Voice: 5/9. I could bear with a book lacking any suspense by leaking the entire outline in the first chapter, but I didn’t enjoy it.

Nevertheless, I conjectured this kind of distant voice, non-linear collage, incoherent episodes and unpredictable switches were intentionally set to reflect the protagonist’s lifelong trauma—possibly PTSD—left by the cruel war in his youth. In other words, perhaps it was normal that I didn’t like it, because Kurt Vonnegut deliberately crafted in this way to instill his indifference or extreme abhorrence to the merciless war into readers most of whom had never witnessed the atrocity of real wars and were thereby inclined to believe governments’ pro-war propaganda.

By the way, sometimes disagreeable books don’t mean they are worthless or not beneficial, taking tedious and hefty textbooks as an example.

Plot: 6/9.

The author of this book came back to Dresden one day with O’Hare and wrote a book on his experience of its destruction—an event concealed by the American government for fear of public denunciation. He promised O’Hare’s wife that it wouldn’t be a book glorifying the war and glamorizing violence:

Billy Pilgrim was a young assistant to the military chaplain during World War II. He eventually wandered around the war zone alone until he met Weary who saved his life multiples times. Weary was abandoned by two other soldiers because of his benevolence. Therefore he took out his anger on Pilgrim until both of them were arrested by their enemies. Weary died on their way to the camp and his friend Lazzaro swore to avenge him against Billy after the war ended.

Soon they were transported to Dresden and worked in the basement of Slaughterhouse Five to produce syrup. Campbell, an American-born German officer, wanted to recruit them to fight against Russia and was fulminated by a fellow prisoner of war named Edgar Derby. Derby and Billy sometimes cooperated to steal some syrup for the sake of nutrition.

Americans bombed Dresden and overnight hundreds of thousands of people there were annihilated. Luckily, Billy and the other prisoners of war survived owing to the basement. They helped bury the victims, clear out the remains, and recover the city. Derby took a teapot from the dead and was executed in the name of plunder. It was Billy who buried him.

Before long, Billy returned to America after Russian conquered Dresden and repatriated them. Billy became an optometrist and married Valencia whose father was wealthy.

After Billy suffered an air crash, Valencia was so worried about his cranial injury that she got herself killed in a car accident. During the convalescence, Billy heard about the atomic bombing cast on Japan and talked about his military life about Dresden with his roommate in the hospital.

Billy confided to the public that actually he had once been abducted by Tralfamadorians, an alien species that saw matters in the four-dimensional perspective. They kidnapped Billy and penned him in a zoo to observe earthlings. They even abducted a woman for him to mate with. In the end, Tralfamadorians released them. The time span was so infinitesimal that nobody on Earth sensed their departure.

His daughter was ashamed of her father’s lunacy and employed a nurse to tend him. Billy sneaked out, read some science fiction by Kilgore Trout, and appeared on a television program to talk about aliens again.

Billy’s alien story went viral and earned him fame. In 1976, he told his audience about his old feud and predicted his imminent death. His admirers and police vowed to protect him, yet he rejected peacefully and waited for Lazzaro’s laser ending his life.

Character: 5/9. Judging from the surname of Billy Pilgrim, multiple mentions of Christianity and the similarities between Jesus Christ and the protagonist—such as omniscience, frenetic devotion to preaching and acceptance of their foretold endings—I suspect Kurt Vonnegut designed the protagonist as a parodied Jesus Christ to promote the anti-war ideology.

World: 5/9.

Core: 9/9. I thought this book was a terrific blockbuster to smash those political lies beautifying wars and accuse governments of luring immature adolescents to engaging in wars, as indicated by its other name: The Children’s Crusade, A Duty-Dance with Death.

I also admire Kurt Vonnegut’s boldness when he pointed out in the 1976 introduction that the Dresden bombing was expensive yet meaningless and only one person virtually benefited from that apocalypse—the writer himself.

The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is.

Kurt Vonnegut, Introduction to the 1976 Franklin Library edition of Slaughterhouse-Five; Included in Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage, 1999

Moreover, it is said that this anti-war book might may have affected the public opinion on the Vietnam War, which perhaps accounts for its popularity and recommendation.

In Chapter 5, Vonnegut denounced indirectly, through the voices of Rosemary and Trout, the way the Bible suggested it was acceptable to kill nobodies while condemning the killing of Jesus solely because he was the Son of God rather than a nobody. This, according to him, partly explained why “Christians found it easy to be cruel.” Based on the same logic, Vonnegut seemed to suggest delicately that Americans—most of whom, at the time the book was published, were Christians—did not abhor the unnecessary killing of countless civilians in Dresden simply because they were German nobodies rather than Americans or their allies.