Where is slaughterhouse five

All of them decided they needed to come at the atrocity at an angle, so to speak, not to face it head on, because to do that would be unbearable.

And little Oskar with his tin drum, drumming the beats of history, is, like Billy Pilgrim who has come unstuck in time, lovable. From opposite sides, German and American, these two deranged child-men give us our finest portraits of the great derangement of their time.

That is what realism is. Its final passage describes the end of the war and the liberation of the prisoners, who include Billy Pilgrim and Vonnegut himself. But it is cheerfulness nonetheless. Fifty years after its first publication, seventy-four years after Kurt Vonnegut was inside Slaughterhouse-Five during the firebombing of Dresden, what does his great novel have to say to us?

It tells us that human nature is the one great constant of life on earth, and it beautifully and truthfully shows us human nature neither at its best nor at its worst but how it mostly is, most of the time, even when the times are terrible. All we have to do is build something big, like the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China.

Maybe the wall that some individual whom I will not name is planning to build between the United States and Mexico will be read as an urgent message on Tralfamadore. The person who wants to build the wall will not know what the message means, of course. He is a pawn, being manipulated by a power greater than his to send the message in this time of great emergency. By Salman Rushdie. By Troy Patterson. By The New Yorker. That was I. That was me.

That was the author of this book. What do you say, Harrison Starr? Billy Pilgrim is lovable. Enter your e-mail address. It's as if the novel's theme of history repeating itself manifests in the controversies the Kurt Vonnegut book has caused over the years. Inside the pages of Slaughterhouse-Five , a master of ceremonies asks people to explain the function of the novel in modern society. The function of Slaughterhouse-Five has long been as a teaching tool in American classrooms.

He is doomed to relive moments of his life over and over again. Somehow, though, we find ourselves repeatedly in the same predicaments.

Since it was published, Slaughterhouse-Five has been banned or challenged on at least 18 occasions. A few years later, the Island Trees school district of Levittown, New York—in an area once known as Jerusalem—removed Slaughterhouse-Five and 8 other books from its high school and junior high libraries. Pico trial, the U. Supreme court ruled against the board's restriction, citing a violation of the First Amendment.

See more at IMDbPro. Trailer Official Trailer. Photos Top cast Edit. John Dehner Prof. Rumfoord as Prof. Gary Waynesmith Stanley as Stanley. Richard Schaal Howard W. Campbell Jr. Stan Gottlieb Hobo as Hobo. George Roy Hill. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. Using his own terminology, Billy Pilgrim is "unstuck in time", which means he is moving between different points in his life uncontrollably, although he is aware of it at certain of those points as witnessed by the letter to the editor he writes to the Ilium Daily News about his situation.

Primarily, he is moving between three general time periods and locations. The second is his life as an optometrist in Ilium in upstate New York, eventually married to the wealthy and overbearing Valencia Merble, and having two offspring, Robert, who would spend his teen-aged years as a semi-delinquent, and Barbara, who would end up much like her mother.

And the third is as an abductee on the planet Tralfamadore, along with his devoted dog Spot, and Hollywood starlet Montana Wildhack - who was not averse to taking off her clothes to further her career - the Tralfamadorians who have put them on display.

The more time he spends on Tralfamadore, the more he understands the meaning of what is happening to him. He survived the deadliest day on Earth! To enjoy the sexiest night in outer space! Comedy Drama Sci-Fi War. Billy Pilgrim is a poor tortured soul who after the fire-bombing of Dresden is in a state of flux. His mind cannot remain in the present and darts back and forth in time like the narrative. He was never the most assertive of men, and after the war became a shadow of his already meek self.

The war has left him delusional, which is manifested by his abduction by aliens. This may or may not have happened. Vonnegut leaves it up to the reader to decide. What decision they make effects what genre the novel belongs to.

Is it science fiction? If Billy was abducted by aliens then this is sci-fi, but if it is a figment of his imagination then this becomes something much deeper. I think he made it up, unconsciously, as a coping strategy for the effects of war, and that the author has used it as a tool to raise questions of the futility of free will, but more importantly to further establish the anti-war theme.

Vonnegut draws on a multitude of sources to establish this further, such as the presidential address of Truman. He ironically suggests that the A-bomb, whilst devastating, is no worse than ordinary war; he points out the fact that the fire-bombing of Dresden killed more than the nuking of Hiroshima.

Vonnegut himself is a character within the narrative as the life of Billy Pilgrim is, in part, an autobiographical statement. The narrator addresses the reader and informs them of this. He tells them that this all happened more or less. This establishes the black humour towards war and the inconsequential deaths of those that are in it. The main character time travels, in his mind, and has no real present state. The narrative initially appears random and completely confusing.

View all 14 comments. Feb 15, Kirstie rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: people dealing with trauma. I read this book first in when my grandfather passed away. It was a bit of a coincidence as his funeral occurred between a Primate Anatomy exam and a paper for my Experimental Fiction class on Slaughterhouse Five. I was frantically trying to remember the names of all kinds of bones when I picked this up in the other hand and tried to wrap my head around it. Basically, Vonnegut has written the only Tralfamadorian novel I can think of.

These beings, most undoubtedly inspired in Billy Pilgrim's I read this book first in when my grandfather passed away. These beings, most undoubtedly inspired in Billy Pilgrim's head by the scattered science fiction plots of Kilgore Trout, experience time as a continuum that is constantly occurring What Billy learns from these creatures is that each traumatic event that has happened in his life fits very precisely into a state of meticulous nature.

It has always happened and always will happen and so it goes on and on and on. He exists throughout his memories traveling back and forth with the knowledge of what will happen and how precise it all is. Dresden is bombed in every moment and his friend Derby is put in front of a firing squad.

At every second, he is the only survivor of a plane wreck, he is getting married, and he is fighting a Children's Crusade. It's the only way he can look at the despair that has happened and make sense of it. When my grandfather died and I read this, I felt as if it was just what I needed because I could escape back into time and remember the good memories of my grandfather At the same time my grandfather had a heart attack, I was watching him play cards with my grandma at the kitchen table.

But which one to think of? Well, that was easy. Death can't be prevented and so it goes but you can always try to change which moment you live in.

It's a little bit different than a memory and if you go far into it, you'll end up like Billy Pilgrim, which is to say, you will go insane because the rest of the world sees time as linear and counts seconds and minutes and hours.

Once and awhile, it doesn't hurt. I re-read this again on the plane rides home and back before and after my grandmother's funeral on Monday and last night. My grandma was a strong and intelligent woman and she always read everything she saw. My recent memories of my grandmother were of her at the holidays. She always had her mind but her physical condition had deteriorated and she was dependent on oxygen. It made me sad to think of her like this a bit. It's really hard for me to think that my grandma is no more but then I tell myself My grandma is right now reading at 4am in her living room chair and I am a child creeping down the stairs hoping she's still up.

She is telling me that one day I'll come around and like green onions. She is reminding me to keep my feet off of the davenport and about being "tickled" by something.

She lives in a jungle of houseplants and watches musicals all of the time, always pointing out when some distant relative of mine appears briefly in The Greatest Show on Earth.

My grandma can't be dead and be doing all of those things, can she? It doesn't make sense. She will always be alive in some moments just like I will always be seven and nine and twenty eight and perhaps past thirty and forty. So, she'll always be here. I just wish I could dream about her. View all 12 comments. Jul 20, Kenny rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites , author-author , classics , vonnegut , magical-realism , desert-island-books.

He told me it was the greatest novel ever written. I did, and it isn't. He insisted I was wrong. I wasn't. But, I was done with Vonnegut; there were authors I was craving to read and Vonnegut was not one of them.

Skip ahead to my joining Goodreads. So, I broke down, and picked up a copy. Well, it is hard to put into words how much I loved the world inhabited by Billy Pilgrim. That's a good thing. It propelled Vonnegut, who had been largely ignored by both critics and the public, to fame and literary acclaim.

It spent sixteen weeks on the New York Times best seller list and went through five printings by July of The American Library Association listed the book as the 46th most banned or challenged book of the first decade of the 21st century. How could anybody masturbate to Slaughterhouse-Five? He wrote in the local paper, 'This is a book that contains so much profane language, it would make a sailor blush with shame. The content ranges from naked men and women in cages together so that others can watch them having sex to God telling people that they better not mess with his loser, bum of a son, named Jesus Christ.

As a kid who was not allowed to give book reports in front of the class because my reading choices were "morally questionable" I now officially love the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library!

As i said previously, Billy becomes "unstuck" from the linear nature of time and takes us along on his journey. Billy Pilgrim is the anti-everyman while engaging in love, ethics, war, science, and aliens. It is most definitely an anti-war book. It is in many ways an anti-death book.

It presents a philosophy questioning the purpose of life amidst determinism. That would far to simple an ending for something as brilliant as this; Billy lives on reliving this strange existence, learning and relearning the lessons of his life, unstuck from time.

So, have I revised my opinion of Vonnegut? Most definitely. Will I read more Vonnegut in the future? Yes, but selectively. Will I reread Slapstick? View all 27 comments. It is generally recognized as Vonnegut's most influential and popular work. A central event is Pilgrim's surviving the Allies' firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner-of-war. This was an event in Vonnegut's own life, and the novel is considered semi-autobiographical. Jul 18, Lyn rated it really liked it. A fun visit with cantankerous old Uncle Kurt.

Vonnegut is on a short list of my favorite authors and this is perhaps his most famous work. Not his best, but most recognizable. Billy Pilgrim is also one of his best characters. Kilgore Trout is his best.

I liked it as I like everything I have read of him. The recurring themes and characters, use of repetition for emphasis and comic relief, his irreverence and postmodern lack of sensitivity shine bright as ever here. Vonnegut can be funny and grim A fun visit with cantankerous old Uncle Kurt.

Vonnegut can be funny and grim on the same page, same sentence even, and not lose relevance or sincerity. This publication was nominated for a Hugo and a Nebula and was also a finalist for the National Book Award. I think maybe only Ursula K. LeGuin could also pull that off. We all walk through life with a film of our past raging in our minds, but Vonnegut had Billy go one step further, in that he actually lives random moments in time, from his famous prison time in Dresden to his airplane crash, to his kidnapping and zoo sentence on Tralfamador.

Yes, Tralfamador. We are surrounded and encompassed in the world Kurt made. In his introduction, we are told that this is to be a novel against war, an anti-war novel, and the ubiquitous phrase is used as an existential and ironic reminder that we live in each moment of time but that freewill is an intangible thing, as flimsy as dry rubber bands.

The novel is also ripe with situational irony throughout, peppered with his inimitable dry humor and wit. Since this was first published in , seven years before Reagan would be mentioned in the Republican primaries and eleven years before he would be elected, one wonders if KV had some time travel experience. An absolute must read for his fans, a good introduction to his work, and an excellent book for all readers.

View all 28 comments. May 23, Garima rated it it was amazing Shelves: funny-funsome-sarcasome , mycents , its-not-you-its-meta-or-gfhrytyt. I finally read Vonnegut. I finally read a war novel. And after a long time I finally read something with so many GR ratings and a decent number of reviews which is precisely the reason I have nothing much to add to the already expressed views here.

So I urge you to indulge me to state a personal anecdote. Thank You. By the time I got to know about it I had already watched too many movies and crammed en I finally read Vonnegut. By the time I got to know about it I had already watched too many movies and crammed endless number of answers about when and where such n such war was fought.

So the fact that someone so close in the family had witness something I only read in schoolbooks was utterly fascinating for me. Thus began my streak of stupid questions. Me: Did you kill someone? Did they torture you? Did you dig some sort of tunnel to escape? And so on. I thought for a while and answered: Because it always happens. War always happens. View all 60 comments. Now for something completely different , stating it mildly Billy Pilgrim is not just another time travelling man, kidnapped by aliens from the unknown planet Tralfamadore and put in their zoo, he's an eyewitness to the destruction of Dresden, during World War Two.

Our Billy an optometrist, eye doctor marries the boss's slightly overweight daughter Valencia who no one else wanted, people are so unkind. The couple have two disrespectful children, Barbara and Robert, the truth that he becom Now for something completely different , stating it mildly The couple have two disrespectful children, Barbara and Robert, the truth that he becomes very rich through his nuptials, doesn't make him a bad guy, lucky, I guess is the proper adjective.

Billy is no prize either , a tall, skinny weakling, an ordinary looking man , with a peculiar tendency for nervous breakdowns The only unique thing about him, is the fact he visits rather reluctantly different stages of his life, by way of an unexplained and altogether involuntary power , by time travel. Yet for a while at least, life doesn't become endless and boring, still not as much fun as you'd think, repeating situations again and again, ouch.

Past, Present and Future, are all the same to poor Pilgrim, he can be at his daughter's wedding and in a few moments, be back as a P. Causing fires to spread quickly and kill fry thousands, anywhere from 30, to , humans, nobody will ever know the exact amount. Then poor Billy is back in Illium, New York, talking to his only friend, Kilgore Trout an unsuccessful science fiction writer, 75 unread novels I understand you can get his books at the local library, if you are diligent.

The cosmic flying saucer that took Mr. Pilgrim secretly to that strange world The very curious people of Tralfamadore like to watch and how. They are not embarrassed by any kind of activity, providing him with a young, beautiful, and eager movie starlet Montana Wildhack, for the prisoner.

The salacious activity gives the inhabitants of this planet many hours of entertainment Billy will never really die, he will always travel through time and space forever. View all 23 comments. Feb 07, Leonard Gaya rated it really liked it Shelves: favorites. Kurt Vonnegut, like his protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, witnessed long ago one of the most dreadful and now almost forgotten events during the crepuscular spring of , when the Allies, pretending to eradicate Nazism, utterly destroyed the German city of Dresden and killed tens of thousands of civilians comparable to the Hiroshima bombing.

This event is the bleeding core of the novel. He then keeps travelling in time from one paragraph to the next, going back and forth from the days before the Dresden destruction, to his childhood years, to his postwar life as an optometrist who is writing a book about Dresden and suffers a plane crash, to the time of the Vietnam War and Ronald Reagan the present time when Vonnegut was writing , to a geodesic sphere on the far-off planet of Tralfamadore, to Times Square, and back to the firestorm of World War II.

View all 21 comments. This book is an absolute masterpiece and it makes it clear in every single sentence. I think it is best to go into it without knowing too much about the plot. You just got to take it as it comes, so to say. Before reading, I was worried that I might have trouble with the writing style.

English isn't my first language and the older a book is, the more trouble I seem to have with the writing because of obsolete words, unusual sentence structures, ect. However, my worry was totally for nothing in This book is an absolute masterpiece and it makes it clear in every single sentence. However, my worry was totally for nothing in this case. I found the entire book very easy to read which is even more surprising considering the heavy topics that get dealt with. I also loved how there were many little passages and repetitions of certain phrases.

It seemed fitting somehow. I would have never guessed that the blend of a war story with Science Fiction could work so well! It gives it so much room for analysing and interpretation. Honestly, I could write a thousand more reasons why I loved this book, but in the end I would just repeat myself, because I seriously just loved every.

I highly recommend everyone to give it a shot. View all 18 comments. Listen: This reviewer is stuck in time. He is unable to escape the narrow confines of the invisible, intangible machinery mercilessly directing his life from a beginning towards an end.