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© All text and images copyright 1999-2004 emjaybee
Give a hoot.Don't steal.

The basic plot concerns Billy Pilgrim, who, like Vonnegut, survived the bombing of Dresden in World War II as a German prisoner of war. Pilgrim then goes on to live a mostly ordinary life as an optometrist.

Vonnegut adds to this straightforward tale a science-fiction conceit, the idea that Pilgrim has become "unstuck from time" when he is abducted by a race of aliens who are able to perceive all of time at once. This results in Pilgrim--and the reader--recounting his life out of sequence, leaping back and forth between his youth, old age, middle age, and time spent as a well-cared-for captive in the alien zoo.

The problem is, for the reader anyway, that knowing so much about a character's life before it happens tends to drain all the dramatic tension. Pilgrim, who was presented as none too bright or perceptive to start with, becomes even more passive as he adopts the aliens' fatalistic viewpoint. This is summed up by the phrase "so it goes" repeated after any horror or tragedy. The inferno of Dresden, the death of his wife, his own foreseen death, lose all their interest as events, because Pilgrim merely accepts what happens as what must happen. Very little thought or emotion seems to take place within him, just a disconnected series of memories.

Vonnegut, meanwhile, makes many funny and sarcastic observations as the narrator of Pilgrim's life, which gives the book some much-needed spice, and rescues it from complete passivity, because Vonnegut-as-character is much more interesting than his creations.

And that creates the disconnect for me. I appreciate what Vonnegut was doing by blending fiction, autobiography, and the then-unappreciated possibilities of science fiction. Slaughterhouse Five is an interesting piece of work, and yet, I don't feel anything after reading it but a sort of "Huh." Vonnegut is a clever and gifted writer, technically, but he doesn't engage me emotionally.

It may be just me. It may be that other works of his are much more powerful in that respect. I will probably pick up something else of his in the future, just to give him another shot. But Slaughterhouse Five won't be one of those books that calls me to re-read it every year or so. Instead, it will just be the semi-pleasant memory of watching a skilled writer at work.

Read the original New York Times review.

Other info also available from the excellent Duke University Vonnegut page.