Novel
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut · 1969
Synopsis
Billy Pilgrim, a chaplain's assistant captured during the Battle of the Bulge, is transported to Dresden and housed with others in a slaughterhouse; during the bombing, they shelter in the meat cellar while the city burns above them. He survives, returns home, becomes an optometrist in Ilium, in New York State, marries Valencia, and starts travelling in time without wanting to: he relives the night of Dresden and a stay in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore, where he is exhibited with an actress, Montana Wildhack. The Tralfamadorians see all times at once.
Context
Home from the war twenty-three years earlier, he writes in the first chapter, he had tried several times to write this book without succeeding. He puts himself in the scene visiting Bernard V. O'Hare, a fellow prisoner, whose wife reproaches him for writing a book that will make war look like a fine thing, when those who fought it were children. He promised to call the book the Children's Crusade, and the second title kept the promise. The work was removed from school libraries, and burned in 1973 in the furnace of a school in Drake, North Dakota.
Who it is for
A short novel with a fractured chronology, in which the narrative jumps from one period to another without transition. Translated by Lucienne Lotringer in 1971, translation revised in 2016.
Prizes and reception
An immediate bestseller, it made its author known, and is still among the most challenged books in schools in the United States.
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