What makes slaughterhouse five a classic

His books argue about ideas of freedom and mourn the dead, from their first pages to their last. I was absorbed by the stories of Natasha Rostov, Prince Andrei, and Pierre Bezukhov, and found the extremely long descriptions of fighting, especially of the Battle of Borodino, pretty boring, to be frank.

The description of men at war, I thought, had never been bettered, and the greatness of the novel was to be found in those descriptions, and not in the somewhat more conventional stories of the leading characters.

Loved war, hated peace. That younger self was strongly drawn to fantasy and science fiction, and sought out magazines called things like Galaxy and Astounding and Amazing , and was drawn to the work not only of the crossover giants, like Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov and Ursula K.

Le Guin and Arthur C. Kornbluth, Clifford D. Sprague de Camp. To read it again has been to discover the humane beauty of the non-sci-fi parts, which make up most of the book.

He tells us that his characters were real people, though he has changed all the names. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. Billy looked inside the latrine. The wailing was coming from in there. 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. He knows that most human beings are not particularly violent. Or not more violent than children are. Give a child a machine gun, and he may well use it. Which does not mean that children are particularly violent. Billy Pilgrim is an adult to whom Vonnegut gives the innocence of a child.

He is not particularly violent. At the end of the first chapter, he describes finally putting the book together, and it is that description, more than anything else that happens to poor traumatized Billy throughout the rest of the novel, that makes Slaughterhouse-Five make sense to me. I taught in the afternoons. In the mornings I wrote. I was not to be disturbed. I was working on my famous book about Dresden. 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? Slaughterhouse-Five is a book that tries to talk honestly and intelligently about war and about death, and finds that they are both impossible to talk about. What can you do?

Rose-water , and his most highly praised work, Slaughterhouse-Five Vonnegut wrote prolifically until his death in Slaughterhouse-Five treats one of the most horrific massacres in European history—the World War II firebombing of Dresden, a city in eastern Germany, on February 13, —with mock-serious humor and clear antiwar sentiment.

More than , civilians died in Dresden, roughly the same number of deaths that resulted from the Allied bombing raids on Tokyo and from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, both of which also occurred in Inhabitants of Dresden were incinerated or suffocated in a matter of hours as a firestorm sucked up and consumed available oxygen.

The scene on the ground was one of unimaginable destruction. Vonnegut, like his pro-tagonist Billy Pilgrim, emerged from a meat locker beneath a slaughter-house into the moonscape of burned-out Dresden.

His surviving captors put him to work finding, burying, and burning bodies. His task continued until the Russians came and the war ended. First, he finds himself in a psychiatric hospital for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.

After his supposed recovery, her marries and has children. But then, on the night of his daughter's wedding, he is abducted by aliens and put on display at the Tralfamadorian zoo. Billy makes the best of things, and when a famous actress becomes his exhibit mate, they fall in love and have a child. It's a shame, then, that Billy is sent back to Earth, where be becomes "unstuck in time" and forced to relive his past, present, and future.

According to Vonnegut, it took him over 20 years to write Slaughterhouse-Five , a novel that attempts to explain what the author himself experienced as a prisoner of war and a witness to the destruction at Dresden.