Book summary

SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE, a best-seller when it was first published in 1969, brought Kurt Vonnegut to prominence as a major voice in American fiction. Vonnegut was a POW held in Dresden in 1945 when the city was attacked by American bombers and virtually obliterated, leaving more than 130,000 people dead. He uses that event as the climax of this satirical and horrifying anti-war novel, in which a young man named Billy Pilgrim experiences much of what Vonnegut himself saw during the war. Unlike his creator however, Pilgrim has become "unstuck in time" following his abduction by aliens thus affording him the opportunity to travel freely across time, visiting different periods in his life in an attempt to sort out his complicated history. The book's anti-war stance, one reason for its success with the counterculture of the Vietnam War generation, is based on Vonnegut's premise that the dehumanization of people is to be avoided at all costs, and it is this stance that accounts for the novel's continued popularity.

Media reviews

"What I...applaud is the marvelous comic scenes with the British prisoners of war; the control in the war scenes; the understated bitterness with which he handles the American soldiers....When Vonnegut stops preaching and is funny, I take him very seriously."