations man for General Electric in Schenectady, New York, and a volunteer fireman in the village of Alplaus, where I bought my first home. My boss there was one of the toughest guys I ever hope to meet. He had been a lieutenant colonel in public relations in Baltimore. While I was in Schenectady he joined the Dutch Reformed Church, which is a very tough church, indeed.
He used to ask me sneeringly sometimes why I hadn't been an officer, as though I'd done something wrong.
My wife and I had lost our baby fat. Those were our scrawny years. We had a lot of scrawny veterans and their scrawny wives for friends. The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.
I wrote the Air Force back then, asking for details about the raid on Dresden, who ordered it, how many planes did it, why they did it, what desirable results there had been and so on. I was answered by a man who, like myself, was in public relations. He said that he was sorry, but that the information was top secret still.
I read the letter out loud to my wife, and I said, "Secret? My God -- from whom?"
We were United World Federalists back then. I don't know what we are now. Telephoners, I guess. We telephone a lot -- or I do, anyway, late at night.
A couple of weeks after I telephoned my old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, I really did go to see him. That must have been in 1964 or so -- whatever the last year was for the New York World's Fair. Eheu, fugaces labuntur anni. My name is Yon Yonson. There was a young man from Stamboul.
I took two little girls with me, my daughter, Nanny, and her best friend, Allison Mitchell. They had never been off Cape Cod before. When we saw a river, we had to stop so they could stand by it and think about it for a while. They had never seen water in that long and narrow, unsalted form before. The river was the Hudson. There were carp in there and we saw them. They were as big as atomic submarines.
We saw waterfalls, too, streams jumping off cliffs into the valley of the Delaware. There were lots of things to stop and see -- and then it was time to go, always time to go. The little girls were wearing white party dresses and black party shoes, so strangers would know at once how nice they were. "Time to go, girls," I'd say. And we would go.
And the sun went down, and we had supper in an Italian place, and then I knocked on the front door of the beautiful stone house of Bernard V. O'Hare. I was carrying a bottle of Irish whiskey like a dinner bell.
I met his nice wife, Mary, to whom I dedicate this book. I dedicate it to Gerhard Müller, the Dresden taxi driver, too. Mary O'Hare is a trained nurse, which is a lovely thing for a woman to be.
Mary admired the two little girls I'd brought, mixed them in with her own children, sent them all upstairs to play games and watch television. It was only after the children were gone that I sensed that Mary didn't like me or didn't like something about the night. She was polite but chilly.
"It's a nice cozy house you have here," I said, and it really was.
"I've fixed up a place where you can talk and not be bothered," she said.
"Good," I said, and I imagined two leather chairs near a fire in a paneled room, where two old soldiers could drink and talk. But she took us into the kitchen. She had put two straight-backed chairs at a kitchen table with a white porcelain top. That table top was screaming with reflected light from a two-hundred-watt bulb overhead. Mary had prepared an operating room. She put only one glass on it, which was for me. She explained that O'Hare couldn't drink the hard stuff since the war.
So we sat down. O'Hare was embarrassed, but he wouldn't tell me what was wrong. I couldn't imagine what it was about me that could burn up Mary so. I was a family man. I'd been married only once. I wasn't a drunk. I hadn't done her husband any dirt in the war.
She fixed herself a Coca-Cola, made a lot of noise banging the ice-cube tray in the stainless steel sink. Then she went into another part of the house. But she wouldn't sit still. She was moving all over the house, opening and shutting doors, even moving furniture around to work off anger.
I asked O'Hare what I'd said or done to make her act that way.
"It's all right," he said. "Don't worry about it. It doesn't have anything to do with you." That was kind of him. He was lying. It had everything to do with me.
So we tried to ignore Mary and remember the war. I took a couple of belts of the booze I'd brought. We would chuckle or grin sometimes, as though war stories were coming back, but neither one of us could remember anything good. O'Hare remembered one guy who got into a lot of wine in Dresden, before it was bombed, and we had to take him home in a wheelbarrow. It wasn't much to write a book about. I remembered two Russian soldiers who had looted a clock factory. They had a horse-drawn wagon full of clocks. They were happy and drunk. They were smoking huge cigarettes they had rolled in newspaper.
That was about it for memories, and Mary was still making noise. She finally came out in the kitchen again for another Coke. She took another tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator, banged it in the sink, even though there was already plenty of ice out.
Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation. "You were just babies then!" she said.
"What?" I said.
"You were just babies in the war -- like the ones upstairs!"
I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.
"But you're not going to write it that way, are you." This wasn't a question. It was an accusation.
"I -- I don't know," I said.
"Well, I know," she said. "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs."
So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.
So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: "Mary," I said, "I don't think this book of mine is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.
"I tell you what," I said, "I'll call it 'The Children's Crusade.' "
She was my friend after that.
O'Hare and I gave up on remembering, went into the living room, talked about other things. We became curious about the real Children's Crusade, so O'Hare looked it up in a book he had, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay, LL. D. It was first published in London in 1841.
Mackay had a low opinion of all Crusades. The Children's Crusade struck him as only slightly more sordid than the ten Crusades for grown-ups. O'Hare read this handsome passage out loud:
History in her solemn page informs us that the crusaders were but ignorant and savage men, that their motives were those of bigotry unmitigated, and that their pathway was one of blood and tears. Romance, on the other hand, dilates upon their piety and heroism, and portrays, in her most glowing and impassioned hues, their virtue and magnanimity, the imperishable honor they acquired for themselves, and the great services they rendered to Christianity.
And then O'Hare read this: Now what was the grand result of all these struggles? Europe expended millions of her treasures, and the blood of two million of her people; and a handful of quarrelsome knights retained possession of Palestine for about one hundred years!
Mackay told us that the Children's Crusade started in 1213, when two monks got the idea of raising armies of children in Germany and France, and selling them in North Africa as slaves. Thirty thousand children volunteered, thinking they were going to Palestine. They were no doubt idle and deserted children who generally swarm in great cities, nurtured on vice and daring, said Mackay, and ready for anything.
Pope Innocent the Third thought they were going to Palestine, too, and he was thrilled. "These children are awake while we are asleep!" he said.
Most of the children were shipped out of Marseilles, and about half of them drowned in shipwrecks. The other half got to North Africa where they were sold.
Through a misunderstanding, some children reported for duty at Genoa, where no slave ships were waiting. They were fed and sheltered and questioned kindly by good people there -- then given a little money and a lot of advice and sent back home.
"Hooray for the good people of Genoa," said Mary O'Hare.
I slept that night in one of the children's bedrooms. O'Hare had put a book for me on the bedside table. It was Dresden, History, Stage and Gallery, by Mary Endell. It was published in 1908, and its introduction began:
It is hoped that this little book will make itself useful. It attempts to give to an English-reading public a bird's-eye view of how Dresden came to look as it does, architecturally; of how it expanded musically, through the genius of a few men, to its present bloom; and it calls attention to certain permanent landmarks in art that make its Gallery the resort of those seeking lasting impressions.
I read some history further on:
Now, in 1760, Dresden underwent siege by the Prussians. On the fifteenth of July began the cannonade. The Picture-Gallery took fire. Many of the paintings had been transported to the Königstein, but some were seriously injured by splinters of bombshells, -- notably Francia's "Baptism of Christ." Furthermore, the stately Kreuzkirche tower, from which the enemy's movements had been watched day and night, stood in flames. It later succumbed. In sturdy contrast with the pitiful fate of the Kreuzkirche, stood the Frauenkirche, from the curves of whose stone dome the Prussian bombs rebounded like rain. Friederich was obliged finally to give up the siege, because he learned of the fall of Glatz, the critical point of his new conquests. "We must be off to Silesia, so that we do not lose everything."
The devastation of Dresden was boundless. When Goethe as a young student visited the city, he still found sad ruins: "Von der Kuppel der Frauenkirche sah ich diese leidigen Trümmer zwischen die schöne städtische Ordnung hineingesät; da rühmte mir der Küster die Kunst des Baumeisters, welcher Kirche und Kuppel auf einen so unerwünschten Fall schon eingerichtet und bombenfesterbaut hatte. Der gute Sakristan deutete mir alsdann auf Ruinene nach allen Seiten und sagte bedenklich lakonisch: Das hat der Feind gethan!"
The two little girls and I crossed the Delaware River where George Washington had crossed it, the next morning. We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors.
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
I taught creative writing in the famous Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa for a couple of years after that. I got into some perfectly beautiful trouble, got out of it again. I taught in the afternoons. In the mornings I wrote. I was not to be disturbed. I was working on my famous book about Dresden.
And somewhere in there a nice man named Seymour Lawrence gave me a three-book contract, and I said, "O.K., the first of the three will be my famous book about Dresden."
The friends of Seymour Lawrence call him "Sam." And I say to Sam now: "Sam -- here's the book."
It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.
And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?"
I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.
I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.
As I've said: I recently went back to Dresden with my friend O'Hare. We had a million laughs in Hamburg and West Berlin and East Berlin and Vienna and Salzburg and Helsinki, and in Leningrad, too. It was very good for me, because I saw a lot of authentic backgrounds for made-up stories which I will write later on. One of them will be "Russian Baroque" and another will be "No Kissing" and another will be "Dollar Bar" and another will be "If the Accident Will," and so on.
And so on.
There was a Lufthansa plane that was supposed to fly from Philadelphia to Boston to Frankfurt. O'Hare was supposed to get on in Philadelphia and I was supposed to get on in Boston, and off we'd go. But Boston was socked in, so the plane flew straight to Frankfurt from Philadelphia. And I became a non-person in the Boston fog, and Lufthansa put me in a limousine with some other non-persons and sent us to a motel for a non-night.
The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only with the electric clocks, but the wind-up kind, too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again.
There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling, I had to believe whatever clocks said -- and calendars.
I had two books with me, which I'd meant to read on the plane. One was Words for the Wind, by Theodore Roethke, and this is what I found in there:
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.
My other book was Erika Ostrovsky's Céline and His Vision. Céline was a brave French soldier in the First World War -- until his skull was cracked. After that he couldn't sleep, and there were noises in his head. He became a doctor, and he treated poor people in the daytime, and he wrote grotesque novels all night. No art is possible without a dance with death, he wrote.
The truth is death, he wrote. I've fought nicely against it as long as I could... danced with it, festooned it, waltzed it around... decorated it with streamers, titillated it...
Time obsessed him. Miss Ostrovsky reminded me of the amazing scene in Death on the Installment Plan where Céline wants to stop the bustling of a street crowd. He screams on paper, Make them stop... don't let them move anymore at all... There, make them freeze... once and for all!... So that they won't disappear anymore!
I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction. The sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar, I read. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.
So it goes.
Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them.
And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.
People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.
I've finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.
This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. It begins like this:
Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
It ends like this:
Poo-tee-weet?
Product details
- Publisher : Modern Library; 50th Anniversary ed. edition (February 1, 1994)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0385312083
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385312080
- Lexile measure : 850L
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.46 x 0.94 x 8.33 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #24,027 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #65 in Science Fiction Short Stories
- #263 in Fiction Satire
- #893 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Kurt Vonnegut was a writer, lecturer and painter. He was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. During WWII, as a prisoner of war in Germany, he witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired Slaughterhouse Five. First published in 1950, he went on to write fourteen novels, four plays, and three short story collections, in addition to countless works of short fiction and nonfiction. He died in 2007.
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book well-written and thought-provoking. They describe it as a humorous tale with good comic relief. The book is described as an anti-war novel that touches on the horrors of war. Readers appreciate the whimsical, unusual style and quirky illustrations. They also mention the interesting time travel elements.
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Customers find the book enjoyable and well-written. They appreciate the brilliant writing style and clear storytelling. The book is described as a classic novel that should be read by all.
"...How to describe it? Silly, empathetic, philosophical, observant, whimsical, searing, unapologetic...." Read more
"...Worth a read ... just to say you did. Also interested in his "Mother Night " (Campbell referenced here) and the movie with Nick Nolte...." Read more
"...Slaughterhouse-Five was not laden with ancient language terms or obscure references - so I was able to leave the thesaurus closed and enjoy the..." Read more
"...Yet, somehow, I kept missing what is no doubt one of his greatest books, SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE...." Read more
Customers find the book thought-provoking and engaging. They appreciate the philosophical content, subtle commentary on scripture, and poignant observations about the human condition. The book covers a range of concepts from war to science fiction and constantly surprises the reader with its creative writing style.
"...How to describe it? Silly, empathetic, philosophical, observant, whimsical, searing, unapologetic...." Read more
"...this story is told in Vonnegut’s characteristic style of simple declarative sentences. A breeze to read...." Read more
"...It is an important achievement by any standard, the most significant of Kurt Vonnegut's work...." Read more
"...In S5, there are over 100 references to death and each one is accompanied by "So it goes."..." Read more
Customers enjoy the humor in the book. They find the characters amusing and the writing style humorous. The book is described as a thoughtful tale of dark reflective humor with a unique writing style.
"...Part war story, part science fiction, and part bizarro, observational comedy, I couldn't explain it concisely if I tried...." Read more
"...unstuck in time, and you will too as you read this thoughtful tale of dark reflective humor...." Read more
"...forever living with that memory and hence this rather comical piece of a science fiction novel came as a result of this historic event...." Read more
"...: it conveys it's painfully serious message through absurd and hilarious means--a text-book technique in the world of satire and a more basic tenant..." Read more
Customers find the book an anti-war novel and science fiction. They say it's a brilliant revelation of the absurdity of war, very relevant today. The book touches on the horrors of war, with an inventive look into war and its consequences. It gives you a full understanding of war without being explicit. The author looks at war and indecencies of war from a fresh perspective, showing the destructive power of war reversed.
"...What a weird and quirky novel. Part war story, part science fiction, and part bizarro, observational comedy, I couldn't explain it concisely if I..." Read more
"...There is much made of this being an anti-war book, and certainly there is that aspect within the pages...." Read more
"...In Vonnegut's story telling he interweaves science fiction...." Read more
"...classes, Slaughterhouse Five is considered by many to be the ultimate anti-war satire, a story that scolds the meaning of all war..." Read more
Customers appreciate the book's style. They find it whimsical, concentrated, and unusual. The illustrations are simple, hand-drawn images of objects that add a colorful dynamic to the story.
"...How to describe it? Silly, empathetic, philosophical, observant, whimsical, searing, unapologetic...." Read more
"...piece of illustrated literature I'd read, but all the quirky illustrations were simple, hand-drawn images of objects I never expected to be depicted..." Read more
"...Dresden was a beautiful city, the very cultural center of Germany on the river Elbe, and had absolutely no military value...." Read more
"...that it became a classic in the meantime, one is struck with a kaleidoscope of images that make up Billy’s life...." Read more
Customers enjoy the time travel in the book. They find the concept interesting, describing it as a science fiction/psychological crossbreed about time travel, aliens, philosophy, and war. The idea of time being cyclical and happening all at once is appreciated. Readers appreciate the tightly knit timelines as the story progresses.
"...From a science fiction perspective, the book has some neat passages about time travel, the fourth dimension and how life would be if time was..." Read more
"...But, as the book progressed, the timelines became more closely knitted; the book became more understandable and therefore more readable...." Read more
"A challenging book with dark themes and connections to history. It’s sad and tense...." Read more
"...These aliens see all time in a single moment...." Read more
Customers find the book heart-wrenching and humorous. They describe it as a classic that evokes a full range of emotions from horror to tragedy. The book is described as profound, revealing a rare glimpse behind emotional damage and coping skills. Readers describe it as simple yet complex, challenging with dark themes and connections to history.
"A challenging book with dark themes and connections to history. It’s sad and tense...." Read more
"...of Vonnegut - moralistic yet nihilistic, pointless yet poignant, heartbreaking, uproarious, and deeply human while at the same time bizarre and alien..." Read more
"...It has a symmetry and repetition that is endearing and captivating rather than annoying...." Read more
"This is a combination of a lot of different things. It's funny, yet sad, and quick, but deep...." Read more
Customers have different views on the plot. Some find it intriguing and complex, while others feel it lacks a compelling narrative. The story is described as bizarre, ambiguous, and complex.
"...The disparate plot (what little there is) tells the strange life of Billy Pilgrim, a WWII veteran who lived through the bombing of Dresden, one of..." Read more
"...a holocaust novel (it's not), allow it to be smart, silly, funny and weird and an enjoyable adventure." Read more
"...is that the story Vonnegut tells resembles war itself: a kaleidoscope of insanity, a series of Cubist paintings set in motion, with little apparent..." Read more
"...The story as a whole to me, feels just a bit disjointed, and feels like the author had to work very hard to get an entire book out of it...." Read more
Reviews with images
Moldy and annotated
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2021I read this novel as a young man and again later in my 30s. I thought I'd give it another read to see if it's as strange as I'd remembered. What a weird and quirky novel. Part war story, part science fiction, and part bizarro, observational comedy, I couldn't explain it concisely if I tried. The disparate plot (what little there is) tells the strange life of Billy Pilgrim, a WWII veteran who lived through the bombing of Dresden, one of the most horrific events of WWII. But he soon becomes "unstuck in time" and we careen back and forth throughout his life: his time as an optometrist, his time in WWII, the time he was abducted by aliens called Tralfamadorians, who see the entirety of time all at once. Strange story. Is Billy’s unstuck state an analogy for insanity? Could be. Vonnegut (he is the narrator of the novel and appears in the Dresden part of the story) tells this strange story with an empathetic lilt as he retells many of the disturbing events that Billy and the other characters endure, punctuating any mention of death with his well-known phrase, "So it goes."
Since the Tralfamadorians see time as a whole and not in a linear fashion, I imagine that’s how Vonnegut approached this story. Told in sections that are out of order (literally and figuratively), the one thing that is a constant is Vonnegut’s narrative voice. How to describe it? Silly, empathetic, philosophical, observant, whimsical, searing, unapologetic. A hilariously observant passage finds Billy Pilgrim in a train car filled with war prisoners during WWII. He’s sitting next to a hobo who is not a prisoner; he’s just on the train for the ride. The train car is filthy, despondent, cold, and the prisoners are hungry, tired, dejected. The hobo tells Billy, “This ain’t bad. This ain’t nothing at all.” It’s all in your perspective, Vonnegut seems to offer the reader. So it goes.
I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and I highly recommend it. I would give this novel 5 stars.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2024Jumps around a lot (with the time travel, of course). Not a lot of tactical details about the fire-bombing of Dresden, but plenty on the aftermath.
Reminiscent of Forrest Gump, with jumps to different events in his life, anchored by a soul-crushing family life.
Worth a read ... just to say you did. Also interested in his "Mother Night " (Campbell referenced here) and the movie with Nick Nolte.
Would love to find Sci-Fi books by Kilgore Trout ... if he weren't "madey-uppy" by Vonnegut. ;)
- Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2024This was a straight-forward and "fun" book to read, and it kept me entertained from start to finish.
Slaughterhouse-Five was not laden with ancient language terms or obscure references - so I was able to leave the thesaurus closed and enjoy the novel as I would imagine the author intended.
Thank You
- Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2018Way, way back, I barely knew the name of Kurt Vonnegut. He was not part of the science fiction “ghetto” - some SF fans will no doubt know what I’m talking about – so how could he be worth knowing? Then I grew up, read some of his work, admitted my mistake, and became one of his biggest fans.
Yet, somehow, I kept missing what is no doubt one of his greatest books, SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE. Surely everybody now knows Vonnegut’s take on the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II while Vonnegut was a prisoner of war.
The genius is that the story Vonnegut tells resembles war itself: a kaleidoscope of insanity, a series of Cubist paintings set in motion, with little apparent rhyme or reason. Vonnegut seems to have written himself into the story, though the main character, Billy Pilgrim, is presumably made up. One would assume this of Billy’s adventures: Randomly slipping in and out of time, visiting with an extraterrestrial race from the planet Tralfmadore that kept him in a zoo where he mated with a young starlet, and so on.
Billy is, truth be told, like most of us: Nondescript, mainly ineffectual, stumbling through a series of random events swirling around us in confusing ways. Much of the book consists of events during World War II – leading up to the firebombing of Dresden and its aftermath, though they mingle with Billy’s life before and after the war.
Vonnegut does offer a few observations, though they can be depressing. One of my favorites is: “…there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.” In a similar vein, but less depressing: “The nicest veterans … I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.”
One of the things I like about Vonnegut is how he often provides a philosophy that sounds as if it should be true. In this book it is the teachings of the extraterrestrials. Billy says at one point: “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist… It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’”
I haven’t decided yet if that passage is depressing or not.
And there is this piece of Tralfamadoran advice: “That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.”
Actually, that might indeed be pretty good advice.
SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE is full of such moments.
Or, as Vonnegut might say, “So it goes.”
Top reviews from other countries
- Israel Mar MartinezReviewed in Mexico on October 13, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Recommended
It was an awesome book, I enjoyed it a lot.
-
SertanReviewed in Turkey on November 29, 2024
2.0 out of 5 stars Hasarlı ürün.
Kitabın basımı, sayfaların rengi, font gerçekten hoş lakin ürünüm hasarlı geldi, arka tarafı ezilmiş neredeyse yırtılmış bir kondisyondaydı. Ancak gelmesini heyecanla beklediğim için geri iade etmek ya da değişim sürecini beklemek istemiyorum o nedenle buruk bir şekilde okuyorum.
- Jens RoedlerReviewed in Germany on October 15, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars O tempora o mores
Nobody writes like Vonnegut or Henry Miller anymore. Deeply satisfying read and perfect description of the warped human mind.
- RGMReviewed in Canada on August 8, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars A simple, elegant classic
I hadn't read SL5 for 40 years, originally as an undergrad. It is as good or better than I remembered it, with the short, vignette-like episodes that make it almost impossible to put down (much like Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut's other great novel). There is a plain-spoken, everyday humour that somehow makes a book about something as heart-rending as the massacre of an entire city remarkably humane and even funny. Structurally, the book takes the events of one man's life and shuffles them like a deck of playing cards; it is tribute to KV's genius that the result is brilliantly coherent and logical, and easy to follow. It stands as the best and most empathic novel about trauma I have ever read, and KV was well ahead of his time in crafting the interplay between trauma, dissociation, re-experiencing and emotional distancing the are now recognized as part of PTSD. Vonnegut is one of the great American novelists of the 20th century; it is important that his work is not lost in the passage of time. I highly recommend SL5.
- Binding is not upto the mark. Pages are almost coming out as I read.Reviewed in India on May 16, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Book binding
Binding is not upto the mark. Pages are coming
out as I read.