Book Review: "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut

I've been trying to catch up on some of the classics I never read in school, and Slaughterhouse-Five is one of those books. I'm actually glad I didn't read this in high school, because I wouldn't have been able to comprehend all of its themes. Part autobiography, part absurd, part satire, part science fiction and part war drama - this isn't a story that fits neatly into any specific genre. I can imagine that the first mention of Billy Pilgrim coming unstuck in time and his alien abduction by the Tralfamadorians would cause some readers to close the book and push it away. However, it is this plot aspect that not only functions as an example of Billy's war warped mind, but also as a narrative tool used by Vonnegut to tell a non-linear story.

The narrator of the story is Kurt Vonnegut, he doesn't call himself Kurt Vonnegut, but after listening to an interview with him, I can say with authority that the narrator is a man writing a story about a man writing a story about the WWII massacre at Dresden (very postmodern meta-fiction). The frame story is told in first person perspective and introduces us to the historical event that was the fire bombing of Dresden, Germany. The narrator/Vonnegut talks about how hard it has been to write a story about Dresden, "because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." So what follows is Vonnegut's disjointed tale of Billy Pilgrim that doesn't feel disjointed at all, but rather a well composed and complete story that isn't told in chronological order. You have to be a really good writer to pull off this kind of story telling and make your reader feel like the story couldn't have been told any other way, despite the absurdity of it all.