Slaughterhouse Five; or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a Fourth-Generation German-American Now Living in Easy Circumstances on Cape Cod (and Smoking Too Much) Who, as an American Infantry Scout Hors de Combat, as a Prisoner of War, Witnessed the Fire-Bombing of Dresden, Germany, the Florence of the Elbe, a Long Time Ago, and Survived to Tell the Tale: This Is a Novel Somewhat in the Telegraphic Schizophrenic Manner of Tales of the Planet Tralfamadore, Where The Flying Saucers Come From
1969

	Hardcover edition of Slaughterhouse-Five from Amazon.com
	Paperback copy of the novel from Amazon.com. The Amazon page was 25 pages of sample text.
	Need a quick help for Slaughterhouse-Five? Grab Barron Notes or Cliffs Notes from Amazon.com. The little Barrons piece is how first I got into Slaughterhouse-Five.
	1969 NY Times review
	NPR commentary on the novel's 25th year anniversary
	Indiana Historical Society's ''Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse Five''
	Censorship of SH5 as ''pornographic''
	Themes of SH5 by Marek Vit
	Buy the "Slaughterhouse Five" movie on video from Amazon.com. Jeepers, I simply love this film!
	George Roy Hill's "Slaughterhouse Five" on DVD! Get it now from Amazon.com.
	IMDB's comprehensive filmography for Vonnegut with thorough details on SH5
	Check out the film's Japanese movie poster
	Slaughterhouse-Five as a play
	Slaughterhouse-Five as opera!

Chapter Two. ''When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that 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'.''

Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: Broadening Views, 1968-1988. ''On the title page of Slaughterhouse-Five Vonnegut invites the reader to see the book as 'a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore.' With its short chapters and paragraphs, its short sets of sentences or paragraphs with spaces between them, the novel has a physical resemblance to the Tralfamadorian model. Many of the juxtaposed segments do not relate sequentially or thematically but together build a total impression like a montage. Events from two periods (1944-1945 and 1968) and from other points in the life of the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, are intermixed. His life is not revealed chronologically, by beginning in medias res, or by flashback; rather, the reader knows its end from the start, and the parts are filled in, from all segments of his life, as the ovel progresses.

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Gale Research (Farmington Hills, MI)
Contemporary Authors,49. ''In Slaughterhouse Five, -- Or the Children's Crusade, Vonnegut finally delivers a complete treatise on the World War II bombing of Dresden. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a very young infantry scout* who is captured in the Battle of the Bulge and quartered in a Dresden slaughterhouse where he and other prisoners are employed in the production of a vitamin supplement for pregnant women. During the February 13, 1945, firebombing by Allied aircraft, the prisoners take shelter in an underground meat locker. When they emerge, the city has been levelled and they are forced to dig corpses out of the rubble. The story of Billy Pilgrim is the story of Kurt Vonnegut who was captured and survived the firestorm in which 135,000 German civilians perished, more than the number of deaths in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Robert Scholes sums up the theme of Slaughterhouse Five in the New York Times Book Review, writing: 'Be kind. Don't hurt. Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot's wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them.' The reviewer concludes that 'Slaughterhouse Five is an extraordinary success. It is a book we need to read, and to reread.'

The popularity of Slaughterhouse Five is due, in part, to its timeliness; it deals with many issues that were vital to the late sixties: war, ecology, overpopulation, and consumerism. Klinkowitz, writing in Literary Subversions. New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism, sees larger reasons for the book's success: 'Kurt Vonnegut's fiction of the 1960s is the popular artifact which may be the fairest example of American cultural change. . . . Shunned as distastefully low-brow . . . and insufficiently commercial to suit the exploitative tastes of high-power publishers, Vonnegut's fiction limped along for years on the genuinely democratic basis of family magazine and pulp paperback circulation. Then in the late 1960s, as the culture as a whole exploded, Vonnegut was able to write and publish a novel, Slaughterhouse Five, which so perfectly caught America's transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age.'

Writing in Critique, Wayne D. McGinnis comments that in Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut 'avoids framing his story in linear narration, choosing a circular structure. Such a view of the art of the novel has much to do with the protagonist . . . Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist who provides corrective lenses for Earthlings. For Pilgrim, who learns of a new view of life as he becomes ''unstuck in time,'' the lenses are corrective metaphorically as well as physically. Quite early in the exploration of Billy's life the reader learns that ''frames are where the money is.'' . . . Historical events like the bombing of Dresden are usually 'read' in the framework of moral and historical interpretation.' McGinnis feels that the novel's cyclical nature is inextricably bound up with the themes of 'time, death, and renewal,' and goes on to say that 'the most important function of "so it goes" [a phrase that recurs at each death in the book] . . . , is its imparting a cyclical quality to the novel, both in form and content. Paradoxically, the expression of fatalism serves as a source of renewal, a situation typical of Vonnegut's works,for it enables the novel to go on despite -- even because of -- the proliferation of deaths.'''

*Chris' Note: Throughout The Vonnegut Web novel pages I offer the appropriate section of the fine Vonnegut essay from Gale Research's Contemporary Authors series, volume 49. In the above instance there is an error. While Vonnegut himself was an infantry scout in WWII, Billy Pilgrim is a chaplain's assistant.

Early editions of
Slaughterhouse-Five**
NEW YORK: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1969.
FINLAND: Messrs Tammi, 1969.
TOKYO: Hayakawa Shobo, 1969.
STOCKHOLM: P.A. Norstedt, 1969.
HAMBURG: Hoffman und Campe, 1969.
ITALY: Mondadori, 1969.
FRANCE: Edition du Seuil, 1969.
LONDON: Jonathan Cape, 1969.
BARCELONA: Editorial Grijalbo, 1970.
COPENHAGEN: Gyldendal, 1970.
AMSTERDAM: Meulenhoff, 1970 (Slachthuis viff, of De Kinderkruistacht, trans. Else Hoog).
POLAND: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1970.
NEW YORK: Delta-Dell, 1970.
OSLO: Gyldendal, 1970.
STOCKHOLM: P.A. Norstedt, 1971.
HUNGARY: Artijus, 1971.
BRAZIL: Editora Artenova Ltda., 1971.

** The definitive bibliography is ''The Kurt Vonnegut: A Comprehensive Bibliography'' by Asa B. Pieratt, Jr., Julie Huffman-klinkowitz and Jerome Klinkowitz, (Hamdon, CT: Archon Books, 1987).

Letter to NY Times Editor. ''I clicked up the (Amazon) top 20 books ordered at West Point, and mixed in with The Art of War, The Face of War, some World War II memoirs and books on physical fitness was Vonnegut's book, which could have been titled 'The Face of Massacre....'

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Adaptations: Slaughterhouse-Five as a play and opera

BOOK:  Slaughterhouse-Five  ·  NY Times Review Tralfamadorian Structure · NPR Commentary · SH5 as Opera · SH5 as Play RELATED:  Complete Writings  ·  Kilgore Trout

© 1997-2005 Chris Huber, Durham NC (USA)  ·  Last Updated 02/05/05

Also by Chris Huber: Whyaduck Productions  ·  Which Circle?