Notes
- I’m sure much must have been written about this book, both from a literary perspective1 and from a philosophical viewpoint2. I’ve not read anything of this yet, though I have read and enjoyed the book.
- While the book can be – and no doubt usually is – read stand-alone, some of the characters had featured in earlier works.
- Clearly, this is an ‘anti-war’ book, but I need no convincing so my main interest is in the book’s philosophy of time3. I may say a few things on the other aspect of the book in due course.
- The overall philosophy of time is that of the 4-dimensional block. All of spacetime is timelessly in existence. This is in contrast to the ‘Growing Block’ view, where the future is open, but the past is real and henceforth always there.
- It is said that the Tralfamadorians can see in 4 dimensions: they can see the ‘4-dimensional worms’ beloved of perdurantists4. There are also supposed to be various other – presumably spatial – dimensions that Earthlings can’t perceive. I wasn’t clear how important this aspect was – it seemed to be introduced as an aside to support some unlikely ideas; I assume this was intended as comedy.
- In the ‘Moving Spotlight’ view, the whole 4-D manifold exists timelessly, but the ‘spotlight’ of the present moves around and along it. Maybe this is more or less what Vonnegut has in mind, except the Tralfamadorians can see it all at once, but prefer to focus on the ‘nice bits’.
- Billy Pilgrim has to ‘time travel5’ to other times and places, but he seems to ‘remember’ both future and past times. He knows how things end up (including the time of his own death, and that his marriage will be mostly OK).
- Central to the Tralfamadorians’ understanding of time is that there is no such thing as free will6. Things just happen and can’t be otherwise; while they know how the universe will end, and that they will be the cause of it, there’s nothing they can do to prevent it.
- I suspect there’s a bit of a muddle here. In a standard ‘Growing Block’ model, there could be free will while the Block is growing. But, once the Block is completed, everything is fixed, and anyone finding themselves at a particular time would do just what they did. But there would be no knowledge of the future at that time, and they are not constrained by the future. It’s just how it goes (but not in Vonnegut’s sense).
- It’s said that this is a Sci-Fi book, but it seems to me that this is a literary device. The Tralfamadorians are described as looking like toilet plungers, which doesn’t sound serious. Billy becomes interested in the fictional Sci-Fi author Kilgore Trout7, whose stories show some striking parallels to Billy’s experiences with the Tralfamadorians.
- Billy Pilgrim’s daughter takes it that Billy’s tales about the Tralfamadorians come from his brain injury, and – in a way – it would be better that way. However, it seems that Billy had been ‘abducted’ prior to this and has only now decided to talk about it in public.
- This is – I suspect – a man’s book, or was intended as such when written. Some of the passages are rather distasteful; some of the characters exceptionally nasty.
- I’ve retained the material I copied from Amazon prior to reading the book for comparison with my own thoughts.
Amazon Book Description
- ‘An extraordinary success. A book to read and reread. He is a true artist’
→ New York Times Book Review
- Billy Pilgrim – hapless barber's assistant, successful optometrist, alien abductee, senile widower and soldier – has become unstuck in time. Hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse in Dresden, with the city and its inhabitants burning above him, he finds himself a survivor of one of the most deadly and destructive battles of the Second World War. But when, exactly? How did he get here? And how does he get out?
- Travel through time and space on the shoulders of Vonnegut himself. This is a book about war. Listen to what he has to say: it is of the utmost urgency.
- ‘The great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.’
→ George Saunders
- Amazon Review: It took Vonnegut more than 20 years to put his Dresden experiences into words. He explained, "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again." Slaughterhouse Five is a powerful novel incorporating a number of genres. Only those who have fought in wars can say whether it represents the experience well. However, what the novel does do is invite the reader to look at the absurdity of war. Human versus human, hedonist politicians pressing buttons and ordering millions to their deaths all for ideologies many cannot even comprehend. Flicking between the US, 1940's Germany and Tralfamadore, Vonnegut's semi-autobiographical protagonist Billy Pilgrim finds himself very lost. One minute he is being viewed as a specimen in a Tralfamadorian Zoo, the next he is wandering a post-apocalyptic city looking for corpses. Slaughterhouse Five - Or The Children's Crusade A Duty-Dance with Death is a remarkable blend of black humour, irony, the truth and the absurd. The author regards his work a "failure", millions of readers do not. Released the same time bombs were falling on South East Asia, this title caused controversy and awakening. Essential reading for all. So it goes8.
→ Jon Smith
- Reviews
- Marvellous...the writing is pungent, the antics uproarious, the humour suitably black, the wit sharp as a hypodermic
→ Daily Telegraph
- Mr Vonnegut knows a great deal about what is probably the largest massacre in modern history - the fire-bombing of Dresden in 1945. Slaughterhouse Five is a reaction to the event by one of our most gifted and incisive novelists. A work of keen literary artistry
→ Joseph Heller, author of 'Catch-22'
- The individuality of Vonnegut's style is a curious yet perfect match for the pain of the emotional content. A humane, human book that always remains a work of art rather than biography, no matter how apparent the author's presence
→ Kate Atkinson
- Unique...one of the writers who map our landscapes for us, who give names to the places we know best
→ Doris Lessing
- Funny, satirical, compelling, outrageous, fanciful, mordant, fecund and at the bottom-line, simply stoned-out-of-its-mind
→ Los Angeles Times
- About the Author: Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. An army intelligence scout during the Second World War, he was captured by the Germans and witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired his classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. After the war he worked as a police reporter, an advertising copywriter and a public relations man for General Electric. His first novel Player Piano (1952) achieved underground success. Cat's Cradle (1963) was hailed by Graham Greene as 'one of the best novels of the year by one of the ablest living authors'. His eighth book, Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969 and was a literary and commercial success, and was made into a film in 1972. Vonnegut is the author of thirteen other novels, three collections of stories and five non-fiction books. Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.
Amazon Customer Review – Positive
- "Slaughter-House Five" by Kurt Vonneget is by far one of the best books I've read in ages. And that's better than "Pride and Prejudice". :-)
- It is a challenging, but entertaining, quick and easy read. It's a chopped up narrative but somehow all makes sense.
- We jump around between the fire-bombing of Dresden in WW2, various decades in post-war America, and another planet.
- As an American POW, Vonnegut did himself witness the fire-bombing of Dresden just like the hero "Billy Pilgrim" who is an everyman figure. The book is Vonnegut's experience transformed into fiction.
- In the two autobiographical chapters that top and tail the book, Vonnegut explains that he was unable to write the "proper" book about Dresden. It seems likely that Vonnegut and Pilgrim are both suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This is never explicitly stated in medical terms, and it is never made clear whether the time-travel and fantasy are real, the effects of Pilgrim's psyche attempting to protect itself, or the effects of brain injury.
- And in fact this ambiguity doesn't matter because the book is about subjective experience where resolution may never come, and the message of the book is that this "is OK". In short, Vonnegut is trying to reassure himself about his experiences i.e. the book is about mending. The death toll at Dresden was higher than with the atomic bombs - the Allies hushed this up for some considerable time.
- The author has a deep need to be a witness. Even though Billy Pilgrim is a version of the author, Vonnegut cannot help but put himself in some scenes that actually occurred, as a background American soldier.
- The writing is blackly amusing from start to finish, and Vonnegut frequently trashes the commericalism of Americans and the shallowness of their lives, sometimes in sci-fi metaphor, sometimes not, with a few slices of his pen.
- This book was not initially what I expected at all, but as I got towards the end it became more and more like what I expected. On the surface the writing is about the "small things", however, the deeper themes are running underneath and slowly build up power.
- The writing is poetic, themes and language resonate across scenes separated by space and time.
- I think I am correct is saying that this is commonly regarded as a science fiction novel. Science fiction is definitely a theme of the novel, and science fiction is definitely woven into the novel, but I personally don't think the whole is science fiction. However, the novel does deliver everything science fiction should, but in my view there is considerably more to the book.
Amazon Customer Review – Less Positive
- Kind of sci-fi, antiwar, psychedelic of its time. ‘Cult classic’, sure but doesn’t transcend 60s.
- This was an interesting read, for sure, and I understood why some banned the book, for its antiwar stance and its revelation of the allied bombing of Dresden, and the moral stickiness of actions which sacrifice the lives of civilians ‘to win the war’ Obviously at the time of its writing America was engaged in another war.
- The world is once again in situations, both in Ukraine and in the Middle East, where ordinary people leading their ordinary lives, are being targeted. Loss of lives as ‘collateral damage’. Everybody loses.
- Vonnegut writes an interesting foreword and afterword to the story of Billy Pilgrim, POW during the Second World War, and survivor of that mass bombing of Dresden. Some of the story here is Vonnegut’s own, but he offers himself as a possibly unreliable narrator, too, as he himself was a POW and survivor of Dresden.
- Billy Pilgrim, his fictional invention, is a strange and broken man, constantly ‘time travelling’ or flipping backwards and forwards in his own life, both before, after, and during his wartime experiences. He is indeed a ‘Pilgrim’ into the damaged landscape of his own psyche. This is also a fairly unique way of exploring PTSD, Billy’s stability is blown by the horror of his experiences. He spends time in and out of mental hospitals, and believes he has been abducted by aliens.
- Some of this is very funny, in a very dark way indeed. The aliens who ‘abduct’ Billy also provide a kind of cosmic view of human beings.
- I did find this, though, rather imprisoned in its time.
In-Page Footnotes ("Vonnegut (Kurt) - Slaughterhouse 5, or The Children's Crusade - A Duty-dance with Death")
Footnote 1: Footnote 2: Footnote 7: Footnote 8:
Book Comment
Vintage Classics; 1st edition (21 Mar. 1991)
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2026
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)