Critical Book Review of Slaughterhouse Five
In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut explains his experience of the World War II bombing of Dresden, Germany. Vonnegut's creative antiwar novel shows the audience the hardships of the life of a soldier through his writing technique. Slaughterhouse Five is written circularly, and time travel is ironically the only consistency throughout the book. Vonnegut outlines the life of Billy Pilgrim, whose life and experiences are uncannily similar to those of Vonnegut. In Chapter 1, Kurt Vonnegut non-fictionally describes his intentions for writing the book. Vonnegut personally experienced the destruction of Dresden, and explains how he continuously tried to document Dresden but was unsuccessful for twenty-three years after the war. Vonnegut let the audience know his continued displeasure with his attempts in order to inform them how difficult of a task the completion of his novel was. Throughout the novel, Billy Pilgrim is traveling to different moments in his life. He has seen his death, as well as his birth, and everything in between. Also, Billy Pilgrim has traveled to the planet "Tralfamadore." The audience doesn't know if this claim is true, but Billy is convinced that he has been abducted by the Tralfamadorians and taken to their planet. The Tralfamadorians are very significant in that they can view time in a completely different way than humans. The aliens see and entire event, not just individual moments like humans see. Tralfamadorians have seen the beginning and end of the universe. They describe this ability to Billy as "looking at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains instead of a small pebble of it" (p34). Kurt Vonnegut served in the Armed Forces during World War II and was captured during The Battle of the Bulge. He and a group of American prisoners of war were taken to Dresden to take part in a prisoner work camp. Vonnegut and his fellow soldiers were housed n an underground facility when Dresden became history as the most loss of human life at one time. On the