Slaughterhouse Five¶
249 words on Kurt Vonnegut
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I recently read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five
. After having read and liked Galápagos, Breakfast of Champions and Cat's Cradle in the past years, I knew what to expect in terms of style and bitter irony.
Kurt Vonnegut has this special style of a, seemingly naïve, narrative that tells you in a very detached way what is going on. He doesn't say anything bad is happening – it's just obvious to the reader putting the bits together. I like that style.
In Slaughterhouse Five episodes of the the protagonist's, Billy Pilgrim's, life are given. He was in the World War II, witnessing the bombing of Dresden (which currently is a scaringly popular topic in German media, by the way). He is also an optometrist, married to a rich fat daughter of an optometrist. And he is being abducted by a breed of alien that can travel along time, giving him another perspective of time – and making other humans think he's mad. Those different lines are interwoven and juxtaposed throughout the book.
The author Kilgore Trout also appears in the book.
Trout, incidentally had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.
So it goes.
After you've read the book, you may want to see the film.
Bookmark: 07-08-2001 Coventry to Birmingham International airport by train.
