I had great expectations for my first Vonnegut novel. I have heard so much praise for him as an author who is both critically acclaimed and enjoyed by the average reader, but I found this book mostly puzzling. I expected to read about Dresden, and I did for 20 pages or so. I was not expecting optometry, Tralfamadore, or being unstuck in time. I can only suppose that this is all supposed to demonstrate how the war experience addled Billy’s mind, but this makes little sense as he is not the narrator. The name “Billy Pilgrim” screams allegorical Everyman to me, but I do not see how his story is the same as mine, or even that of the typical infantryman. I do like the way Vonnegut tells a story so plainly and I get the theme that Billy and other pawns in the war have no free will, but I must say that I found Catch-22 a much more humorous and meaningful look at the absurdity of the second World War. So it goes.
October 2, 2009
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Most of stories in Vonnegut’s books happen in the same universe and are significantly intertwined. These tend to be his shorter books. Some of the longer ones, such as Slaughterhouse Five, Player Piano and Cat’s Cradle are only tangentially related to the bulk of his work. I found the ‘independent’ books to be less enjoyable than the shorter, related ones, and of those three that I mentioned Slaughterhouse Five was my least favorite.
I suggest you read Breakfast of Champions and go from there.
As a side note, the automatic spell-checking function told me I spelled ‘favorite’ incorrectly. It suggested I spell it as ‘favourite’. Welcome to America, WordPress.
As a second side note, WordPress flags it’s own name as a spelling error. Poor.
Comment by Michaluk — October 5, 2009 @ 1:39 pm
The automatic spell-checking function is not a feature of WordPress; it is a feature of your browser. Assuming you are using Firefox, open the context menu in any text box and select Languages / en_US. Slaughterhouse-Five is one of his longer works? I found it surprisingly short.
Comment by chadhogg — October 6, 2009 @ 10:44 am
Sweet, thanks. It’s curious that I’ve never noticed ‘armor’, ‘color’, ‘favorite’ or the like as incorrect until now. Maybe the language got reset in an update or something. I guess it doesn’t make sense for the check to be on the receiving side, since it would have to know what I’m typing before I hit the submit button.
Vonnegut’s books are very short. I think most are around 200 pages, with Player Piano etc. a little longer, but it’s been a while since I’ve read them and I might be wrong. I hope your experience with Slaughterhouse Five didn’t sour you to reading more Vonnegut. He’s one of my favorite authors.
Comment by Michaluk — October 6, 2009 @ 1:04 pm