Slaughterhouse-five
A Duty Dance With Death
Vonnegut, Kurt
Paperback
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The 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut has been on my "to obtain and read" list for as long as I can remember.  It ranks somewhere around Clockwork Orange among the books that I feel I need to read, for one reason or another.  Cult fiction has always interested me, and this one is on that ambiguous list of books that if you haven't read it you really should (usually the ones you can find in just about every list that exists on the internet for cult fiction, and usually these books have been subject to book bans and controversy).  There's always certain reasons to read a book, historical reasons, literary ground breaking material, controversy, hype, you name it - and one can't really have an opinion on the importance of a novel one hasn't read - which pretty much means you have to read it.  I've read a few "meta-fiction" novels - mainly badly translated Russian texts (I had an interesting Modern Fiction class one semester) - but as much as I disliked most of them there's always a few good one's out there.  Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis is probably one of my favorites that I've had a chance to read (and if you haven't click on the link on the left labelled "Novella" and read it). 

One of the reasons that Slaughterhouse-Five is on my to read list is because Vonnegut's signature disjointed and discontinuous narrative style - a disruption of the more "average" or "accepted" strictly chronological time-sequence order of most novels.  Vonnegut's novel does not present it's story in one continuous linear sequence of events.  Since the protagonist experiences something he calls being "unstuck" from time - and therefore experiences (or believes he experiences) his life out of order, all jumbled up - he goes back and forth through time with no order or formula to the experience.  This style of writing would have been somewhat noveau during the time period Slaughterhouse-Five was written - and would therefore be significant in the history of literature as well as a nice break from commonality. 

Slaughterhouse-Five was nominated for best-novel Nebula Award, and best-novel Hugo Award in 1970 - both of which it lost to Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.  It appeared in Time's list of the 100 all-time-best English-language novels written since 1923.  It is also the 67th entry to the American Library Association's list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-1999.  A film adaptation was made in 1972, but was a box office flop - although it was critically praised and won the Prix du Jury at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, a Hugo and a Saturn Award.

Summary
Slaughterhous-Five is one of  the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the  infamous fire-bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's  odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey  of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning  in what we are afraid to know.

Book Excerpt

ll 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." ....