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Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
"All this happened, more or less" is the first sentence of Kurt Vonnegut's most influential novel, as told through the eyes of the unreliable narrator who relates the story of Billy Pilgrim, a World War II soldier who refuses to fight. In the novel, the 1945 firebombing of Dresden, Germany, is treated satirically and with antiwar sentiment. Vonnegut, who was in Dresden during the actual destruction, was captured and held in a meat locker below a slaughterhouse. Following the bombing, he was ordered to bury and incinerate the bodies of the fallen. More than twenty years later, Vonnegut penned Slaughterhouse-Five, written in the disjointed style of someone suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder: "It is so short and jumbled and jangled," he writes, "because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." The novel was published during the Vietnam War. |