© 1994 National Public Radio
All Things Considered (NPR 4:30 pm ET)
March 17, 1994

25th Anniversary of 'Slaughterhouse Five' Released
ALAN CHEUSE

Noah Adams, Host: Twenty-five years ago, a novel appeared with these darkly whimsical words on the title page. ''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 firebombing of Dresden, Germany, the Florence of the Elbe, a long time ago and survived to tell the tale.'' The novel was greeted by many as one of the most powerful anti-war books of our time. Now a 25th anniversary edition has been published, prompting our book reviewer, Alan Cheuse, to do some rereading.

Alan Cheuse, Commentator: I didn't know what was going to happen when I opened the pages of this novel again. So much of what I remembered as the really great stuff of my early reading days just hasn't held up the second time around. But here's Vonnegut with all his breezy pessimism, or should I call it pessimistic breeziness of style? His pages just as vital, perhaps more so, than the first time I plunged into this book.

It's the story, as some of you may recall, of a World War II veteran named Billy Pilgrim. Pilgrim, a survivor of the monstrous Allied firebombing raid on Dresden where he was interned as a German POW in the spring of 1945, has come, as he calls it, 'unstuck in time.' And the novel swings with great panache back and forth between Billy's youth, his wartime encounters with death and destruction, and his post-war life. It's a life spent not only on Earth in mental hospitals but also in the planet Tralfalmador, where, as he tells us, he will spend a good part of eternity having been scooped up and taken there by a crew from an intergalactic spaceship. Zooming back and forth in time in a novel that swings back and forth from realism to science fiction and back again, Billy's cracked vision of war and peace helps us to see ourselves in our own place in time a little more clearly than we might have before.

This is a wonderfully understated little satire. And after 25 years, we can still respond to its deep felt cry for sanity in a world we never made and hark in all the more to its famous four word refrain that signifies the trivial and the devastating passage of all things, 'and so it goes.'

Adams: Novelist Alan Cheuse. He teaches at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

© 1994 National Public Radio