Slaughterhouse-5
by Kurt Vonnegut




Slaughterhouse-5 is a novel about the life of a man named Billy Pilgrim. The main subject of the book is that he goes into war (before he was married, he was about 14) and during his experience in World War 2 something clicks in his mind and it turns out that he can travel through time, well he does not really travel in time but his mind takes him to different places in time. This only really happens when he is asleep though, and is no real problem in the war. It’s only that the time traveling sometimes causes Billy to talk in his sleep making so that the other soldiers want him no where near them when he sleeps.

The time travel in this book has made it difficult to choose a time and place but it’s somewhere around the World War 2 era and the place is not specified in the book but I know that at one point (or more) he was at Dresden when it was bombed. Although it’s set during a war and you would expect the conflict to be person vs. person it is mostly person vs. self. Throughout the book Billy struggles with his mind and inner conscience to decide what to do with the time traveling. I feel like this book is also about learning to deal with how your life is because Billy knows how everything is going to turn out because he can travel into the future but he can’t change the way anything goes so he has to learn to deal with what happens. Vonnegut doesn’t really say how Billy feels a lot but at some points he just starts crying for no reason and there is no specification as to why but Vonnegut implies that even Billy doesn’t know why.



When I read the book I felt like Billy trying to deal with my life at the moment and realizing different life lessons during different parts of the book. The biggest thing that I learned from the book was that you cannot change time so you shouldn’t try to change it. If you can’t change it, learn to take advantage of what you have in life and don’t to mourn what you don’t have. I think that Vonnegut's writing is really good and his word choice is very intriguing. You hear him say “Rose petals and mustard gas” and the first thing you think is “why did he choose that?” and the second thing you think is “what does that smell like?”. The way he uses the words to convey a sense of beauty along with a sense of disgust is wicked.


I would definitely recommend Slaughterhouse-5 to a friend even though there is some explicit material I think that the allurement of the book makes up for the unreserved portions of the novel. Vonnegut was truly clever in his writing and it would do anyone good to listen to his writing and hear his voice in the words that he chose to use. His idea about life and how you cannot change the course of your life and so you should not try to is the most encouraging thing that I have read in a novel about time travel.