Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

Billy Pilgrim a veteran of World War Two is haunted by what he saw there.

Book Review: Slaughterhouse-Five is a brilliant work, a modern classic, a full and quietly emotional statement about life and war and death. Written without pretension or irony, this is a very human and humane book, how without meaning or purpose in the universe we, like Billy Pilgrim, are helpless in the face of what is to come. But it's not without hope. Even lacking order and illusion, we can learn to accept life. Subtitled "or The Children's Crusade," Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) writes of horror and terror in a tone of child-like wonder. Everything that happens in the book, no matter how consequential, is told calmly. Billy Pilgrim, a constant victim of circumstance and a veteran of the War, a survivor of the bombing of Dresden, and later an optometrist, has famously become "unstuck" in time, and he and the narrative jolt between various periods in his life, creating several story-lines that gradually accumulate, so that the reader sees different events being told simultaneously, filling in the story as a whole. Just as the story takes place at several times, so the book has several narrators, adding to the story's mosaic, which accumulates in strength and meaning. There is Kurt Vonnegut, the actual author; there is the first-person character of the author as participant in the story; there is an omniscient narrator that pulls it all together; and there are various characters who get to tell, briefly, stories within the story. Slaughterhouse-Five was written in the midst of the Vietnam War, which apparently was the appropriate moment for Vonnegut to write of the bombing of Dresden. The bombing is the center of Billy's life, the novel itself, and a lesson for Vonnegut and by extension, for us. If something as horrible as the bombing of Dresden (or countless other tragedies) can occur, then there is no meaning to anything, but Vonnegut writes it all in a tone of wide-eyed innocence. Although life may change, history doesn't and what is going to happen will happen, as realized in the Serenity Prayer (written by Reinhold Niebuhr). The only meaningful response is one of acceptance, embodied in the book's repeated "So it goes." Slaughterhouse-Five brings together elements of several of Vonnegut's books featuring characters such as Kilgore Trout, Eliot Rosewater, Howard Campbell, and others. A book that's required reading for anyone interested in understanding our common humanity in the midst of apocalypse.  [5★]