Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut: A Short Review

It’s good that I didn’t expect anything when I first opened Slaughterhouse-Five. It’s not that I thought it’d be bad. I just happened to know absolutely nothing about either the book or its author. Sure, I’d heard the name Kurt Vonnegut before, but thinking it was a remarkably German name for an American author was where my judgements began and ended.

I’m glad I went blank into Slaughterhouse-Five because whatever expectations I might have had would have been subverted immediately. It’s one of those books you can never quite put your finger on, yet even though its parts seem disorganized, those parts don’t just add up to a whole, that whole makes you feel and reflect on many things.

For example, you could say Slaughterhouse-Five is about the bombing of Dresden in World War II. Technically, that’s correct. And even though the city and its destruction are mentioned all the time, the supposed main event ultimately takes place on less than a handful of pages. It is anticlimactic not only in its presence but also its description. Bombs fell. Our hero stayed in his shelter. He came out, everyone was dead. So it goes.

Despite this, the book’s climax perfectly represents what it’s meant to do: By making war sound like a humdrum, everyday experience, it reveals both the unbelievable nature of humans killing each…