Slaughterhouse Five

It’s time once more for the fourth update in my year-long experiment of living (actually reading) fictionally. For those of you keeping score at home, the first book I tackled was Oscar Wilde’s fascinating 19th century novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Next was Ernest Hemingway’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1952 novel The Old Man and the Sea, followed by my first ever cat mystery novel in Lillian Jackson Braun’s The Cat Who Played Post Office. For book number four I decided to take on a novelist who I’m sorry to say I had not read up to this point: Kurt Vonnegut and what is considered his greatest work, Slaughterhouse Five.

Despite previous essays on this experiment shying away from delving into the plot or narrative of the books I’ve been reading, I feel little bit of gushing is required. This may very well be the best novel I’ve ever read. This may be due to the paucity of titles I have gotten to over the years, but I feel I can state this with some confidence. Vonnegut’s use of simple language combined with the post-modern satirical nature of the entire work combine to make a powerful indictment of our violent humanity and how we react to the violence of our age. The short, clipped sentences reminded me of Hemingway, while the overall caustic commentary on warfare was more Joseph Heller, and yet Vonnegut weaves a story that is completely his own. I came away from this book seeing almost everything in my universe differently, which is what I’m looking for in each work I delve into, and I was immensely satisfied with the statement Vonnegut was trying to make.

Digging down more into the writing takeaways from this book, I would say there are two:

1. Use of repetition. Vonnegut’s use of repetition, almost exclusively after mentioning some kind of death, is masterful. While you might think that reading the same phrase (“so it goes,” which according to Wikipedia shows up 106 times) would get annoying, in fact somehow the author uses it to repeatedly hit you over the head about how little we as humans seemed to care about death in the 20th century. It’s a bizarre little mix of humor and horror, and is used deftly to create a sense of anesthesia against the very dark subject matter while simultaneously making you consider each instance on a deeper level.
2. Injection of Science Fiction elements into any story. While Vonnegut is apparently known as a SciFi writer, for me that wasn’t the major element of this book. While this book stands supreme as an anti-war novel, Vonnegut goes above and beyond that with his references to time travel and alien cultures, all in service of immense story lines about humanity and how we perceive time, violence, and each other. The simple matter of the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, being “unstuck in time” allows the narrative to fly literally anywhere, from the deepest recesses of space to various points between his birth and death, and allows us to consider just how important it is to even tell a story in a linear fashion. The alien beings Pilgrim meets can view time as a fourth-dimensional construct, one of many mind-blowing notions within the book that help us see the story unfold from various angles.

​In short, while I am ashamed it took me this long to get to such a monumental author’s work, I can say without a doubt that reading anything by this man will improve your writing. An absolute joy of a novel to read, it also is an epic yarn that ought to rattle your perceptions of time, the universe, and our own human nature. I would highly recommend this book to anyone, and hope to continue reading more of Vonnegut’s work throughout the years.

Up next in the experiment I return to the mystery genre, this time tackling a book I have wanted to read for years: Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. There are only a few books remaining on my list before I start working in some recommendations from you all out there. If you still want to give me your list, feel free to shoot me an email or comment on this here bloggy. And stay tuned for the next exciting installment in my year of living (actually reading) fictionally.​