Jacket design by Paul Bacon.
I was probably on the downhill side of a manic episode when I re-read this novel over a year ago so I never managed a review of it fresh in my noggin. I toyed with the idea of re-re-reading it but after a few pages, I knew I was just covering old familiar ground while the mortality clock continued to tick faster and faster. So I put it down and decided to just do a shit review of Vonnegut's most famous book. Which maybe that's exactly the right novel of his to do a shit review of! There's so much material out there about it, why would anybody care what I thought about it? From what I've learned about doing reviews on the Internet, many denizens of the world simply want three things out of critical writing about a piece of art: the literal point of it; all the "Easter eggs"¹ in it; and why they should give a fuck about it. I suppose that's why morons like AI and hate my line-by-line breakdowns of Pynchon texts. "Just tell me all the secrets and mathematical formulae so I can file it away as 'information' in my stupid electric fat storage system." Insight and dick jokes apparently mean nothing to them.
Slaughterhouse-Five was the first Vonnegut book I ever read. It's probably the first Vonnegut book a lot of people read if they approach Vonnegut as an author they want to read. I imagine a lot of people began reading Vonnegut because they found one of his "lesser" novels in an aunt or uncle's bookcase where they'd stuck it unread after receiving it from some dodgy '70s book club and was then intrigued enough to give it a read. But I started with Slaughterhouse-Five because it was an intentional move on my part. I was a senior at San Jose State University and had found myself in English 1B (or 102? or whatever the second standard English course is you're supposed to take as a Freshman) due to my weird history of transferring schools and skipping semesters. Somewhere along the way, my high school AP credits for the class had disappeared from my record and the school was all, "Hey, idiot. How did you get this far without taking this mandatory Freshman class? Go back and take it!" So there I was, King Shit Senior in a Freshman English class full of fresh new college students, most of whom did not give a fuck about reading and writing but had been told they must take this class. I was like a fucking Golden God in that classroom! My teacher, Aaron Malchow (who was a Graduate Student teacher. What do you call those? I fucking forget. The Non-Certified Spouse, who taught German at the University of Lincoln as one, could tell me but she's asleep!), fucking loved me. Probably. We were probably about the same age, anyway. I bet he wanted to hang out with me because I was so cool.
It's probably time for a new paragraph. Is that how writing works? Is it that arbitrary? Anyway, I had Cerebus pins on my backpack at the time so when I went to the teacher/student meeting to discuss the big essay project for the class, focusing on one author and their work, Assistant Student Near Professor Malchow suggested I do Dave Sim and Cerebus. It was a great suggestion and probably would have been a lot of fun but I was there to learn, dammit! So I wanted to read something I wasn't familiar with. That was Kurt Vonnegut. He was disappointed because I think he wanted to read smart and funny things about Dave Sim being a huge misogynist (which Dave claims he isn't and forces people to sign a petition saying he isn't if they want to have anything at all to do with him, so, um, checkmate, you jerks!). He did thank me for making my essays funny though. He kind of shit on most of his students when he pointed out they all take it so seriously that they're afraid to put any personality into their writing at all. I can't say I didn't understand that feeling that you needed to be academic and serious in your papers. But when you're a couple months away from graduating from college and you're taking a Baby Course for English Babies? It basically frees you up to write an essay that's six pages of ranting about people on campus carrying around umbrellas in the rain.
My point, which I haven't been supporting but I'll just choose to get to it now, is that I don't really need to review this book. Because if a Vonnegut book has been more written about than this one, it's Breakfast of Champions. I meant to end that statement with "I'll eat my own butthole" or something but now we're past it (and also me threatening to eat my own butthole due to being wrong about something just means I'm probably purposefully being wrong because can you imagine eating your own butthole? I'm not being gross! Obviously I mean directly after a shower!), so I'll add some evidence about Slaughterhouse-Five being the most written about Vonnegut novel: it's his magnum opus. So, yeah, of course. Just check the Wikipedia for Slaughterhouse-Five, clock how long it is, and then go look at the stub of an article for Slapstick or Deadeye Dick. If there's a question about Kurt Vonnegut on Jeopardy, the question is going to be "Who do Conservatives pretend they've read but would actually have had a massive aneurysm and be too dead to make that claim if they'd actually read anything he's ever written?" I mean, "What is Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death?"
This book is about the bombing of Dresden and the existential dread that settled over Vonnegut for the rest of his life having survived it. Kurt says this about Dresden on the first page of the novel and I think it might be the sentence that most explains Vonnegut's point of view: "There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground." That's his description of Dresden when he went back to visit in 1967. But isn't that just his description of life and the world humans have made? He's referencing bone meal that wouldn't be there if not for the actions of other human beings. This is how fucked up we are and this is the shit world we live in and it's because of this, because of all this human bone meal we tread upon every day, that he's so insistent that we just fucking be kind to each other.
My attempt at a theme for this novel is this: "Life is hard and it can often suck and the people in power will make it worse and the strangers around you often don't give a shit about you and we're all going to wind up bone meal paving the streets of every big city in the world so maybe don't make this finite existence worse for other people going through the same shit?" And also maybe, "Don't blame yourself for the times you didn't do your best. We're all just fucking trying and, well, free will isn't even a thing, sort of!" I remember somewhere in the beginning of this book, he tells his kids to do anything they want except go into making weapons.² Seems like good, reasonable fucking advice.
I've been to Dresden. Hanging in my living room, I have a framed picture of a barren landscape of dark trees next to the Elbe, just dozens of feet from Dresden Castle, that I took while I was there. I should label it "Human Bone Meal". I was there in 2003 or so. Sixty years after the bombing of Dresden. They were still fucking rebuilding shit.
Another line I think exemplifies Vonnegut's philosophy. This one on page 8, a quote from his father: "You know—you never wrote a story with a villain in it." And here's a phrase that I hate to read when I'm reading people's essays on the Internet, a phrase that I'm now using even though I hate it, using it because it sounds like such a Vonnegutian phrase (although I never hate it when Vonnegut uses it because he knows when to use it for good effect): "Think on that." Vonnegut doesn't write villains because life is the antagonist. Life is trying to kill us all and all we have to help defeat it—at least for as long as we can—is each other. We are villains when we refuse to be kind to others, when we let greed and stupidity and selfish violent actions overcome our empathy and compassion.
Remember: Conservatives could never like Vonnegut.
I believe the closest Vonnegut ever came to writing a villain was when he was writing a nonfiction essay about William F. Buckley, Jr.
I'm almost done with this review and I haven't even mentioned Billy Pilgrim or Tralfamadore or Montana Wildhack. Why should I?
The first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five is what most people would have called an author's note because it's not even a prologue. Vonnegut explains how the book came to be in Chapter One and the story begins in Chapter Two. You know the novel begins in Chapter Two and not Chapter One because Vonnegut ends Chapter One by saying the novel begins with "Listen. Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time" and that's the line that begins Chapter Two. It's odd, isn't it?
The end of this review is this: I have just re-re-re-re-re-read (it's hard to know how many times I've read it over my 55 years) Chapter One of Slaughterhouse-Five and I've cried multiple times while doing so and my heart is broken for all the children coerced into going off to war and making the world a worse place simply because terrible men who have never found anything to love in this world forced them to (or, at the very least, manipulated them through propaganda and the mythology of what it means to be a man). I guess I'm about to read it again?
P.S. There's a lot of horseshit about the book on its Wikipedia page. Don't read that. It'll just confuse you. Read the fucking book, slacker.
__________________________________________________________________________________
¹ Those quote marks are doing a lot of mental work here. I feel like the Internet meaning of "Easter egg" has changed the pre-Internet meaning so much that it's basically unrecognizable now. There was a time when "Easter egg" truly meant something somewhat outside the work that was hidden, meant to be hard to find, and was simply a surprising, interesting, and cool find when it was. An Easter egg had no impact on the work it was hidden within. Now it just means something recognizable was referenced. "Oh! The protagonist in the opening credits of Movie X mentions truth and beauty in this bit. That's a reference to John Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'!" There was a time when audiences were expected to know things and knowing those things helped understand the overall theme and plot of a work, or the dialogue happening between generations of poets, or, in visual art, philosophical ideas communicated through the styles used or subverted. Now these are just "Easter eggs" for people to point out as endless bits of Trivia on an IMDB page or that awful TV Tropes shit that's ruined actually experiencing things with your own fucking mind. The purposeful references in a work of art are now just seen as opportunities to post an "I see what u did there" gif instead of a helpful aid in understanding the overall work of art. Internet "Easter Eggs" are noticing that the title Infinite Jest comes from "Hamlet" without understanding that David Foster Wallace is saying, "Get thee to The Complete Works of Shakespeare before reading this book because it'll, you know, fucking help."
² "I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that." Page 19, Slaughterhouse-Five. Amen.
Slaughterhouse-Five was the first Vonnegut book I ever read. It's probably the first Vonnegut book a lot of people read if they approach Vonnegut as an author they want to read. I imagine a lot of people began reading Vonnegut because they found one of his "lesser" novels in an aunt or uncle's bookcase where they'd stuck it unread after receiving it from some dodgy '70s book club and was then intrigued enough to give it a read. But I started with Slaughterhouse-Five because it was an intentional move on my part. I was a senior at San Jose State University and had found myself in English 1B (or 102? or whatever the second standard English course is you're supposed to take as a Freshman) due to my weird history of transferring schools and skipping semesters. Somewhere along the way, my high school AP credits for the class had disappeared from my record and the school was all, "Hey, idiot. How did you get this far without taking this mandatory Freshman class? Go back and take it!" So there I was, King Shit Senior in a Freshman English class full of fresh new college students, most of whom did not give a fuck about reading and writing but had been told they must take this class. I was like a fucking Golden God in that classroom! My teacher, Aaron Malchow (who was a Graduate Student teacher. What do you call those? I fucking forget. The Non-Certified Spouse, who taught German at the University of Lincoln as one, could tell me but she's asleep!), fucking loved me. Probably. We were probably about the same age, anyway. I bet he wanted to hang out with me because I was so cool.
It's probably time for a new paragraph. Is that how writing works? Is it that arbitrary? Anyway, I had Cerebus pins on my backpack at the time so when I went to the teacher/student meeting to discuss the big essay project for the class, focusing on one author and their work, Assistant Student Near Professor Malchow suggested I do Dave Sim and Cerebus. It was a great suggestion and probably would have been a lot of fun but I was there to learn, dammit! So I wanted to read something I wasn't familiar with. That was Kurt Vonnegut. He was disappointed because I think he wanted to read smart and funny things about Dave Sim being a huge misogynist (which Dave claims he isn't and forces people to sign a petition saying he isn't if they want to have anything at all to do with him, so, um, checkmate, you jerks!). He did thank me for making my essays funny though. He kind of shit on most of his students when he pointed out they all take it so seriously that they're afraid to put any personality into their writing at all. I can't say I didn't understand that feeling that you needed to be academic and serious in your papers. But when you're a couple months away from graduating from college and you're taking a Baby Course for English Babies? It basically frees you up to write an essay that's six pages of ranting about people on campus carrying around umbrellas in the rain.
My point, which I haven't been supporting but I'll just choose to get to it now, is that I don't really need to review this book. Because if a Vonnegut book has been more written about than this one, it's Breakfast of Champions. I meant to end that statement with "I'll eat my own butthole" or something but now we're past it (and also me threatening to eat my own butthole due to being wrong about something just means I'm probably purposefully being wrong because can you imagine eating your own butthole? I'm not being gross! Obviously I mean directly after a shower!), so I'll add some evidence about Slaughterhouse-Five being the most written about Vonnegut novel: it's his magnum opus. So, yeah, of course. Just check the Wikipedia for Slaughterhouse-Five, clock how long it is, and then go look at the stub of an article for Slapstick or Deadeye Dick. If there's a question about Kurt Vonnegut on Jeopardy, the question is going to be "Who do Conservatives pretend they've read but would actually have had a massive aneurysm and be too dead to make that claim if they'd actually read anything he's ever written?" I mean, "What is Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death?"
This book is about the bombing of Dresden and the existential dread that settled over Vonnegut for the rest of his life having survived it. Kurt says this about Dresden on the first page of the novel and I think it might be the sentence that most explains Vonnegut's point of view: "There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground." That's his description of Dresden when he went back to visit in 1967. But isn't that just his description of life and the world humans have made? He's referencing bone meal that wouldn't be there if not for the actions of other human beings. This is how fucked up we are and this is the shit world we live in and it's because of this, because of all this human bone meal we tread upon every day, that he's so insistent that we just fucking be kind to each other.
My attempt at a theme for this novel is this: "Life is hard and it can often suck and the people in power will make it worse and the strangers around you often don't give a shit about you and we're all going to wind up bone meal paving the streets of every big city in the world so maybe don't make this finite existence worse for other people going through the same shit?" And also maybe, "Don't blame yourself for the times you didn't do your best. We're all just fucking trying and, well, free will isn't even a thing, sort of!" I remember somewhere in the beginning of this book, he tells his kids to do anything they want except go into making weapons.² Seems like good, reasonable fucking advice.
I've been to Dresden. Hanging in my living room, I have a framed picture of a barren landscape of dark trees next to the Elbe, just dozens of feet from Dresden Castle, that I took while I was there. I should label it "Human Bone Meal". I was there in 2003 or so. Sixty years after the bombing of Dresden. They were still fucking rebuilding shit.
Another line I think exemplifies Vonnegut's philosophy. This one on page 8, a quote from his father: "You know—you never wrote a story with a villain in it." And here's a phrase that I hate to read when I'm reading people's essays on the Internet, a phrase that I'm now using even though I hate it, using it because it sounds like such a Vonnegutian phrase (although I never hate it when Vonnegut uses it because he knows when to use it for good effect): "Think on that." Vonnegut doesn't write villains because life is the antagonist. Life is trying to kill us all and all we have to help defeat it—at least for as long as we can—is each other. We are villains when we refuse to be kind to others, when we let greed and stupidity and selfish violent actions overcome our empathy and compassion.
Remember: Conservatives could never like Vonnegut.
I believe the closest Vonnegut ever came to writing a villain was when he was writing a nonfiction essay about William F. Buckley, Jr.
I'm almost done with this review and I haven't even mentioned Billy Pilgrim or Tralfamadore or Montana Wildhack. Why should I?
The first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five is what most people would have called an author's note because it's not even a prologue. Vonnegut explains how the book came to be in Chapter One and the story begins in Chapter Two. You know the novel begins in Chapter Two and not Chapter One because Vonnegut ends Chapter One by saying the novel begins with "Listen. Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time" and that's the line that begins Chapter Two. It's odd, isn't it?
The end of this review is this: I have just re-re-re-re-re-read (it's hard to know how many times I've read it over my 55 years) Chapter One of Slaughterhouse-Five and I've cried multiple times while doing so and my heart is broken for all the children coerced into going off to war and making the world a worse place simply because terrible men who have never found anything to love in this world forced them to (or, at the very least, manipulated them through propaganda and the mythology of what it means to be a man). I guess I'm about to read it again?
P.S. There's a lot of horseshit about the book on its Wikipedia page. Don't read that. It'll just confuse you. Read the fucking book, slacker.
__________________________________________________________________________________
¹ Those quote marks are doing a lot of mental work here. I feel like the Internet meaning of "Easter egg" has changed the pre-Internet meaning so much that it's basically unrecognizable now. There was a time when "Easter egg" truly meant something somewhat outside the work that was hidden, meant to be hard to find, and was simply a surprising, interesting, and cool find when it was. An Easter egg had no impact on the work it was hidden within. Now it just means something recognizable was referenced. "Oh! The protagonist in the opening credits of Movie X mentions truth and beauty in this bit. That's a reference to John Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'!" There was a time when audiences were expected to know things and knowing those things helped understand the overall theme and plot of a work, or the dialogue happening between generations of poets, or, in visual art, philosophical ideas communicated through the styles used or subverted. Now these are just "Easter eggs" for people to point out as endless bits of Trivia on an IMDB page or that awful TV Tropes shit that's ruined actually experiencing things with your own fucking mind. The purposeful references in a work of art are now just seen as opportunities to post an "I see what u did there" gif instead of a helpful aid in understanding the overall work of art. Internet "Easter Eggs" are noticing that the title Infinite Jest comes from "Hamlet" without understanding that David Foster Wallace is saying, "Get thee to The Complete Works of Shakespeare before reading this book because it'll, you know, fucking help."
² "I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that." Page 19, Slaughterhouse-Five. Amen.
