Slaughterhouse five

Slaughterhouse 5 (Slaughterhouse-Five, or The children's Crusade) is a novel by Kurt Vonnegut (published in 1969) and counts as an example of meta-fiction. The novel tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, that unarmed and without equipment as an Assistant chaplain in the battle of the bulge ends up, is captured and eventually forced labour in Dresden in a slaughterhouse has to do is just before Dresden bombed . The book speaks of 130,000 dead. [1] ==Content[ Edit] == The novel begins with an introduction by the author, who also elsewhere in the novel sometimes directly to the reader, in which this directive explains why he has written the book and opens with the insurance "This is all more or less true story". He writes the work with the comment from a Publisher in his mind that writing an anti-war book is kind of like writing a antigletscherboek, a phrase that also occurs several times in the book.However, the novel is most characterized by "so it goes", that is, allowing every disappointment, every, every cruel death is senseless cruelty commented.

The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, optometrist from Ilium[2], a fictional city in the State of New York, is "popped out of the time". He is a "time-spasticus" and travels at random moments to random moments in his past so that the novel offers a kaleidoscopic look at his life and death, in which many eccentric characters figure. The strangest of these are without a doubt the alien inhabitants of Tralfamadore, which time doesn't see it as a vlietende flow moments, but as a mountain range with peaks and valleys, beautiful places and ugly. They know that eventually the universe will be destroyed by one of their experiments with a new fuel left and accept that fate, "so that time structured". Earthlings are described by them as the only beings that believe in free will.

Although the novel maybe forward to later episodes from Pilgrims life, he says in more or less chronological form the story of a group of demoralized American POWs who, plagued by hunger and exhaustion, gradually lose their capacity for compassion and human dignity. In Parallel, be told, also more or less chronologically, how Pilgrims life after the war in a downward spiral if he ends up in a radio broadcast about his meetings with Tralfamadorianen tells, and increasingly loses his grip on reality. ==Receipt[ Edit] == The novel was a runaway success in literary circles and still applies if vonneguts best work. In conservative circles in the us the reaction was less enthusiastic and the book was banned in many public libraries and schools. [3]  Nowadays, the work as a classic.