Slaughterhouse-FiveOr the Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death

When Kurt Vonnegut told a friend Slaughterhouse-Five was an anti-war novel, the friend replied that he might as well write an anti-glacier book. The friend’s dark humor seems outdated in a world obsessed with global warming, but that is about the only element of this striking, riveting story that hasn’t aged well.

Slaughterhouse-Five centers around Billy Pilgrim, a New York optometrist who is drafted to fight the Nazis and ends up filling the lowly role of chaplain’s assistant. After being captured by the Nazis, marching painfully through Germany, and finally witnessing the horrific firebombing of Dresden (as did Vonnegut), Pilgrim finally returns home, but the war memories are too much for him and he becomes “unstuck in time” (Vonnegut’s elegant way of saying the war drove Pilgrim mad). From there on a very ironic Vonnegut take us on a kaleidoscopic tour of Pilgrim’s life: one moment he’s walking over the cratered, sterile land that was once Dresden, the next he’s imagining that he’s in an alien zoo being asked to copulate for the audience’s enjoyment.

If Slaughterhouse-Five sounds lurid and fantastic, that’s because it is, but it’s also rich with emotion and the mundane struggle for a normal life. Essentially the story of one man scarred by World War II, the book wrestles with some big questions: the inevitability of war, free will, the line between sanity and insanity. Its evocation of Dresden remains vital and makes for a good counterpoint to contemporary WWII books, like Nicholson Baker’s recent and controversial Human Smoke. Befitting Vonnegut, reader Ethan Hawke is wry but sincere, sounding at times like Jack Nicholson and others like Quentin Tarantino. Hearing him read the novel’s oft-repeated mantra, “So it goes,” in tones varying from sad to bemused to wistful, it’s clear Vonnegut is in good hands.