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Slaughterhouse-Five (Mass Market Paperback)

by Kurt Vonnegut (Author) "All this happened, more or less..." (more)
Key Phrases: rumpus room, barbershop quartet, Edgar Derby, Kilgore Trout, Roland Weary (more...)
4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (740 customer reviews)
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

Don't let the ease of reading fool you--Vonnegut's isn't a conventional, or simple, novel. He writes, "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick, and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters..." Slaughterhouse-Five (taken from the name of the building where the POWs were held) is not only Vonnegut's most powerful book, it is as important as any written since 1945. Like Catch- 22, it fashions the author's experiences in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of authority. Slaughterhouse-Five boasts the same imagination, humanity, and gleeful appreciation of the absurd found in Vonnegut's other works, but the book's basis in rock-hard, tragic fact gives it a unique poignancy--and humor.

From Publishers Weekly
"Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time." So begins Vonnegut's absurdist 1969 classic. Hawke rises to the occasion of performing this sliced-and-diced narrative, which is part sci-fi and partially based on Vonnegut's experience as a American prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany during the firebombing of 1945 that killed thousands of civilians. Billy travels in time and space, stopping here and there throughout his life, including his long visit to the planet Tralfamador, where he is mated with a porn star. Hawke adopts a confidential, whisper-like tone for his reading. Listening to him is like listening to someone tell you a story in the back of a bus—the perfect pitch for this book. After the novel ends, Vonnegut himself speaks for a short while about his survival of the Dresden firestorm and describes and names the man who inspired this story. Tacked on to the very end of this audio smorgasbord is music, a dance single that uses a vintage recording of Vonnegut reading from the book. Though Hawke's reading is excellent, one cannot help but wish Vonnegut himself had read the entire text.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.

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Product Details

  • Mass Market Paperback: 224 pages
  • Publisher: Dell (November 3, 1991)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0440180295
  • ISBN-13: 978-0440180296
  • Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 0.7 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (740 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #14,088 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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All this happened, more or less. Read the first page
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rumpus room, barbershop quartet
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Edgar Derby, Kilgore Trout, Roland Weary, New York, World War Two, Three Musketeers, Paul Lazzaro, Lions Club, Magic Fingers, Montana Wildhack, Second World War, Wild Bob, Green Beret, Sugarbush Mountain, Yon Yonson, Eliot Rosewater, Maggie White
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144 of 155 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Worth all five stars, January 31, 2001
By Andyrew (Beaver, PA USA) - See all my reviews
Slaughter House Five deserves its reputation of being a piece of great American literature. The book follows a young man, Billy Pilgrim through his life. Billy believes aliens, tralfamadorians to be exact, have abducted him. We assume that it's through these aliens that he learns to time travel, a skill he frequently uses. In the book Pilgrim bounces around time to all the various portions of his life, many times returning to World War II where he was captured, taken prisoner, and held in slaughterhouse five in Dresden, Germany. He seems to be defined by this moment in his life as he frequently returns there. If you know anything about Vonnegut, you know that he too was held in Dresden, Germany when the city was firebombed. This is the major setup for this antiwar novel as Dresden was home to over 100,000 persons while at the same time Dresden didn't have any industry lending itself to the war effort. Obviously you wander, "Then why was this city bombed? What advantage came from killing well over 100,000 thousand civilians?"

One of the major themes of the book is fate. The prayer of serenity appears twice in the book stating that we need to change the things we can and be wise enough to know which things we cannot change. Also the Tralfamadorians speak of fate. They say they know how the universe is going to end, but they do nothing to stop it. Vonnegut seems to say that yes, war is one of those things we cannot avoid, but we need to change the things we can about it, like the atrocious bombing of Dresden.

Overall, the book's message is clear, and Vonnegut delivers his message in a very accessible way. The story of Billy Pilgrim is enjoyable to read, and contains more than dry philosophy that some antiwar novels are filled with.

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194 of 214 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Read it again, July 5, 2004
This review is from: Slaughter House Five (Hardcover)
I know this novel fairly well having read it several times (once aloud to my students). It is about all time being always present if only we knew, or could realize it, or had a sense about time in the same way we have senses for light and sound.

It is also about the Allied fire bombings of Dresden which killed more people than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. (And so it goes.) Kurt Vonnegut begins as though writing a memoir and advises us that "All of this happened, more or less..." Of course it did not, and yet, as with all real fiction, it is psychologically true. His protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, an unlikely hero, somewhat in the manner of unlikely heroes to come like Forest Gump and the hero of Jerzy Kosinski's Being There, transcends time and space as he bumbles along. This is a comedie noire--a "black comedy"--not to be confused with "film noir," a cinematic genre in which the bad guys may win or at least they are made sympathetic. In comedie noire the events are horrific but the style is light-hearted. What the genres have in common is a non-heroic protagonist.

This is also a totally original work written in a most relaxing style that fuses the elements of science fiction with realism. It is easy to read (which is one of the reasons it can be found on the high school curriculum in our public schools). It is sharply satirical, lampooning not only our moral superiority, our egocentricity, but our limited understanding of time and space. And of course it is an anti-war novel in the tradition of All Quiet on the Western Front and Johnny Got His Gun.

Vonnegut's view of time in this novel is like the stratification of an upcropping of rock: time past and time present are there for us to see, but also there is time future. Billy Pilgrim learns from the Tralfamadorians (who kidnapped him in 1967) that we are actually timeless beings who experience what we call the past, present and future again and again. And so Billy goes back to the war and forward to his marriage, and to Tralfamadore again and again. He learns that the Tralfamadorians see the stars not as bright spots of light but as "rarefied, luminous spaghetti" and human beings as "great millepedes with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other." So time is not a river, nor is it a snake with its tail in its mouth. It is omnipresent, yet some things occur before and some after, but always they occur again.

And so it goes.

What I admire most about this most admirable novel is how easily and naturally Vonnegut controls the narrative and how effortlessly seems its construction. It is almost as if Vonnegut sat down one day and let his thoughts wander, and when he was through, here is this novel.

In a sense, Vonnegut invented a new novelistic genre, combining fantasy with realism, touched by fictionalized memoir, penned in a comedic mode as horror is overtaken by a kind of fatalistic yet humorous view of life. Note here the appearance of Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut's alter-ego, the science fiction writer who is said to have invented Tralfamadore.

Bottom line: read this without preconceptions and read it without regard to the usual constraints. Just let it flow and accept it for what it is, a juxtaposition of several genres, a tale of fiction, that--as fiction should--transcends time and space.
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40 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Essential in many ways, August 16, 2000
By "milothemayor" (Del Mar, CA USA) - See all my reviews
This novel is essential in many ways. It is undoubtedly one of the best-written, most well respected novels of the 20th century (No. 6 on the list that was a compilation of all the other lists) and is, therefore, essential to your understanding of 20th century fiction. If you have never read Vonnegut, this book should be the first one you read: it is the most famous and one of the best and really captures the essence of Vonnegut. Finally, despite its literary merit, this is a FUN book to read. You will laugh, you will think, but, most of all, you will enjoy reading it and you will finish it FAST.

This should be your introduction to Vonnegut. I've found that true Vonnegut fans don't often choose Slaughterhouse-Five as their favorite, but, instead choose one of Vonnegut's other wonders (Breakfast of Champions, Cat's Cradle, Sirens of Titan, etc.). I think that most would agree that this is a good jumping off point, just as, in music, people often start with Greatest hits albums and then work from there.

Only Vonnegut could make such a strange premise believable and emotional. The book shifts time and place from paragraph to paragraph without warning. It is about aliens and WWII. It all works so perfectly, however and is so profound to those who read carefully. Billy Pilgrim is one of the great characters in all of literature.

Don't be scared off by aliens and the weird premise. It works better than 99% of so-called "normal" books. Absolutely ESSENTIAL.

thanks {{{milo}}}

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Not just a fantasy
Where to begin? I feel that many of the reviewers have already captured the essence of this novel, but I also feel compelled to add to it.. Read more
Published 2 days ago by ::Sara::

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting read
I saw this book on several different `must read' lists and decided to see what the hype was all about. Read more
Published 7 days ago by An Historian

5.0 out of 5 stars Modern classic!!
This wonderful snack of a book does so many things right. First, it is clear and concise. Second, the limited narrator is used excellently. Read more
Published 8 days ago by Marcus E. Goormastic

5.0 out of 5 stars Vonnegut Fan
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut was nominated for a best-novel Nebula Award and for a best-novel Hugo Award. Read more
Published 18 days ago by Author D. B. Pacini

5.0 out of 5 stars Vonnegut's Proposal
This novel is rendered so finely that, if you do not realize it, you will think of it as trash. Vonnegut uses high and low culture with such ease while blending deep philosophical... Read more
Published 24 days ago by Will

4.0 out of 5 stars Refreshingly weird...
Adding my drop in the bucket of reviews:

I enjoyed the book. It is insane at times, a little hard to follow, and leaves certain questions unanswered. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Ally B.

4.0 out of 5 stars Definitely worth reading and owning
Time-travel and war: two concepts only the ingenious Kurt Vonnegut would incorporate into the same story. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Francesca

5.0 out of 5 stars SH5
"The Things They Carried" is a plethora of experiences that leaves the reader to truly grasp the nefariousness of war. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Banana

5.0 out of 5 stars Significant for this Nuclear Generation and the Next
Kurt Vonnegut's picaresque prose lacks parity with any mainstream literature. His unique style is inundated with seemingly random circumstances that are simply dripping with... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Zach Duey

5.0 out of 5 stars Erik's Review of SlaughterHouse Five
At first it is difficult to imagine that a story about a phlegmatic man who experiences a horrific firestorm attack in Dresden, while a POW, and communes with aliens can have any... Read more
Published 2 months ago by EBE

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