Slaughterhouse-Five

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Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut

Literature

Aug 1, 2018

Many thousands died when Allied planes firebombed Dresden, Germany, in February 1945. Kurt Vonnegut, an American soldier being held there as a prisoner of war, survived because he was confined to Schlachthof-fünf—slaughterhouse number five, an airtight, impregnable underground meat locker. When the future author and his fellow prisoners emerged from their shelter, they found a landscape of unimaginable destruction and were put to work unearthing corpses from the ruins. This strange and compelling novel is the tale that Vonnegut eventually crafted from the horror of his Dresden experience. The profound effect Slaughterhouse-Five had on its first generation of readers—and its continuing resonance—stems from the elaborate phantasmagorical web that Vonnegut weaves around this gruesome reality. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut created an uncompromisingly idiosyncratic, intensely affecting work that not only reflected but also helped shape antiwar and counterculture sentiments of the late 1960s; it remains offbeat and eloquent today.

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