Why this book:  Selected by my reading group.  I had read it as an undergraduate and it made a strong and positive impression on me. I remember it more than most books I’ve ever read.

My Impressions: The book is ostensibly a novelized version of Vonnegut’s experience as a hapless soldier in WWII, captured by the Germans, interred in various PoW camps, and finally surviving the fire-bombing of Dresden because of the lucky coincidence that the PoW’s were kept in Schlachthof Funf – Slaughterhouse Five – just outside of town.  The running theme of the story is the story of Billy Pilgrim, something of an adaptable dolt who just seems to flow with whatever is happening.   He never seems to make a decision – just goes along for the ride – reminding me of Meursault,  in Camus’s existential classic, The Stranger, emotionally detached from the world around him.  Billy Pilgrim, like Meursault, does what people want him to do, just goes wherever life pushes him, displays no passion toward anything.  At least Meusault realizes at the end of his life, that life is to be grabbed and experienced, not simply endured.   I’m not sure Billy Pilgrim ever realizes this.  I almost had the sense that Vonnegut had PTSD after his WWII experiences, and dealt with the horror of war, by completely numbing the feelings of his character, and perhaps himself.   Billy Pilgrim is a go-with-the-flow guy to the extreme, and is never particularly happy or sad. 

But what made the story particularly different and interesting is the science fiction quality of the story (Vonnegut angrily resisted the  characterization of his book as ‘science fiction’.)  Billy Pilgrim did not experience his life sequentially in time – his life existed as a complete entity from beginning to end, like a book that had already been written.  His self awareness and self consciousness did not go thru the book sequentially through time from beginning to end; rather his consciousness simply bounced around through the book of his life.  He knew how and when he was going to die, what ‘the future’ would bring, who and how he would marry, what his career would be, what would happen to his parents and family.    This ‘knowledge’ seemingly had no effect on on him. It was as though you were to spend your life reading the same book, reading portions from the end, or the middle, and then the beginning, and shifting to other parts….forever.   His life seems to have a ‘yeah, whatever’ quality to it.  One reads, “and so it goes”  again and again, especially when a person, or a thousand people die. 

There was a clever section in which Billy Pilgrim is abducted by aliens and put in a zoo as a species from another planet.  This allowed Vonnegut to satirize human attitudes and behavior and Western Culture from the perspective of more enlightened aliens.

This book was written in the late 1960’s and at the time, it was regarded as an anti-war commentary coming from a WWII vet with a quirky personality.  He had a section in which Billy Pilgrim watches a WWII movie in reverse, which makes a very clever commentary on the absurdity of war.  

Fun, fascinating, clever, and easy read. Worth re-reading. Listed on many top 100 novels lists of the 20^th century.