Slaughterhouse-Five

About Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death was published in 1969 by Delacorte and is Kurt Vonnegut's sixth novel. It is one of the most significant American novels of the twentieth century — selected by the Modern Library as among the 100 best novels written in English, and cited repeatedly as an influence by writers across multiple generations and genres.

The novel centers on Billy Pilgrim, a mild, unremarkable man from Ilium, New York, who becomes unstuck in time. He experiences the events of his life in non-chronological order — his capture as an American POW during the Battle of the Bulge, his survival of the Allied firebombing of Dresden while sheltering in a slaughterhouse basement, his postwar life as an optometrist, his marriage, his daughter's exasperation, and his abduction by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who experience all moments in time simultaneously. Tralfamadore becomes the novel's philosophical engine: its four-dimensional beings offer Billy (and through Billy, the reader) a cosmology in which all moments always will have been, nothing can be changed, and the only sane response is to focus on the pleasant moments rather than the terrible ones.

Vonnegut himself appears in the novel's first chapter, explaining how the book came about — how he witnessed the bombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war and spent twenty-three years trying to write a book about it and kept failing, because there was nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. The result of that failure-turned-form is the novel's characteristic phrase: "So it goes." It appears after every mention of death, from major to trivial, until it becomes a kind of mantra of exhausted acceptance — which is not quite the same thing as peace.

The Dresden Firebombing and the Anti-War Tradition

The firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 killed somewhere between 22,000 and 25,000 people — most of them civilians — in a campaign whose military utility was, at best, contested. Vonnegut was there. He sheltered with other POWs in a cold-storage meat locker (the slaughterhouse of the title) and emerged afterward to help collect corpses.

Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, and its reception was inseparable from that context. A novel that said, obliquely but relentlessly, that war is undignified, chaotic, and conducted largely on the bodies of ordinary people who had no stake in the outcome — this was not a comfortable text during Vietnam. It became one of the defining anti-war books in American literature, standing alongside All Quiet on the Western Front and The Things They Carried.

The novel's genre-bending — science fiction, war novel, autobiography, satire — is deliberate. Conventional literary forms imply conventional understandings of cause and effect, heroism and cowardice, sacrifice and meaning. Vonnegut's mixing of forms reflects his conviction that the conventional forms are inadequate to describe what actually happens in war.

Why Slaughterhouse-Five Has Been Banned

Slaughterhouse-Five has been banned or challenged in 46 school districts across 12 states. The challenges cite the novel's profanity, its sexual content, and what some challengers have described as an anti-American or irreligious worldview. Some challenges have explicitly targeted the novel's anti-war themes, characterizing them as unpatriotic.

The novel was publicly burned by a school board in Drake, North Dakota in 1973, a fact Vonnegut addressed directly in a widely reprinted letter to the school board chairman. In that letter he pointed out that the burning of books was the kind of thing the Nazis did — not a comparison designed to persuade, perhaps, but one that illustrated his sense of the stakes.

A novel about the pointless slaughter of civilians in war, written by a man who witnessed it, has been banned in American schools for fifty years. Vonnegut himself would likely have found this more than usually ironic. And so it goes.