Slaughterhouse 5 ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I didn’t know much about this book before adding it to my list, just that it was an anti-war book that many people agreed should be read at least once by everyone.

Before I start my rambling thoughts, you need to know the basics of the plot:

Billy Pilgrim is a prisoner of war, optometrist, time traveller and alien abductee. The major theme in the book is innocence faced with apocalypse and also centres around the bombing of Dresden.

There is a lot to unpack with this book so I’m gonna start off by saying I liked it quite a bit.

First, I want to talk about the main character, Billy Pilgrim, who is an odd, quite pathetic man. I know very little about Billy; I don’t know how old he is, what time period he is currently living during the events of the book and how the madness that is his life is affecting him.

Now I’m gonna get into time travel. Unlike Doctor Who and most other time travel related stories, there is no chronology to the travelling. There is no linear timeline to this novel and no intentional time travel is done. Often, Billy Pilgrim closes his eyes in one time period of his life and opens them in a different one. At some points in the novel, it does become a little hard to follow what’s just happened in that particular time period as you’ve jumped around a lot in between.

A common motif throughout the story is that all moments in time are happening simultaneously. It’s a little hard to describe briefly in a short review like this so I recommend that if you want to know more read the book. Unsurprisingly (with this novel), the aliens that abduct Billy teach him this way of thinking whilst he is an exhibit in their zoo.

The alien abduction is mentioned long before you read about it and seems a little like the ramblings of a mad man, but then it happens. I wouldn’t say the abduction being canon makes it any less mad, but somehow, bizarrely, it ties the story together.

The central story of the Dresden bombing is not light hearted like the rest of the book. These parts include prisoners of war, labour camps and the transport to them and some of the many deaths that occurred regularly during the Second World War. There are some horrific details mentioned that made me feel a little sick, and to make things worse those details are usually throw away comments.

I think including the nonsense about aliens and time travel made Vonnegut’s war story a lot easier to stomach.

Now it sounds like I’ve been quite negative about this book, but I really enjoyed it. I would give it five stars, but I’m left with too many unanswered (maybe even impossible-to-answer) questions. So, in the end, this classic novel is only four stars!

C🌙