Slaughterhouse-Five
Billy Pilgrim, a hapless American optometrist from Ilium, New York, has come unstuck in time. He ricochets between his boyhood, his unhappy marriage, his work, his experience as a prisoner of war in a Dresden slaughterhouse on the night the Allies firebombed the city and killed more than a hundred thousand civilians, and his later life on the planet Tralfamadore, where he is displayed in a zoo by aliens who see time all at once. Kurt Vonnegut, who survived the Dresden bombing as a prisoner of war himself, took more than two decades to write the book, and the result is a short, bleak, darkly funny anti-war novel published in 1969 that uses its science-fictional conceit to refuse every available form of war-story consolation. So it goes.
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What you might want to know about Slaughterhouse-Five
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Optometrist Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. He drifts between his middle age in upstate New York, his time as a POW under the Dresden firebombing, and a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore.
Yes. Slaughterhouse-Five has been one of the most frequently challenged and banned books in American schools since its 1969 publication, primarily for language, sexual content, and antiwar themes. It remains widely taught.
Partly. Kurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden as a 22-year-old American POW in February 1945. The novel's framing chapters are autobiographical; the time travel and Tralfamadorians are invented.
Slaughterhouse-Five was written by Kurt Vonnegut, published in 1969 by Delta Trade Paperbacks.
Slaughterhouse-Five is 205 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Slaughterhouse-Five takes most readers 3 to 4 hours to finish.
Slaughterhouse-Five is a standalone novel by Kurt Vonnegut, not part of a series.
Slaughterhouse-Five is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.