Name: Slaughterhouse-Five
Rating: 4.045454545454546 (55 reviews)

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Slaughterhouse-Five

Ans Rizwan

Greg Talbot

John Wayne war glories are absent. Anti-war haranguing, like that of :Johnny Got Your Gun” is absent to. Like it's brother in arms “Catch-22”, “Slaughterhouse 5” is richly trenched in a perverse sense of humor. A biting, impersonal passiveness pervades this Pilgrim's journey from American to beautiful, to Dresden the ruins. His shifts in time do not pivot his ever center awareness of a richer race of aliens that have chosen to give him a zoo habitat, and the awakening to the non-linear life experiences. There is a certain dignity that is lost as the story goes on. As a reader, we start to put the clues together of Billy's reality. We start feel the powerlessness beaten into him as a solider is extended to him throughout the portals of his life. And Vonnegut's “Sermon on the Mount” Christianity is degraded by an imposing self-righteous one. There is a lot of personal experience that Vonnegut appears to bring to the table. This would be the novel that propelled him as a writer to the mainstream. There Vonnegut continued to write impressively (Galapagoos being my personal favorite), and remained a strong patriotic voice for a values-orientated America. Slaughterhouse 5 remains one of the most defining books of the past 50 years. A brilliant novel that narrates an original story, and reminds us of our own big-headedness and insensitivity to others. So it goes.

Lila R E

Kurt Vonnegut

Fraser Simons

Love how theme and structure are unified for what is being said about war and veterans. Prose are excellent, of course. Expected no less. And interactions were great. I did not really connect with the characters due to the structure and the constant jumping around. The psychic distance is pretty far away, and I think that’s on purpose. It just makes it so it felt more academic than emotional. Its also something I think most people agree with already, knowing what we know about the effects of war on the human body and mind, just as it’s widely accepted that various administrations have perpetuated the forever war the US needs/wants for its imperialism. 

I imagine this was very very subversive and mind blowing when it was published. It’s probably a testament to its publication, and works like it, that these notions are in the cultural consciousness and taken for granted. That should give the text more added weight. But I rate books as it relates to my expectations, which I think is very fair and scales with popular books, classics, or indies, etc. it allows me to rate things favourably compared to emotional reaction or other things. And this does exceed my expectations. There’s just no room in my rating system for marking something as an important text. Maybe I’ll make a text. But I think classic status applies to this for that reason anyways. Maybe my reviewers opinion on the matter has no baring regardless. The culture has spoken!

Side note: I was about to slap someone if I heard “and so it goes” or “and so on” again. 95% of the time it wasn’t needed. It became really annoying.

Slaughterhouse-Five

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