Featured Reading Guide
Kurt Vonnegut
Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller these are the life roles of Billy Pilgrim, hero of this miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse. Slaughterhouse 5 is one of the world’s great anti-war books. Centring on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden in the Second World War, Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through time reflects the journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.
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topAbout the Book
Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller these are the life roles of Billy Pilgrim, hero of this miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse. Slaughterhouse 5 is one of the world’s great anti-war books. Centring on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden in the Second World War, Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through time reflects the journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.
topKurt Vonnegut interview/review
McSweeney’s, September 2002
- Before speaking with you, I read over many of your books and came across one of the most heartbreaking paragraphs I’ve ever read in Timequake: “I was the baby of the family. Now I don’t have anybody to show off for anymore.“
Yeah. Where do you fit into in your family?
- I’m the oldest. I have one younger brother.
You’re certainly very different people. Chances are he’s a helluva lot funnier than you are. The only way he could get attention at the dinner table is by being funny.
- You have outlived your ancestors, and many of your colleagues in letters.
Yes, well, that’s the reason that I don’t want to be in New York any longer. I don’t want to go to parties any more. There are no familiar faces anymore. You know, you go to a party and you hone in on the couple people you know. There are none of those people for me at parties any more. I’ve lost my sister, my brother, my editor, my publisher. It’s a whole generation gone by. Old war buddies of mine, my colleagues, my family.
- Joseph Heller, in 1999.
I took that one very hard.
- You were one of the few people to walk out of Dresden. Now, some fifty years later, you’re among the last men standing.
Every so often I run into someone on the street who announces to me that they are really a survivor. I mean, who the fuck isn’t? If you’re not dead, you’re a survivor.
topStarting Points for Discussion
- Despite being a work of fiction, Slaughterhouse 5 clearly has many autobiographical elements to it – both Billy Pilgrim and Vonnegut himself, for instance, were captured in the Ardennes in 1944. Is it possible to distinguish fiction from reality in the novel?
- The central episode around which Slaughterhouse 5 turns is the firebombing of Dresden. But is it right to simply call the novel and anti-war book? Is Vonnegut trying to address other concerns in the novel as well?
- Why do you think the author introduces science fiction elements to the book? How central and the books discussions about truth, time and war are Billy’s experiences on Tralfamadore and his use of time travel?
- How would you describe the characterisation in Slaughterhouse 5? Does Vonnegut spend much time describing his characters, and if not, what use does he have for them?
- Although written about World War II, the novel was first published at the height of the Vietnam War. Is this significant? Does Vonnegut draw any explicit or implicit parallels anywhere within the book between the two wars?
- Both Kilgore Trout and Dr Rosewater appear in other Vonnegut novels. How would you judge the significance of each character to the telling of this particular story? Are they essential to the novel?
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Breakfast Of Champions
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Hocus Pocus
Jailbird
Look At the Birdie
Look at the Birdie evokes a world in which squabbling couples, high school …
Suggested Further Reading
Mao II ~ Don DeLillo
V ~ Thomas Pynchon
Astrological Diary of God ~ Bo Fowler
Choke ~ Chuck Palahniuk
All Families Are Pschotic ~ Douglas Coupland