Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut: Review, Themes & Adaptations

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis
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The novel opens with a promise and a hedge: “All this happened, more or less.” The hedge is the honest part. Slaughterhouse-Five, published by Delacorte on March 31, 1969, came out of something that really did happen to its author, and the “more or less” admits how much room about twenty years of failed attempts had left between the event and the page.

The Author and How the Book Got Made

Kurt Vonnegut was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, and left Cornell in January 1943 to enlist. Sent to Europe as an intelligence scout with the 106th Infantry Division, he was captured on December 22, 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge. He ended up in Dresden, housed in a slaughterhouse and put to work in a factory that made malt syrup. When Allied bombers hit the city on February 13–15, 1945, he and the other prisoners sheltered in a meat locker three stories underground. Afterward he was made to help dig bodies out of the rubble (Wikipedia: Kurt Vonnegut). The German name for the slaughterhouse, Schlachthof Fünf, gave the novel its title.

Getting the experience onto paper took far longer than living through it. Vonnegut wrote about Dresden for years without producing anything he or his publishers found acceptable, and the book’s first chapter describes those struggles. By 1969 he had already published novels including Cat’s Cradle, but this was the one that made him famous. It spent 16 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and peaked at No. 4. It was nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula in 1970 and lost both to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. The full title, for the record, is Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death.

The first Times review reportedly told readers they would “either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner” (as quoted on Wikipedia; the original review was not checked). That split has followed the book ever since, and it is a fair summary of the argument over where it belongs.

Billy Pilgrim Comes Unstuck

The third-person story starts with the line “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” Billy, like Vonnegut, was born in 1922 and survives the bombing of Dresden. He does not experience his life in order. He drops into his wartime captivity, his postwar life, and his captivity among aliens, then back out again, with no warning and no say in the matter.

Vonnegut built the book out of short, flat declarative episodes, which he described as a mosaic of small chips. The narrator steps in as himself, hand-drawn illustrations appear, and the whole thing is deliberately slippery about how reliable any of it is. Vonnegut said Billy was modeled on a fellow prisoner, Edward “Joe” Crone, and that Edgar Derby was modeled on Mike Palaia (Wikipedia). Derby, a middle-aged American prisoner, is executed in Dresden for taking a teapot. (That is a spoiler of sorts, though the book announces its deaths in advance anyway.)

Empty concrete underground cellar with meat hooks and a bare bulb

“So It Goes” and the Tralfamadorian Shrug

The refrain “So it goes” follows nearly every death in the book, 106 times by one count, and it does three jobs at once. It is dark comic relief, a memento mori, and a way of refusing to make a speech about the dead. The Tralfamadorians, the aliens who take Billy, see all of time at once and tell him that death only looks final from inside one moment. Their reason for not minding is the line that sums up the philosophy: “Because this moment simply is.”

Critics disagree about whether Vonnegut endorses this view or is quietly mocking it, and the text gives both sides material. One reading takes it as consolation: if every moment exists forever, no one is ever fully gone. Another reads it as what a man says when he has seen something he cannot absorb, a fatalism that works partly as anesthesia. The second reading is the more convincing one in this reviewer’s judgment, because Billy never seems comforted. He seems numb.

Trauma Before the Word Existed

Billy’s time-slipping is now commonly read as post-traumatic stress, a diagnosis that did not officially exist when the novel was written. Writer Charles Petzold, rereading the book in 2019, described the time-jumps as a way of escaping and reliving the bombing, and said the novel was far more coherent than he remembered from college (his blog post). The structure is the argument. A book about a mind that cannot stay in the present could not sensibly be told in a straight line.

The Dresden Number Problem

The novel gives the Dresden death toll as 135,000, a figure taken from David Irving’s 1963 book The Destruction of Dresden. A commission of historians funded by the Dresden city council concluded in 2010 that between 22,700 and 25,000 people were killed, and Irving’s figures have since been described as inflated; he is also a Holocaust denier (Wikipedia: Bombing of Dresden). According to Wikipedia, later editions of the novel have not added a correction. Petzold flagged the same problem in his rereading.

Whether that damages the book is a fair argument. Defenders point out that the novel’s power was never in the count; a narrator who says “more or less” in the first line is not offering a ledger. Critics reply that a famous anti-war novel repeating a number from a discredited source is worth knowing about, and a reader should know it going in.

Battered paperback open beside a manual typewriter on a wooden desk

What Readers Push Back On

Not everyone gives it a clean pass. A Substack reread called Middlebrow Musings takes aim less at the book than at the culture around it, including men who cite Vonnegut as proof of worldliness, and rejects the idea that this is the only Vonnegut novel anyone needs. (The page does not name its author or date, so treat it as one reader’s opinion.) A more common complaint is that the repeated refrain can start to feel like a tic on a first read. The counterweight is length: the first edition ran 190 pages, and a book this short does not have much time to wear out its welcome.

Burned in North Dakota, Argued in the Supreme Court

The book has a long record as a target for school censors. According to the Wikipedia article on the novel, Rochester Community Schools in Oakland County, Michigan, banned it in 1972 (it was later reinstated). In 1973 a school board head in North Dakota objected to its language and copies were burned in the school furnace; Vonnegut answered in a letter titled “I Am Very Real.” In 2011 it was removed at Republic High School in Missouri, and the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library offered 150 free copies in response.

The best-known legal fight was Island Trees School District v. Pico, decided by the Supreme Court in 1982. Slaughterhouse-Five was the first of eleven books at issue, and the school board had removed it from the high school library. The justices split on the First Amendment question and produced no binding rule, though the outcome allowed the students’ challenge to go forward (Wikipedia: Island Trees v. Pico). The Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis still marks Banned Books Week and sends free books to students.

On Screen, Onstage and in Panels

George Roy Hill directed the 1972 film from a screenplay by Stephen Geller, with Michael Sacks as Billy, Ron Leibman as Paul Lazzaro and Valerie Perrine as Montana Wildhack. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes, the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation and the first Saturn Award for best science fiction film, though it lost money at the box office. Vonnegut himself called it “a flawless translation” of the novel in his preface to Between Time and Timbuktu (Wikipedia: Slaughterhouse-Five (film)). The trailer is below.

The story has proved hard to contain in one medium. A stage version opened at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool in 1989, and Eric Simonson’s adaptation was staged by Steppenwolf in Chicago in 1996. Hans-Jürgen von Bose’s opera premiered at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich that July. BBC Radio 3 broadcast a drama in 2009 starring Andrew Scott, and a graphic novel by Ryan North and Albert Monteys came out from BOOM! Studios in September 2020. Guillermo del Toro announced a remake with a Charlie Kaufman script in 2013; no finished film has been confirmed.

Lone man in a wool overcoat in a snowy field under giant clock hands and stars

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Slaughterhouse-Five a true story?
Partly. Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden and survived the February 1945 firebombing, and the opening line says the war parts are “more or less” what happened. The time travel and the Tralfamadorians are invention.

What does “unstuck in time” mean?
Billy Pilgrim jumps between moments of his own life out of order and has no control over where he lands. The novel is told the same way, in fragments, rather than from beginning to end.

Is it science fiction?
It uses science-fiction machinery, including aliens and time travel, and it was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula. Whether that makes it science fiction or a war novel that borrows the genre is the question the 1969 Times review raised, and it is still open.

Why is it so often banned?
In the 1973 North Dakota case above, the objection was to obscene language. The 1982 Pico case shows that the book has also been caught up in broader fights over what school boards can remove from libraries.

Is the Dresden death toll in the book accurate?
No. The novel’s figure of 135,000 comes from David Irving’s 1963 book, and a 2010 historians’ commission put the toll between 22,700 and 25,000.

Where to Read It

Further Reading

The Paris Review, “The Art of Fiction No. 64”: a 1977 composite of four interviews, with George Plimpton, David Hayman, David Michaelis and Richard Rhodes, which Vonnegut reworked himself. In it he describes Slaughterhouse-Five as his book about Dresden, and still treats it as a property he has to manage as a businessman.

Charles Petzold, “Reflections on Rereading Slaughterhouse-Five” (March 2019): an enthusiastic reread that still takes Vonnegut to task over the Irving figure.

Middlebrow Musings, “Reread: Slaughterhouse Five”: a skeptical counterpoint aimed at the novel’s fan culture.

Sources

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