Slaughterhouse-Five (Abby Durell)

Title of Book: Slaughterhouse - Five

Author: Kurt Vonnegut

Number of Pages: 215

Star Rating: ☆☆☆☆

Why This Book has Value:

Slaughterhouse-Five is an anti-war book and it has many hidden characteristics that challenged me as a student, a contemplator, and a reader. 

This book started off with the author narrating what happened to him and he was talking about how he wanted to write a book about the horrible things that happened to him and his army-mates while in World War II. He came up with a story within the whole book where a confused old man was thinking back to when he was in the war. His name was Billy Pilgrim. He was in the bombing of Dresden and survived a plane crash, which really screwed with is brain. Billy thought that he was time traveling back and forth after he had "been selected to go to" an alien planet light years away from Earth called Tralfamadore. Billy talked about his wife, his children, his wife on Tralfamadore and the family they started, and his time in the war. The actual author of the book was there and changed all of the character's names, however, these things really did happen and people really did die. 

One of the most important characteristics of the book was how he made me contemplate how I saw the world. Towards the beginning of the book, Billy had said “How the inhabitants of a whole new plane can live in peace! As you know, I am from a planet that had been engages in senseless slaughter since the beginning of time. I myself have seen the bodies of schoolgirls who were boiled alive in a water tower by my own countrymen, who were proud of fighting pure evil at the time.” (117). It made me think about how you cannot change fate. If you are destined for something, then that is what happens. I thought that was important because I hadn't seen the world like that before. It was my ah-ha moment about what this book is about.

Another important characteristic was that the narrator made you feel like he was talking to you. It added a depth to the story, as if he was telling it to only you. He even said “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.” (125). This really made me feel grounded. It made me want to keep reading and finish this assignment. At the beginning, I was not that interested in the book because Vonnegut wasn't connecting to me, or I wasn't connecting to him, and then everything changed when he started to talk more conversationally.

Vonnegut made a very compelling story about anti-war. Towards the beginning, the narrator was talking to his friend, trying to reminisce and think of war stories that happened to them when the wife of the friend became very upset because she didn't want the two men to make war sound glamorous. She wanted them to tell it like it is; horrible and deadly, so they did. On page 164, it was said that “The air-raid sirens of Dresden howled mournfully.” It just reminded me that people die in war. It's not a glorious time to be a hero and save people, because as many lives as you save, twice as many are killed by both sides of the argument.

This book made me become a better reader because it included lots of intriguing words that I was

interested to find the definition of such as "succumbed" (17) which means to be unable to resist or to give in too easily. When there words such as these, I looked them up and it made me more engaged in what I was reading. I felt like I had put time and effort into it so I had to finish or all of my work would be for nothing. It became very important to me towards the end, making me a better student. I tried to understand the words my eyes were gliding over and I think that I picked up the trick of reading in loud places because of it.

I would recommend this book for anyone asking.