Just finished reading Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut...and boy am i perplexed 
What a weird book.
What a weird book.
Just finished reading Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut...
- Thread starter chiwawa626
- Start date
When I picked up this book, I was expecting to read about slaughterhouses like in The Jungle. All I got was anti-war messages.
Vonnegut is not your average story teller- I definately enjoy them, though (I've read six that I can think of, plus I own a few I haven't gotten to yet). My favorite part is when the bombings are going in reverse order, so that the bombs are taken up into the planes, disassembled, and the components buried in the ground where they can't hurt anyone (I can't remember quite how it goes- its been awhile). If you didn't like Slaughterhouse V, then you probably wouldn't like his other stuff; just know the others, for the most part, don't jump back and forth in time like this one. They do, however, usually leave you feeling a little off.
Pliablemoose
Lifer
- Oct 11, 1999
- 25,195
- 0
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I wrote a paper on that book without actually reading one page of text. War books bore me to death... *yawn*
hmm i need to re read it,
read it in 1973 0r '74
" Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born in Indianapolis in 1922, a descendant of prominent German-American families. His father was an architect and his mother was a noted beauty. Both spoke German fluently but declined to teach Kurt the language in light of widespread anti-German sentiment following World War I. Family money helped send Vonnegut's two siblings to private schools. The Great Depression hit hard in the 1930s, though, and the family placed Kurt in public school while it moved to more modest accommodations. While in high school, Vonnegut edited the school's daily newspaper. He attended college at Cornell for a little over two years, with instructions from his father and brother to study chemistry, a subject in which he did not excel. He also wrote for the Cornell Daily Sun. In 1943 he enlisted in the U.S. Army. In 1944 his mother committed suicide, and Vonnegut was taken prisoner following the Battle of the Bulge, in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium.
After the war, Vonnegut married and entered a master's degree program in anthropology at the University of Chicago. He also worked as a reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. His master's thesis, titled Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales, was rejected. Vonnegut departed for Schenectady, New York, to take a job in public relations at a General Electric research laboratory.
Vonnegut left GE in 1951 to devote himself full time to writing. Throughout the 1950s, Vonnegut published numerous short stories in national magazines. Player Piano, his first novel, appeared in 1952. Sirens of Titan was published in 1959, followed by Mother Night (1962), Cat's Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), and his most highly praised work, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Vonnegut continues to write prolifically.
Slaughterhouse-Five treats one of the most horrific massacres in European history?the World War II firebombing of Dresden, a city in eastern Germany, on February 13, 1945?with mock-serious humor and clear antiwar sentiment. Over 130,000 civilians died in Dresden, roughly the same number of deaths that resulted from the Allied bombing raids on Tokyo and from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, both of which also occurred in 1945. Inhabitants of Dresden were incinerated or suffocated in a matter of hours as a firestorm sucked up and consumed available oxygen. The scene on the ground was one of unimaginable destruction.
The novel is based on Kurt Vonnegut's own experience in World War II. In the novel, a prisoner of war witnesses and survives the Allied forces' firebombing of Dresden. Vonnegut, like his protagonist Billy Pilgrim, emerged from a meat locker beneath a slaughterhouse into the moonscape of burned-out Dresden. His surviving captors put him to work finding, burying, and burning bodies. His task continued until the Russians came and the war ended. Vonnegut survived by chance, confined as a prisoner of war (POW) in a well-insulated meat locker, and so missed the cataclysmic moment of attack, emerging the day after into the charred ruins of a once-beautiful cityscape. Vonnegut has said that he always intended to write about the experience but found himself incapable of doing so for more than twenty years. Although he attempted to describe in simple terms what happened and to create a linear narrative, this strategy never worked for him. Billy Pilgrim's unhinged time-shifting, a mechanism for dealing with the unfathomable aggression and mass destruction he witnesses, is Vonnegut's solution to the problem of telling an untellable tale.
Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five as a response to war. "It is so short and jumbled and jangled," he explains in Chapter 1, "because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." The jumbled structure of the novel and the long delay between its conception and completion serve as testaments to a very personal struggle with heart-wrenching material. But the timing of the novel's publication also deserves notice: in 1969, the United States was in the dismal midst of the Vietnam War. Vonnegut was an outspoken pacifist and critic of the conflict. Slaughterhouse-Five revolves around the willful incineration of a hundred thousand civilians, in a city of extremely dubious military significance, during an arguably just war. Appearing when it did, then, Slaughterhouse-Five made a forceful statement about the campaign in Vietnam, a war in which incendiary technology was once more being employed against nonmilitary targets in the name of a dubious cause."
does that help???
info from here
read it in 1973 0r '74
" Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born in Indianapolis in 1922, a descendant of prominent German-American families. His father was an architect and his mother was a noted beauty. Both spoke German fluently but declined to teach Kurt the language in light of widespread anti-German sentiment following World War I. Family money helped send Vonnegut's two siblings to private schools. The Great Depression hit hard in the 1930s, though, and the family placed Kurt in public school while it moved to more modest accommodations. While in high school, Vonnegut edited the school's daily newspaper. He attended college at Cornell for a little over two years, with instructions from his father and brother to study chemistry, a subject in which he did not excel. He also wrote for the Cornell Daily Sun. In 1943 he enlisted in the U.S. Army. In 1944 his mother committed suicide, and Vonnegut was taken prisoner following the Battle of the Bulge, in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium.
After the war, Vonnegut married and entered a master's degree program in anthropology at the University of Chicago. He also worked as a reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. His master's thesis, titled Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales, was rejected. Vonnegut departed for Schenectady, New York, to take a job in public relations at a General Electric research laboratory.
Vonnegut left GE in 1951 to devote himself full time to writing. Throughout the 1950s, Vonnegut published numerous short stories in national magazines. Player Piano, his first novel, appeared in 1952. Sirens of Titan was published in 1959, followed by Mother Night (1962), Cat's Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), and his most highly praised work, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Vonnegut continues to write prolifically.
Slaughterhouse-Five treats one of the most horrific massacres in European history?the World War II firebombing of Dresden, a city in eastern Germany, on February 13, 1945?with mock-serious humor and clear antiwar sentiment. Over 130,000 civilians died in Dresden, roughly the same number of deaths that resulted from the Allied bombing raids on Tokyo and from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, both of which also occurred in 1945. Inhabitants of Dresden were incinerated or suffocated in a matter of hours as a firestorm sucked up and consumed available oxygen. The scene on the ground was one of unimaginable destruction.
The novel is based on Kurt Vonnegut's own experience in World War II. In the novel, a prisoner of war witnesses and survives the Allied forces' firebombing of Dresden. Vonnegut, like his protagonist Billy Pilgrim, emerged from a meat locker beneath a slaughterhouse into the moonscape of burned-out Dresden. His surviving captors put him to work finding, burying, and burning bodies. His task continued until the Russians came and the war ended. Vonnegut survived by chance, confined as a prisoner of war (POW) in a well-insulated meat locker, and so missed the cataclysmic moment of attack, emerging the day after into the charred ruins of a once-beautiful cityscape. Vonnegut has said that he always intended to write about the experience but found himself incapable of doing so for more than twenty years. Although he attempted to describe in simple terms what happened and to create a linear narrative, this strategy never worked for him. Billy Pilgrim's unhinged time-shifting, a mechanism for dealing with the unfathomable aggression and mass destruction he witnesses, is Vonnegut's solution to the problem of telling an untellable tale.
Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five as a response to war. "It is so short and jumbled and jangled," he explains in Chapter 1, "because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." The jumbled structure of the novel and the long delay between its conception and completion serve as testaments to a very personal struggle with heart-wrenching material. But the timing of the novel's publication also deserves notice: in 1969, the United States was in the dismal midst of the Vietnam War. Vonnegut was an outspoken pacifist and critic of the conflict. Slaughterhouse-Five revolves around the willful incineration of a hundred thousand civilians, in a city of extremely dubious military significance, during an arguably just war. Appearing when it did, then, Slaughterhouse-Five made a forceful statement about the campaign in Vietnam, a war in which incendiary technology was once more being employed against nonmilitary targets in the name of a dubious cause."
does that help???
info from here
Originally posted by: chiwawa626
It was weird but i loved it! Reccomend me another book by him...
Vonnegut is a master of dark humor. Slaughterhouse Five is probably his most recognized book, but he wrote quite a few. Cats Cradle is an interesting one. Much lighter in tone, but still really nice. Breakfast of Champions is a little more obtuse. He seemed to have gone off the deep end a bit in the explorative ideas with that one. Mother Night is highly recommended from a friend. "Important lessons in there," he says.
If you like the dark comedy/satire look at war, another classic is Catch-22.
that is my favorite book next to LOTR
His books are very difficult to read. I have read that book about 4 times and still don't think I understand it all. It is black comedy at its best.
I also really enjoy his other books, but if you don't like that one, I woudn't recommend reading any others.
His books are very difficult to read. I have read that book about 4 times and still don't think I understand it all. It is black comedy at its best.
I also really enjoy his other books, but if you don't like that one, I woudn't recommend reading any others.
Originally posted by: flavio
Yep, and I love when he goes off the deep end.
|--|--|--|--|--|--| <-- and this was an inch
Quite agreed. Apparently he wrote the book as a 50th birthday present to himself, so it was no holds barred. His last book, "Timequake", was similar in the repect that he didn't hold much back (I highly recomend "Timequake", but I think its better to read a few of his other books first. Besides his usual dark, sarcastic story, it's also partly autobiographical.)
chiwawa626- If you liked one, you'll like most of the others to some degree. Anything that's been mentioned is good, and I would like to throw "The Sirens of Titan" in the mix. Also, the movie of "Mother Night" is really, really well done (don't let the fact that Nick Nolte and John Goodman are in it scare you away).
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