Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: A review
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut My rating: 4 of 5 stars Slaughterhouse-Five was Kurt Vonnegut's noble effort in 1969 to make sense of a lunatic universe in which a whole city could be destroyed and 130,000 people killed, not because the city had any military value or the people posed any military threat but as an instrument of terror to discourage the enemy and bring a swifter end to a terrible war. Vonnegut had been there on February 13, 1945, a 23-year-old prisoner of war imprisoned in Dresden, the city that was the target of American fire-bombing. He had experienced the destruction of the city from a safe underground bunker, a former slaughterhouse. He was one of the few who survived and he said in the first chapter, which serves as an introduction to the book, that he had been trying to write about it ever since. In that introduction, where Vonnegut speaks in his own voice, he says that there is "nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." He solves that prob...