Book Bearings
Slaughterhouse-Five
- 203 pages · about 3 hours
- First published 1969
- 141 editions
Bookshop.org links may earn us a commission. It supports independent bookstores and costs you nothing.
1 About this book
Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, follows Billy Pilgrim, an American soldier and chaplain's assistant who is captured by the Germans late in the Second World War and held as a prisoner in Dresden, where he lives through the Allied firebombing of the city. Billy has also come unstuck in time: he slips without warning between the war, his early years, his later life in America, and a period he says he spent on the planet Tralfamadore. Kurt Vonnegut was himself a prisoner of war in Dresden during the bombing, and he opens the novel in his own voice, with an account of his long struggle to write about it.
- Science fiction
- Literary fiction
- Classics
- Spy stories
- War stories
- World War II
- Literature and the war
- War
2 What to expect
An anti-war novel built from fragments: its hero, a former prisoner of war who survived the bombing of Dresden, slips back and forth through his own life and, he says, to another planet. The short sections jump in time without warning, in simple sentences full of black humor and a refrain repeated after every death. It is brief, strange and easy to read, and its flat, resigned tone is its way of looking at horror.
Good for readers who want: an anti-war classic, dark humor, and a short novel told out of order.
3 About Kurt Vonnegut
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 More by Kurt Vonnegut
5 Similar books
- Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
- Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
- A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
- Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
- A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab
- Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov
- Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton