SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE OR THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE, A NOVEL BY KURT VONNEGUT (BOOK REVIEW AND RECOMMENDATION)

Today I shall review Slaughterhouse-five, a semi-autobiographic anti-war novel by Kurt Vonnegut. Published in 1969, the novel has met with largely positive reviews and is widely regarded as a classic (it even made the list of the best one hundred modern novels according to Time magazine). Slaughterhouse-five was nominated for Nebula and Hugo award in 1970, but lost to Ursula Le Guin The Left Hand of Darkness. The novel focuses on Billy Pilgrim, a young American soldier who fought in WW2 and survived the bombing of Dresden. The book follows the story of his life. The novel opens with the famous line: "All of this happened, more or less." The writing style and the language used is simple ( and in accordance with Vonnegut signature style) but the narrative is not linear and post-modernist. In fact, the novel features many jumps through time. The novel even contains science fiction elements as its protagonist Billy believes he can travel through time and is in communication with an alien race. The first chapter of the novel is basically Vonnegut writing about why and how he wrote the novel.  So, the first chapter feels like a preface at first. Once you start reading, you understand why it is the first chapter and not a preface. Kurt sometimes speaks through Billy, even going so far as addressing the reader. The protagonist of the novel and the writer sometimes feel like the same person. This postmodernist novel definitely defies expectations. 

The title of the novel makes perfect sense once you read the novel. The reason why the protagonist Billy survives the bombing of Dresden is because he (together with other war prisoners) was locked in a slaughter-house. The prisoners were routinely locked in there and ironically it saved their life. One slaughter-house saved them from another (the bombing). One might also argue that slaughterhouse refers to the war in general. The nightmarish title not only serves the tone of the book but indicates  autobiographical details important for understanding.  Moreover, the novel talks about the horrors of the Second World War and the prose at times feels feverish. It's not the easiest book to read. It's a genuinely sad book. The bombing of Dresden is certainly one of those horrible tragedies that should have never happened but they still happened. One image that particularly stayed in my mind was that of hundreds of German adolescent girls being boiled alive in a water tank they sought refuge in. Someone has brought these poor girls to Dresden, believing the city won' be bombed as it was of little significance at that point. However, they ended up being one of many civilian casualties. 

COMPARISON OF PLAYER PIANO AND SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE AKA THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE

What have I read from this author before? I have read Player Piano a couple of years ago. I quite liked Player Piano, it's an interesting dystopian novel set in near future. Most of the labour is done by machines, meaning that only a selected few get to have a real job. Others aren't exactly starving, the state feeds them but that's about it. They are depressed and lack a sense of purpose in their lives. So, those who 'work' are the privileged ones. The plot focused on a young engineer who is increasingly unhappy and frustrated in a society where the work force is composed primarily of managers and engineers. The protagonist realizes that something is wrong with the society he lives in. The plot of the novel is well written and the writing is simple and the point.  As I said, I quite enjoyed that novel.  Ever since I've read Player Piano, I've been wanting to read more from Kurt Vonnegut. I'm really happy I managed to read this one. If I would compare the two novels, I would say they are quite different. There are no autobiographical elements in Player Piano, it's a straightforward dystopian novel. Slaughterhouse-five, a postmodernist, semi-autobiographic and anti-war novel is not surprisingly a more complex work.  Slaughterhouse-five is a much sadder novel than Player Piano. However, the two novels do have something in common and that is they both question the modern society.  Moreover, they both whilst written using a simple syntax, are quite clever books that really encourage the reader to think.

THE ALTERNATIVE TITLE FOR THE BOOK:  THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE

What is this novel about? Well, it's a novel about war but also about life. About the children's crusade for so many soldiers who fought were so terribly young. The second world war and death. Life and death. In particular, the bombing of Dresden seems to play a crucial part.  Kurt Vonnegut reveals this in the opening chapter. He writes about how he visited a veteran friend whose wife was angry with him because she thought Kurt would idolize the war but once he set her straight, she became his friend.

“Well, I know," she said. "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs."

So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.

So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: "Mary," I said, "I don't think this book of mine will ever be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.
"I tell you what," I said, "I'll call it 'The Children's Crusade.'"

She was my friend after that.”

This quote does a great job of describing what kind of book this is. If you take a look at the photograph below, you'll see that this novel is dedicated to Mary and Gerhard. When I told my husband what this book is about (not sparing the details such as Billy being made to dig up bodies after the bombing), he told me how I sure knew how to pick them. Well, I suppose is one must read a tragic book, then a beautiful beach is possibly the best place. It's good to be surrounded by beauty when one is reading about death and destruction. This book is at times a strange mix of comedy and tragedy, of sadness and humour. For all its signature dark humour, irony, satire and postmodernism, it's a complex and serious novel. I've must have read hundreds of books about Second World War, some fictional and some non-fictional.  Therefore, I cannot say that I was shocked by tragedies described. I was, however, quite moved. Moved and sad for all the boys ever fighting in the wars since the dawn of time. Moved and sad for the men who had to command them and lead them into death. Yes, I've  have read hundreds of books  (that were in one way or another) about Second World War.  What I can say with certainty is that (as far as WWII writing goes) this novel is an important one! The Children's Crusade is a book that will make you think. It might not be everyone's cup of tea but it's a healing cup of tea. Healing in its honesty and intention. 

"You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books?"
"No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?
"I say, 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?'"
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that too.
And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death. 

(quoted from the book Slaughterhouse-Five)

NON LINEAR, POST-MODERN AND SEMI-AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL 

In that first chapter Kurt really opens up about his writing, describing how he had been trying to write this novel for years. Besides writing about the struggles he had writing, Kurt also writes about the structure of the novel in the first chapter. Kurt cites the opening lines of the second chapter and the end of the novel itself: 

People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.
I've finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.
This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. It begins like this:
"Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time."
It ends like this:
"Poo-tee-weet?"  (quoted from the book)

Vonnegut even writes about the climax of the book.

"I think the climax of the book will be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby," I said. "The irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And he's given a regular trial, and then he's shot by a firing squad." (quoted from the book)

Obviously, Kurt has given this novel much thought. This is also consistent with his statements and writing. Kurt Vonnegut considered this book to be his most important work. He had been writing it for 20 years, at times doubting he will ever finish it! However, he did. It might have even given him some comfort.

“I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five…I had a shutting-off feeling…that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK.” Kurt Vonnegut, Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut

KURT VONNEGUT, LIKE LOT'S WIFE, DECIDES TO LOOK BACK

“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.” (quoted from the book)

WHY DID IT TAKE VONNEGUT SO LONG TO WRITE THIS BOOK? 

One might wonder why it had taken him so long to finish the book. Probably because it was a difficult book to write. Because he wanted to the victims right- but also the veterans. Because everyone is a victim of war, one way or another. Because while writing about the past, he was also writing about the present. Kurt mentions Vietnam war and current events. Billy's son Robert fights in the Vietnam war. It all ties together. The past and the present. What can one say after the massacre? Words can perhaps be found, but one needs time to find them.

“It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?”  (quoted from the book Slaughterhouse-Five)

A STORY WITHOUT A REAL VILLAIN (AND PERHAPS EVEN A HERO)

Who is the villain in this novel? I honestly think there's not one. I think the war is the main bad guy in this book. There are some bad people for sure, but there is no villain.  There's Roland Weary, a bully that beats up Billy but the reader is compelled to feel sorry for him. Roland is lost in his fantasies and illusions of being a hero, but he's also a terribly lonely kid fighting in WW2. Yes, he is  a bully but it's hard to hate him. Roland dies with his petty hatred. There's also Lazzaro, who threatens his fellow soldiers with violence and just makes a bad situation worse. However, is he a true villain? Bad things happen to everyone. There's also Rumfoord, a seventy old year old athelic professor who bullies his young wife and is mean is Billy. Rumfoord plans to publish a book that will glorify the Dresden bombing. He's certainly not a positive character, but is he really a villain? He appears on the scene only briefly and disappears. Rumfoord seems a hollow man, almost a parody of an American dream. Moreover, he is old and will soon be dead, no matter how physically active he might be. It seems even 'villains' are often victims of life. The reason for his is revealed in the first chapter when Vonnegut writes about himself and his education.

“I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for awhile after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still. Another thing they taught was that no one was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, ‘You know – you never wrote a story with a villain in it.’

I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war.” (quoted from the book)

BILLY- THE PROTAGONIST ISN'T EXACTLY A TYPICAL HERO EITHER

There isn't a main villain/antagonist in this book, but the hero isn't typical either. Billy is a depressed man, broken by life. Back when Kurt Vonnegut wrote this book, PTSD wasn't studied fully and the treatments for it were limited: 

“Billy covered his head with his blanket. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward - always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high school education. She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.”

WHAT WAS MY EXPERIENCE OF READING THIS BOOK? 

I found myself immersed in this novel. As I already said, it is not the easiest of subjects to read about. It was a heart-breaking read, but one that had a profound message. It's message for me is about keeping one's humanity. Many have pointed out the moral clarity of this book and I would agree with it. There's a strong anti-war message to this book. It gives credit where credit is due (by that I mean that it praises personal courage), but it also criticizes war. Kurt Vonnegut speaks of the bombing from a personal and historical perspective. He considers it  a great tragedy. He doesn't really put the blame to anyone in particular, stating that it probably happened through a series of unfortunate and cruel events that wars are filled with. In other words, it's against war, not against the veterans of war.

“The nicest veterans...the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.” Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

THE SCIENCE FICTION ELEMENT OF THE BOOK

As for the book science fiction elements, I must admit that I didn't see this novel as a science fiction one. The science fiction seems more like a way for the author/protagonist to deal with the traumas of everyday life. The presence of aliens gives author the possibility of questioning our human logic and culture. For example, the aliens are not impressed with the Christian religion. They think gospel leaves up too much to interpretation. If hey were to rewrite it, Jesus Christ wouldn't have been God's son until he was killed, then God would officially adopt him. This would, supposedly, make humans wary of hurting one another for God could always adopt them at some point. At lest, this is the alien logic. 

“The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.

But the Gospels actually taught this:

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes.

The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:

Oh, boy–they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch _that_ time!

And that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.

The visitor from outer space made a gift to the Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.

So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.

And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections.” (quoted from the book)

WHAT ROLE DO THE ALIENS PLAY?

It's interesting to examine the role played by the aliens. Their view of life and death offers hope to Billy. After suffering a mental breakdown, Billy starts to read works of a science fiction author he befriends some time after. Science fiction helps Billy break from the horrors of the past and present life.

“- Why me?

- That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?

- Yes.

- Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”

The aliens Billy imagines live in four dimensions. For them there is no past, future or present. They can see different moments simultaneously and experience reality differently than we (humans) do. They perceive death differently than we do. For them a person who has died is still alive in other moments. One could argue that Billy adapts a fatalist view of life from hem but I think his is open to interpretation. 

“The letter said that they were two feet high, and green, and shaped like plumber's friends. Their suction cups were on the ground, and their shafts, which were extremely flexible, usually pointed to the sky. At the top of each shaft was a little hand with a green eye in its palm. The creatures were friendly, and they could see in four dimensions. They pitied Earthlings for being able to see only three. They had many wonderful things to teach Earthlings, especially about time. Billy promised to tell what some of those wonderful things were in his next letter.

Billy was working on his second letter when the first letter was published. The second letter started out like this:

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "so it goes.”

When a Tralfamadorian explains a Tralfamadorian novel to Billy, one can see how the aliens trully experience everything differently. Their art is different from our art, their novels from our novels: 

There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time. 

THIS IS A COMPLEX BOOK THAT COVERS A COMPLEX TOPIC

This is a complex novel that covers a complex subject and I guess that is what makes it such a masterpiece. There are different ways to read his book. One might opt to focus on a number of things: the science fiction, the time travel, the autobiographical elements, the postmodernism, the philosophy, Billy, Billy's marriage and  the exploration of the American dream and so on.

An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, 'There they go, there they go.' He meant his brains.

That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.

IS TIME TRAVELLING REAL?

How real is the time travelling? How real are the science fiction elements in this novel? Perhaps that is something that is open to interpretation. The reader can see Billy's time-travelling as a consequence of PTSD or he can read something more from that.  It is interesting that some do consider this book a science fiction novel (hence the Hugo and Nebula nominations), but some don't. 

“Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground., to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed. (quoted from the book Slaughterhouse-Five)

A DIDACTIC VIEW OF USA AND THE EXPLORATION OF AMERICAN DREAM

In his novel, Kurt also writes about the life in USA. He writes about current events, such as protests and the war in Vietnam. Moreover, Kurt examines the American dream and culture of life. Here is a  quote that stayed in my mind. 

“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”

Here's another quote that can be interpreted as referring to American dream (or just human nature): “Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.”

 MORE ANTI-WAR READING RECOMMENDATIONS:

JENIEC I DZIEWCZYNA (THE PRISONER AND THE GIRL), KORNEL FILIPOWICZ

THE KITE RUNNER BY KHALED HOSSEINI 

THE COLLECTED SHORT STORIES BY ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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 READING UPDATES, NEW FINDS: MARIO VARGAS LLOSA AND RAGNAR JONASSON
READING UPDATE: PLAYER PIANO AND THE FAULT IS IN OUR STARS
 READING UPDATE: LONDON, CERVANTES, LE CARRE AND ESQUIVEL
READING UPDATE AND A GIRLY VINTAGE SUMMER OUTFIT
 SUMMER READING AND REREADING UPDATE
READING UPDATE AND BOOK REVIEWS: WHITE STYLING
READING UPDATE: SCIENCE FICTION
READING UPDATE & BOOK REVIEWS
READING UPDATE & NEW BOOK REVIEWS
 THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ
KAFKA ON THE SHORE, A BOOK REVIEW

MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Kurt Vonnegut, in full Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., (born November 11, 1922, Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.—died April 11, 2007, New York, New York), American writer noted for his wryly satirical novels who frequently used postmodern techniques as well as elements of fantasy and science fiction to highlight the horrors and ironies of 20th-century civilization. Much of Vonnegut’s work is marked by an essentially fatalistic worldview that nonetheless embraces modern humanist beliefs.
Vonnegut grew up in Indianapolis in a well-to-do family, although his father, an architect, was unemployed during much of the Great Depression. As a teenager, Vonnegut wrote for his high-school newspaper, and he continued the activity at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he majored in biochemistry before leaving in 1943 to enlist in the U.S. Army. Captured by the Germans during World War II, he was one of the survivors of the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, in February 1945. After the war Vonnegut took graduate courses in anthropology at the University of Chicago while working as a reporter. He was later employed as a public relations writer in upstate New York, but his reservations about what he considered the deceitfulness of the profession led him to pursue fiction writing full-time.
In the early 1950s Vonnegut began publishing short stories. Many of them were concerned with technology and the future, which led some critics to classify Vonnegut as a science fiction writer, though he resisted the label. His first novel, Player Piano (1952), elaborates on those themes, visualizing a completely mechanized and automated society whose dehumanizing effects are unsuccessfully resisted by the scientists and workers in a New York factory town. For his second novel, The Sirens of Titan (1959), Vonnegut imagined a scenario in which the entire history of the human race is considered an accident attendant on an alien planet’s search for a spare part for a spaceship.onnegut abandoned science fiction tropes altogether in Mother Night (1961; film 1996), a novel about an American playwright who serves as a spy in Nazi Germany. In Cat’s Cradle (1963) some Caribbean islanders, who practice a religion consisting of harmless trivialities, come into contact with a substance discovered by an atomic scientist that eventually destroys all life on Earth. (In 1963 the University of Chicago granted Vonnegut a master’s degree in anthropology after he submitted Cat’s Cradle as a thesis.) The novel was particularly significant in its development of a slyly irreverent voice that constantly called attention to its own artifice; a similar “metafictional” style would characterize much of Vonnegut’s subsequent work. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) centres on the title character, an eccentric philanthropist, but also introduces the writer Kilgore Trout, a fictional alter ego of Vonnegut who appears throughout his oeuvre.
Although Vonnegut’s work had already gained a popular audience by the late 1960s, the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade (1969; film 1972) cemented his reputation. Explicitly drawing on his Dresden experience, Vonnegut crafted an absurdist nonlinear narrative in which the bombing raid serves as a symbol of the cruelty and destructiveness of war through the centuries. Critics lauded Slaughterhouse-Five as a modern-day classic. Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday! (1973; film 1999)—about a Midwestern businessman who becomes obsessed with Trout’s books—is a commentary on writing, fame, and American social values, interspersed with drawings by Vonnegut. Though reviews were mixed, it quickly became a best seller. Vonnegut’s next two novels were less successful. Slapstick; or, Lonesome No More! (1976; film 1982) focuses on a pair of grotesque siblings who devise a program to end loneliness, and Jailbird (1979) is a postmodern pastiche rooted in 20th-century American social history. While Vonnegut remained prolific throughout the 1980s, he struggled with depression and in 1984 attempted suicide. His later novels include Deadeye Dick (1982), which revisits characters and settings from Breakfast of Champions; Galápagos (1985), a fantasy of human evolution told from a detached future perspective; Bluebeard (1987), the fictional autobiography of an aging painter; Hocus Pocus (1990), about a college professor turned prison warden; and Timequake (1997), a loosely structured meditation on free will. Vonnegut also wrote several plays, including Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970; film 1971); several works of nonfiction, such as the collection Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (1974); and several collections of short stories, chief among which was Welcome to the Monkey House (1968). In 2005 he published A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush’s America, a collection of essays and speeches inspired in part by contemporary politics. Vonnegut’s posthumously published works include Armageddon in Retrospect (2008), a collection of fiction and nonfiction that focuses on war and peace, and a number of previously unpublished short stories, assembled in Look at the Birdie (2009) and While Mortals Sleep (2011). We Are What We Pretend to Be (2012) comprised an early unpublished novella and a fragment of a novel unfinished at his death. A selection of his correspondence was published as Letters (2012). Complete Stories (2017) collects all of his short fiction. (quoted from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kurt-Vonnegut)

Thank you for reading.  Have you any reading recommendations to share? Take care and have a nice day!