SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut

Note: I am not a paid reviewer, and I have purchased this title to read for my personal enjoyment.

Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany the night in February 1945 when 800 Allied bombers descended and reduced the city to rubble, leaving tens of thousands dead. Decades later, my father-in-law told me what he had seen as a teenage private in the American army when he entered Dresden a few years after the bombing: ‘They leveled it.’ Vonnegut chose to employ a highly unusual structure in telling his Dresden story, and perhaps being witness to unimaginable devastation he could hardly get his head around best explains why. His opening is first person, auto-biographical narrative on the difficulties in writing about Dresden. Then he employs anti-hero Billy Pilgrim in a fantastical, maybe better described as farcical, non-linear rendering of Pilgrim’s abduction by aliens and display in a zoo before two-foot-high green aliens, worldly success as an optometrist, and miserable existence as a prisoner of war, culminating in Dresden. In sharp, declarative prose presented in brief sections the scenes of Billy’s life waft like coils of smoke, pierced here and there by powerful and shocking war images presented with the authenticity of a witness. But war suffering and violence is mocked in experiences of caricature-like characters, from privates brimming with false confidence to a bombastic, legacy-starved officer. War scenes, and profound observations, often about war and weaponry, and death, are punctuated with the seemingly banal phrase ‘so it goes,’ in an inimitable style that hammers Vonnegut’s point home.