On the HahaFiction shelf
Slaughterhouse-Five
Audiobook available · 5 hr 54 min
Billy Pilgrim survives the bombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war, then lives through his past and future out of order. Civilian life and alien abduction sit alongside his wartime experiences as he tries to make sense of a life he can't follow chronologically.
From the publisher’s blurb
“It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire”Read the full description at Penguin Random House, publisher description
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What makes it funny?
An early conversation compares writing against war to writing against glaciers: neither seems likely to stop its subject. The blunt comparison makes a bleak joke out of the assumption that war is inevitable, while the narrator also pokes fun at his own efforts to write about it.
The comedy at work
Vonnegut's narrator moves from casual remarks about himself to wartime deaths in the same plain, conversational voice. That lack of a comforting change in register lets a joke and a horror occupy neighboring sentences.
Try this if…
Choose this for dark satire that asks you to piece together a life across time. Its speculative ideas accompany an emotionally painful war story, with little relief from the knowledge of what happened in Dresden.
Good to know
The destruction of Dresden, war deaths and lasting trauma are central to the book. Expect frank language as well as dark jokes.
A few distinguishing details
- Billy Pilgrim's life told out of order
- Dresden and alien abduction in one war novel
- An antiwar argument compared to opposing glaciers
More funny contemporary & literary
Sources & further reading
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut: 9780385333849 - Penguin Random House
Publisher
- Available Now - Slaughterhouse-Five - Los Angeles Public Library - OverDrive
Library catalog
- Publisher
Publisher
- UK publisher
Publisher
- Publisher excerpt
Reading sample
- Patrick S. Tomlinson on science-fiction comedy
Review
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