Kurt Vonnegut Web Resources
Marek Vit's Kurt Vonnegut Corner
The Vonnegut Web, by Chris Huber
"Trout was the only character I ever created who had enough imagination to suspect that he might be the creation of another human being. He had spoken of this possibility several times to his parakeet."
Prefacing his novel, Timequake:
"All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental."
Random quote:
"Roses are red and ready for plucking, you're sixteen and ready for high school."
Slaughterhouse-Five
or
The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death
by Kurt Vonnegut
A Fourth generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod [and smoking too much], who, as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, "The Florence of the Elbe," a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale. This is a novel in the somewhat schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace.
Thus starts Kurt Vonnegut's most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five:
"All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I know really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names."
This book is ostensibly about the author's experiences in World War II. Specifically he recounts his experiences leading up to the Allied fire bombing of the German city of Dresden (which killed some 130,000 civilians), how he took shelter in a Slaughterhouse (hence, the title) during the bombing, and his recollections since.
But there is much more: he somehow mixes his dead serious account of war with a humor that makes what he is saying bearable, even comical, without ever losing the moral message that war is quite terrible.
At the same time Vonnegut takes the reader on a journey to the planet Tralfamadore, whose inhabitants are "two feet high, and green, and shaped like plumbers' friends." Tralfamadorians can see in four dimensions.
As in many of his novels, Vonnegut mentions a few stories by the writer Kilgore Trout, of whom Vonnegut said, "Trout was the only character I ever created who had enough imagination to suspect that he might be the creation of another human being. He had spoken of this possibility several times to his parakeet."
This book had me laughing out loud a number of times, that's how funny it is. I think that's a pretty good criterion for a funny book.
If you're interesting in writing, the author's inimitable style and impressive structure are reasons to read Slaughterhouse-Five. If you just want to read a really good book -- and maybe learn something, too -- that's the best reason to read Slaughterhouse-Five.
Chapter Two: "When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes'."