How long is slaughterhouse 5

Tens, hundreds of thousands died. Statistic says so. The subject have been developed in many books, war films have become increasingly popular over the past few years and you can go to the movies with some popcorn and a coke and watch them in a very civilized manner.

Maybe repeat after some time. People need emotions to connect. Personal touch. If someone tells us about the wretched life of another person, we cry. If we are shown a battlefield with thousands of corpses, our faces will set in a grim expression at best.

They remind me of the Russian grandmother of a friend who survived through both World Wars the grandmother, not my friend. Because she remembered the fear and the hunger.

She remembered the war. Several years ago I was in Dresden. No Moon landscape anymore. Charred stone blocks have been weaved into the rounded Baroque body of the Dresden Frauenkirche, which follow you like black reproaching eyes. War is not a statistic. The rest of us are a statistic, we, who consider such events distant and having nothing to do with us. The statistic of dumbfounded numbers.

I think I was going through my Salinger stage… or perhaps it was my Dickens stage. Now I want to find it in my boxes of old things. I want to read more from this strange, misanthropic? Slaughterhouse-Five has expanded in my imagination. The more I think about it and revisit certain passages, the more I admire it and recognize it as a great 20th century novel. The main character is the sweetly-named Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist with a wife and two children.

As a tall, thin, sickly and generally incompetent American soldier and POW during WW2, he miraculously survived the firebombing of Dresden in Oh yeah, and at one point he was also abducted by aliens. Here is a picture of Dresden before the war. It was one of the most beautiful cities, often compared to Florence. And here is a picture after. The book is a puzzle it's up to the reader to figure out.

It takes a while to get used to the structure, which at first seems arbitrary. But the deeper you get into the book you realize it's anything but. There are moments in the narration that take you aback, such as this one in Chapter 8: And then it developed that Campbell was not going to go unanswered after all. Poor old Derby, the doomed high school teacher, lumbered to his feet for what was probably the finest moment in his life. There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces.

One of the main effects of war is that people are discouraged from being characters. How do you make sense of something as absurd and senseless as war? Does something like cause and effect even apply to this situation? A page or two later, Vonnegut gives us this aside about the sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout, who I believe shows up in some other books: Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves.

Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer. What an absolutely dead-on, if cynical, summation of the effects of a capitalist-driven society. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.

What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time. In a way, many of them apply to life in general. Sometimes the effect is annoying, sometimes funny, and sometimes just devastating. Pay attention. Art is a profound act of optimism, especially in the face of acts of meaningless violence and slaughter. Jul 10, Fergus rated it it was amazing. Life can be so unutterably sad. And Americans always jazz up their sadness.

Big Bands became the perfect anodyne to stark terror. So you jazz it up big time yourself - you start to prefer your mini-vacations on Trafalmador over more mundane hot spots. Like, for example, foxholes.

Because where there is carrion like us there the crows gather. And they have gizzards to take care of your bones. You know, had Kurt Vonnegut been a believer he might have considerably mollified his trauma. Or even reading books by and about declared Aspies, like I do now, may have helped do the trick.

But alas, dear Kurt, back then they shot first and asked questions later. No wonder their Jazz was in as much demand as a good, stiff drink back then. For you too, Kurt - you picked up their old-time jazzy zaniness And just marched on into doomed Dresden - Dreaming of long-lost Tralfamador. View all 16 comments. Sep 21, Dan Schwent rated it really liked it Shelves: Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time and experiences the events of his life out of chronological order.

War and absurdity ensue. I've never read Kurt Vonnegut up until now and when Slaughterhouse-Five showed up in my cheapo ebook email a few days ago, I decided it was time.

Get it? Slaughterhouse-Five is often classified as science fiction but it reads more like Kurt Vonnegut trying to make sense of his World War II experiences through a humorous at times science fiction story. It also seems to Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time and experiences the events of his life out of chronological order.

It also seems to be a Big Important Book, due to novelly things like themes of anti-war and the absurdities that come with it. It also uses a non-linear plot structure to illustrate the timey-wimey nature of Billy's affliction.

There's not really a whole lot to tell. Slaughterhouse-Five is basically a collection of non-chronological events in Billy Pilgrim's life: his experiences in World War II, his life after the war, and his abduction by the Tralfamadorians, aliens who view events in time simultaneously rather than chronologically.

The bleakness and black humor go together surprisingly well, like beer and White Castles. I have to wonder, though, if Slaughterhouse-Five would be as highly regarded as it is if it didn't land on so many banned book lists over the years. Nothing like some controversy to get people to read. While it wasn't pants-shittingly awesome, I enjoyed it quite a bit and I'll likely pick up another Vonnegut book in the future.

Four out of five stars. View all 37 comments. Rating: 4. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his and Vonnegut's shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

Don't let the ease of reading fool you Rating: 4. Don't let the ease of reading fool you - Vonnegut's isn't a conventional, or simple, novel. He writes, "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick, and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. Like Catch- 22 , it fashions the author's experiences in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of authority.

Slaughterhouse-Five boasts the same imagination, humanity, and gleeful appreciation of the absurd found in Vonnegut's other works, but the book's basis in rock-hard, tragic fact gives it a unique poignancy - and humor.

Today's prompt is to select your very favorite American novel in honor of the Fourth of July. That would take a few zillion hours of internal debate, creation of endless lists, rebellious actions like breaking things down into genre lists, muttering over who counts as American Teju Cole is, but Henry James isn't: Discuss , etc.

Decision made for me, in this case, by the fact that I'm trying to strong-arm myself into making a dent in the embarrassingly long list of things I've read, re-read, or abandoned since I got all grumpus. And here we are! Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold.

No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times.

Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves. May 23, J. Sutton rated it it was amazing. At first, the absurdity of Slaughterhouse-Five now read 5 times makes it difficult to take seriously. However, part of Vonnegut's magic is that this absurdity becomes impossible to ignore and increasingly powerful as the narrative moves forward.

Vonnegut actually wants you to focus on the absurd. It works itself not only into the narrative, where our protagonist becomes unstuck in time and is abducted by aliens, but also into questions about war, civilization, identity and theories of time a At first, the absurdity of Slaughterhouse-Five now read 5 times makes it difficult to take seriously. It works itself not only into the narrative, where our protagonist becomes unstuck in time and is abducted by aliens, but also into questions about war, civilization, identity and theories of time and how this impacts perceptions of life and death.

Slaughterhouse-Five didn't grab me right away, but as I continued to read, Vonnegut's explorations become more intriguing and insightful. I know I've commented on Vonnegut's perspective on the world in other reviews. You wonder how Vonnegut made the leaps he did and when you think about them there's something completely rational about these leaps which are taken to possibly irrational extremes.

In any event, Slaughterhouse-Five is a book I wouldn't hesitate to recommend; Vonnegut's unique perspective continues to be fresh and interesting And so it goes!

View all 5 comments. Jan 06, Adina rated it it was amazing Shelves: classics , , humor , w-mwl-alternative , short , fantasy-sf. Still on my mind after more than 1 year. This was such a pleasant surprise.

This book has been on my to-read list since the beginning of my activity on Goodreads and I did a good job avoiding to read it. I was sure I would not like it since: 1. I thought this science-fiction satire style was not for me.

I only wanted to read it because it is a classic and I resolved to read more of those modern or not. This book kept bumping on different lists so I could not escape its lure. Oh, I judged this book so wrongly. Actually, I liked it a lot. I thought the time travelling, the fractured prose and the detached tone of the narrator were very effective to portrait the Dresden atrocities and how to witness this can impact your life forever.

View all 10 comments. Mar 19, Dave Russell rated it it was amazing Shelves: novels. Why do I love this book? I love it because of the villains. Not just the obviously villainous Paul Lazzaro--although he's one of the great villains of modern fiction.

During the hellishness of war all he can think about is his own petty need to avenge slights done to him--but the larger, less obvious villains in this book: the Tralfamdorians.

Vonnegut hated being categorized as "science fiction" because most science fiction at the time was just juvenile male wish fulfillment, which he clearly was not interested in. In fact he kind of satirizes that kind of thing in this book. His aliens are much more fascinating than that. The Tralfamdorians aren't much interested in Jesus Christ's message of universal love. They're more interested in the message of Charles Darwin, that beings die to improve the species.

At least that's the message as they see it. Like I said they're villains. To them the idea of free will is silly. Well, villains can be right sometimes. The world is structured in a way that everything that happens is meant to happen and there's nothing we can do about it. Concern for human feelings is useless and therefore we shouldn't give a second thought to massacres and slaughter. Just say "and so it goes," and move on. This was certainly the feeling of the Nazis with their belief in the destiny of the everlasting Reich or whatever the phrase is, and the Communists with their belief that the road to the future must be built on the corpses of the present.

One million deaths is a statistic. They put him in an enclosure where all his needs, material and sexual, are met and where he is protected from the poisonous gas outside.

To mankind their philosophy provides an escape from moral responsibility. In the first chapter of the book Vonnegut tells his friend he is writing an anti-war book.

His friend responds that he "might as well write an anti-glacier book," and Vonnegut kind of agrees with him. And yet he wrote the book anyway. Yes, death is inevitable, but to Vonnegut humanity is also worth mourning.

What happened to Edgar Derby is worth relating, and we should be moved by it. May 08, Seemita rated it really liked it Shelves: other-awards-w , war , historical-fiction , america , fiction. Kurt Vonnegut. Four syllables, once pronounced, suspends in the air like a rock star swishing his name into the air for chanters to latch on and treble the echo.

Slaughter-House Five, god knows how many syllables depending on stress-points of your tongue , once sprinkled from the nozzle of mouth, hangs again in the air like a vagabond wrapper not finding a parapet to land. Perhaps both could have gone their way and not bothered to float into my fairly tranquil world.

But they chose to break the Kurt Vonnegut. But they chose to break the silence. War time account is what both brought with them. I have read Dostoyevsky and that man loves darkness. But this man and his creation loves death. But I stuck like a blinking golliwog, with eyes dancing to the shadows of death. Read it again; I did. But the Trafalmadorians are a vulnerable lot which became rather apparent at their inability to stop their inmates from slipping through the porous boundaries of war-afflicted memories and reconstructed memories.

I was now tempered to balance on that boundary; of fiction and fact, of figment and whole. The duo still sounded weird but substantially weird.

And I know one thing for sure: when someone holds me long captivated with excessive humor, I invariably become the beneficiary of stark truths hidden under his tongue. So, I lurked around till this duo pulled aside a curtain and showed me a slaughter-house. It was supposed to house meat but instead housed prisoners; and incidentally, turned a good refuge till it lasted. As I was about to alight and walk into the slaughter-house myself, the twosome giggled in mock incredulity, flicked the sand time-keeper upside down and blurted, How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

And all of a sudden, with just a switch, we swapped places and it was I who was fighting the wars, licking my scars, shoveling bodies, snapping bonds, mimicking death, eulogizing events and peeking from a window towards a world that still hadn't changed character and was continuing to pay no heed to me.

I wondered what happened. View all 45 comments. There are no characters here, really. Billy Pilgrim and the others are flat flat flat. Vonnegut's point being that the suffering brought on by the war dehumanized and diminished everyone to one-dimensionality. It's an interesting idea and a perfect match for his spare style.

I remember reading the book thirty years ago and thinking it rather comic. On this second reading the humor morphed to bleakest gravitas. The phrase "so it goes," repeated after every mention of death, becomes tiresome. Halfway through I started mentally deleting it from the text. This improved the book somewhat. There is a section in which Billy Pilgrim, due to his capture by extraterrestrials—the Tralfamadorians—for whom time is constant, not linear, watches a war film in reverse.

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German planes flew at them backward, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes.

The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair.

Over France, though, German fighters came up again, and made everything and everybody as good as new This germ of an idea, I suspect, was later expanded by Martin Amis in his Holocaust novel, Time's Arrow. Here's a brief quote from Time's Arrow to support my claim: We'd picked up this batch from the mass grave, in the woods, and stood waiting by the van on the approach road while the carbon monoxide went about its work.

All my men were dressed as doctors. We then drove them closer to town, where one of our men was readying the piles of clothes. Out they all filed. Among them was a mother and a baby, both naked, naturally, for now. The baby was weeping in a determined, muscular, long-haul rhythm, probably from earache. We then escorted this group of thirty souls into a low warehouse littered with primitive sewing machines and spindles. These Jews, led by the weeping baby, made their solemn way past a series of curtains and blankets and, one by one, backed their way through a missing panel in the wall.

This panel I myself replaced with a softly spoken "Guten Tag. I was moved, by their continued silence, by the baby's muffled cries. Readers also enjoyed. Science Fiction. About Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Kurt Vonnegut, Junior was an American novelist, satirist, and most recently, graphic artist.

He was recognized as New York State Author for He was born in Indianapolis, later the setting for many of his novels. He attended Cornell University from to , where he wrote a column for the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. Vonnegut trained as a chemist and worked as a journali Kurt Vonnegut, Junior was an American novelist, satirist, and most recently, graphic artist. Vonnegut trained as a chemist and worked as a journalist before joining the U.

Army and serving in World War II. After the war, he attended University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology and also worked as a police reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago.

He attributed his unadorned writing style to his reporting work. His experiences as an advance scout in the Battle of the Bulge, and in particular his witnessing of the bombing of Dresden, Germany whilst a prisoner of war, would inform much of his work.

This event would also form the core of his most famous work, Slaughterhouse-Five, the book which would make him a millionaire. Author describes details graphically at times, or simply numbers the dead, but the brutality is always there.

Mentions of condoms, pornographic pictures, nocturnal emissions, intercourse, erections, masturbation, oral sex, and marital infidelity. There is some drinking and drunkenness beer, wine, whiskey , and cigarette smoking. Adulation affects Kilgore Trout "like marijuana," but pot is not used.

Because of his damaged mental state, Billy is subdued with morphine while he's institutionalized. Parents need to know that Kurt Vonnegut's classic science fiction novel Slaughterhouse-Five makes an anti-war statement that is powerful in any generation. For example, Vonnegut's irreverent description of the conditions endured by soldiers, prisoners of war, and the victims of the Dresden bombing said as much about the Vietnam War taking place when the book was published as it did about the author's real-life experience in Dresden in Billy Pilgrim, the central character of the novel, believes he's become "unstuck in time" and space, so that a mere moment on Earth equals days or weeks of time with aliens from the planet Tralfamadore.

On Earth, Billy suffers from what we now recognize as PTSD; he has built a life -- with a wife, children, and career as an optometrist -- that he seems to watch from the outside, and that Vonnegut regards with bemused distance. Billy's consciousness continually changes, moving in and out of his "real" life, his time on Tralfamadore, and memories of wartime.

Meanwhile, the narrator breaks character often enough for readers to know that his voice is that of Vonnegut, who actually was on the ground during the Dresden bombing. The novel includes all the brutal violence of war and then some: People and animals are shot and killed, tortured, boiled, and bombed. Corpses are unearthed and burned after the bombing because they're too numerous and difficult to extract where they lay.

However, Vonnegut's narrative is also veiled in gallows humor; he always keeps the reader, and the horrors of war, at an arm's length.

The book includes rude language and profanity "s--t," "piss," "f--k," etc. Characters also drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes in the book, which is at once an inventive masterpiece of science fiction and an uncompromising depiction of the inhumanity of war.

Add your rating See all 7 parent reviews. Add your rating See all 19 kid reviews. Billy served in the U. Army and, as a prisoner of war, was housed in a facility called Slaughterhouse-Five during the bombing of Dresden, Germany. He has experienced intense violence, cruelty, and inhumane conditions. At some point, he becomes "unstuck in time" so that his consciousness moves between real time, past events, and his time-and-space travel to the planet Tralfamadore.

After the war, Billy is discharged and builds a life in his hometown of Ilium, New York, with his wife, Valencia, two children, and a successful optometry practice. He's hospitalized for a period after a head injury, during which time he becomes friends with Elliot Rosewater a holdover from Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, published in and develops a penchant for the works of science fiction writer Kilgore Trout who also appears in Vonnegut's novel, Breakfast of Champions.

Meanwhile, Pilgrim also becomes "unstuck in time"; he's abducted by aliens and often travels to and from Tralfamadore, and in and out of the present time. Billy frustrates his children, who find him distant and absent-minded. While the narrator feels compelled to record his experiences on the ground in Dresden, Billy feels compelled to tell the people of Earth about his visits to Tralfamadore.

A cult favorite for decades, this classic novel blends brutal realism with science fiction, and leavens it all with dark humor. Author Kurt Vonnegut artfully keeps the reader guessing about the plausibility of Billy Pilgrim's time-space travel, and keeps a bemused distance from the worst violence, of which there is plenty.

Slaughterhouse-Five is an extremely entertaining read, and an important book for teen readers to explore more deeply in a classroom setting. It also has one of the all-time great opening lines in literature as it begins what is surely one of the strangest meditations on war: "All of this happened, more or less. Families can talk about Billy Pilgrim's time and space travel in Slaughterhouse-Five. Why does Billy become unstuck in time? Why does he feel compelled to tell everyone about his visits to the planet Tralfamadore?

How is Slaughterhouse-Five different from a typical war novel? How is it different from a typical science fiction novel? Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

See how we rate. Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization, earns a small affiliate fee from Amazon or iTunes when you use our links to make a purchase. It spent 16 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and went through five printings by July. The novel owes much of its immediate success to two rave reviews; one in the New York Times Book Review , which was featured on the section's front page, and another in the Saturday Review. Robert Scholes, who wrote the Times review, was a colleague of Vonnegut's at Iowa.

Slaughterhouse-Five was banned from Oakland County, Michigan, public schools in How could anybody masturbate to Slaughterhouse-Five? In , Wesley Scroggins, then an assistant professor at Missouri State University, called on the Republic, Missouri, school board to ban Vonnegut's novel.

The content ranges from naked men and women in cages together so that others can watch them having sex to God telling people that they better not mess with his loser, bum of a son, named Jesus Christ.

In response to this ban, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis gave away free copies of Slaughterhouse-Five to Republic, Missouri, students who wanted to read it.

The American Library Association listed the book as the 46th most banned or challenged book of the first decade of the 21st century. A private in that regiment, Vonnegut was captured along with Garlow on December 19, , at the Battle of the Bulge.

I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is