Contemporary Authors,49. ''In 'In Slaughterhouse Five, -- Or the Children's Crusade, Vonnegut finally delivers a complete treatise on the World War II bombing of Dresden. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a very young infantry scout* who is captured in the Battle of the Bulge and quartered in a Dresden slaughterhouse where he and other prisoners are employed in the production of a vitamin supplement for pregnant women. During the February 13, 1945, firebombing by Allied aircraft, the prisoners take shelter in an underground meat locker. When they emerge, the city has been levelled and they are forced to dig corpses out of the rubble. The story of Billy Pilgrim is the story of Kurt Vonnegut who was captured and survived the firestorm in which 135,000 German civilians perished, more than the number of deaths in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Robert Scholes sums up the theme of Slaughterhouse Five in the New York Times Book Review, writing: 'Be kind. Don't hurt. Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot's wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them.' The reviewer concludes that 'Slaughterhouse Five is an extraordinary success. It is a book we need to read, and to reread.' The popularity of Slaughterhouse Five is due, in part, to its timeliness; it deals with many issues that were vital to the late sixties: war, ecology, overpopulation, and consumerism. Klinkowitz, writing in Literary Subversions. New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism, sees larger reasons for the book's success: 'Kurt Vonnegut's fiction of the 1960s is the popular artifact which may be the fairest example of American cultural change. . . . Shunned as distastefully low-brow . . . and insufficiently commercial to suit the exploitative tastes of high-power publishers, Vonnegut's fiction limped along for years on the genuinely democratic basis of family magazine and pulp paperback circulation. Then in the late 1960s, as the culture as a whole exploded, Vonnegut was able to write and publish a novel, Slaughterhouse Five, which so perfectly caught America's transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age.' Writing in Critique, Wayne D. McGinnis comments that in Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut 'avoids framing his story in linear narration, choosing a circular structure. Such a view of the art of the novel has much to do with the protagonist . . . Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist who provides corrective lenses for Earthlings. For Pilgrim, who learns of a new view of life as he becomes ''unstuck in time,'' the lenses are corrective metaphorically as well as physically. Quite early in the exploration of Billy's life the reader learns that ''frames are where the money is.'' . . . Historical events like the bombing of Dresden are usually 'read' in the framework of moral and historical interpretation.' McGinnis feels that the novel's cyclical nature is inextricably bound up with the themes of 'time, death, and renewal,' and goes on to say that 'the most important function of "so it goes" [a phrase that recurs at each death in the book] . . . , is its imparting a cyclical quality to the novel, both in form and content. Paradoxically, the expression of fatalism serves as a source of renewal, a situation typical of Vonnegut's works,for it enables the novel to go on despite -- even because of -- the proliferation of deaths.'''

*Chris' Note: Throughout The Vonnegut Web novel pages I offer the appropriate section of the fine Vonnegut essay from Gale Research's Contemporary Authors series, volume 49. In the above instance there is an error. While Vonnegut himself was an infantry scout in WWII, Billy Pilgrim is a chaplain's assistant.

Trafamadorian Structure in Slaughterhouse-Fivefrom Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: Broadening Views, 1968-1988.

On the title page of Slaughterhouse-Five Vonnegut invites the reader to see the book as 'a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore.' With its short chapters and paragraphs, its short sets of sentences or paragraphs with spaces between them, the novel has a physical resemblance to the Tralfamadorian model. Many of the juxtaposed segments do not relate sequentially or thematically but together build a total impression like a montage. Events from two periods (1944-1945 and 1968) and from other points in the life of the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, are intermixed. His life is not revealed chronologically, by beginning in medias res, or by flashback; rather, the reader knows its end from the start, and the parts are filled in, from all segments of his life, as the ovel progresses.

Vonnegut cannot use the traditional form of the novel in presenting life viewed in contemporary terms because the conventional novel conforms to assumptions of cause and effect and rigidities of time and substance that he questions. For him the apparently pointless firebombing of Dresden, with its destruction of beautiful art and architecture and the killing of thousands of innocents, epitomizes the illogical. Consequently he needs a form that, while providing the reader with an intelligible account, does not appear to rationalize the events. In particular he needs a form that recognizes duration as a fourth dimension. He has sought to incorporate this view of reality into his fiction from the start. It means that each object or character is its history, not something that exists and has a history. In contrast to the portrayals of Proteus and Constant in Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan, the nonlinear characterization of Billy Pilgrim emphasizes that he is not simply an established identity who undergoes a series of changes but all the different things he is at different times.

The same principles that govern characters govern events as well. Dresden is led up to, as it were, by events that precede and follow it. It is surrounded by allusions to other catastrophes and to other events with comparable victims. Its being is its history, so that it ceases to be a single event with a single explanation or meaning. It is as Vonnegut and Billy Pilgrim see it, as the stunned German guards see it, as the weeping civilian couple sees it, in all the ambiguity this implies. The relationship between parts in the novel resembles relationships in life -- relative, ambiguous, and frequently subjective.

Part of Vonnegut 's artistry shows in his giving his peculiar brand of realism a strong pattern in its apparent randomness. The novel is described as ''A Duty Dance with Death,'' which seems appropriate since there is a kind of sweeping circularity in its movement. Dresden, symbol of death, is always at the center; it begins where it ends, with the author speaking; and throughout characters appear and reappear. In confronting in this novel the specter of death -- the deaths of many others and his own near death -- it is as if he is at last performing an obligatory ''Dance with Death.''

© The Gale Group. 2001

NY Times Book Review

At Last, Kurt Vonnegut's Famous Dresden Book SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE OR THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADEBy Kurt Vonnegut Jr.Kurt Vonnegut Jr., an indescribable writer whose seven previous books are like nothing else on earth, was accorded the dubious pleasure of witnessing a 20th-century apocalypse. During World War II, at the age of 23, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned beneath the city of Dresden, ''the Florence of the Elbe.'' He was there on Feb. 13, 1945, when the Allies firebombed Dresden in a massive air attack that killed 130,000 people and destroyed a landmark of no military significance. Next to being born, getting married and having children, it is probably the most important thing that ever happened to him. And, as he writes in the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five, he's been trying to write a book about Dresden ever since. Now, at last, he's finished the ''famous Dresden book.''In the same introduction, which should be read aloud to children, cadets and basic trainees, Mr. Vonnegut pronounces his book a failure ''because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.'' He's wrong and he knows it. Kurt Vonnegut knows all the tricks of the writing game. So he has not even tried to describe the bombing. Instead he has written around it in a highly imaginative, often funny, nearly psychedelic story. The story is sandwiched between an autobiographical introduction and epilogue. Fact and Fiction Combined The odd combination of fact and fiction forces a question upon the reader: how did the youth who lived through the Dresden bombing grow up to be the man who wrote this book? One reads Slaughterhouse-Five with that question crouched on the brink of one's awareness. I'm not sure if there's an answer, but the question certainly heightens the book's effects. Here is the story: Billy Pilgrim, ''tall and weak, and shaped like a bottle of Coca-Cola,'' was born in Ilium, N.Y., the only child of a barber there. After graduating from Ilium High School, he attended night sessions at the Ilium School of Optometry for one semester before being drafted for military service in World War II. He served with the infantry in Europe, and was taken prisoner by the Germans. He was in Dresden when it was firebombed. After the war, he went back to Ilium and became a wealthy optometrist married to a huge wife named Valencia. They had two children, a daughter named Barbara who married an optometrist, and a son named Robert who became a Green Beret in Vietnam. In 1968, Billy was the sole survivor of a plane crash on top of Sugarbush Mountain in Vermont. While he was recovering in the hospital, Valencia was killed in a carbon-monoxide accident. On Feb. 13, 1976, Billy was assassinated by a nut with a high- powered laser gun. As you can see, there is much absurd violence in this story. But it is always scaled down to the size of Billy Pilgrim's world, which makes it more unbearable and more obligatory for the reader to understand the author's explanation for it. As I said, Mr. Vonnegut knows all the tricks.

Now there are two things I haven't yet told you about Billy Pilgrim, and I'm hesitant to do so, because when I tell you what they are you'll want to put Kurt Vonnegut back in the science-fiction category he's been trying to climb out of, and you'll be wrong. First, Billy is ''unstuck in time'' and ''has no control over where he is going next.'' ''He is in a constant state of stage fright...because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.''Story Told Fluidly This problem of Billy's enables Mr. Vonnegut to tell his story fluidly, jumping forward and backward in time, free from the strictures of chronology. And this problem of Billy's is related to the second thing, which is that Billy says that on his daughter's wedding night he was kidnapped by a flying saucer from the planet Tralfamadore, flown there through a time warp, and exhibited with a movie star named Montana Wildhack. The Tralfamadorians are two feet high, green, and shaped like plumber's friends, with suctions caps on the ground and little green hands with eyes on their palms at the top of their shafts. They are wise, and they teach Billy Pilgrim many things. They teach him that humans cannot see time, which is really like ''a stretch of the rocky Mountains,'' with all moments in the past, the present and the future, always existing. ''The Tralfamadorians... can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them.'' They teach Billy that death is just an unpleasant moment. Because Billy can go back and forth in time, he knew this lesson when he was in Dresden. In 1976, when he was assassinated, Billy Pilgrim was trying to bring this message to the world. He knew he would die, but he did not mind. ''Farewell, hello, farewell, hello,'' he said. I now, I know (as Kurt Vonnegut used to say when people told him that he Germans attacked first). It sounds crazy. It sounds like a fantastic last-ditch effort to make sense of a lunatic universe. But there is so much more to this book. It is very tough and very funny; it is sad and delightful; and it works. But is also very Vonnegut, which mean you'll either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner.© THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Themes of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-FiveMarek Vit

"Be kind. Don't hurt. Death is coming for all of us anyway,and it is better to be Lot's wife looking back through saltyeyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plainin order to save them."- Robert Scholes

Introduction Slaughterhouse-Five; or The Children's Crusade, A DutyDance With Death is surely the best achievement of Kurt Vonnegutand even one of the most acclaimed works in modern Americanliterature. It is a very personal novel which draws uponVonnegut's own experience in World War Two. He was an advancescout with the 106th Infantry Division, a prisoner of war anda witness to the fire-bombing of Dresden on 13th February 1945.135,000 people died in the ruins of Dresden, which means that itwas the greatest man-caused massacre of all times (71,379 peoplewere killed by the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.) Vonnegut manages to tell the reader many things and it ishard to decide, what exactly is the main theme. It is a novelabout war, about the cruelty and violence done in war, aboutpeople and their nature, their selfishness, about love, humanity,regeneration, motion, and death. I will try to explore the novel in a greater depth and tryto say which of the themes mentioned characterizes the book tothe greatest extent.

Kurt Vonnegut and his writing Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born in 1922. He is an author ofnumerous novels and short stories, two plays and several works ofnon-fiction. Most of his books are affected by his war experience(Hocus Pocus, Mother Night etc.), although in some novels it isreally hard to identify. In Slaughterhouse-Five, however, the warexperiences are obvious from the beginning. All his books are strongly satirical and ironical (Vonnegutoften uses very dark humor), funny, compassionate and extremelywise. They mostly have a very poor plot (or none at all) and theemphasis is put onto the rather comic and pathetic characters.

Kurt Vonnegut also very often uses science fiction and comic bookformulas (quick action, short dialogues etc.), which usually putshis books onto bookstore shelves marked "sci-fi". Vonnegut,however, doesn't take the sci-fi elements with the same seriousness as the other sci-fi writers, and that probablymakes the difference between his works and science fiction. In Slaughterhouse-Five, many characters from his previousbooks show up (Mr. Rosewater, Kilgore Trout, the Tralfamadoriansetc.) The reader can also recognize some themes that appeared inVonnegut's earlier books (War vs. Love; Life vs. humanunderstanding etc). Some critiques described Slaughterhouse-Fiveas a summary of his previous five novels.

Structure of Slaughterhouse-Five The book has two narratives. One is personal and the otheris impersonal. The latter is the story of Billy Pilgrim who,similarly to the author, fights in World War Two, is takenprisoner by the Germans and witnesses the fire-storming ofDresden. The personal narrative is Vonnegut's own story aboutwriting a book about the worst experience of his life. It appearsmostly in the first chapter, and describes his temptation towrite a book about Dresden and his efforts to finally produce it.The p ersonal view also appears in the tenth (and last) chapterand surfaces twice in the Billy Pilgrim's story ("That was I.That was me. That was the author of this book." - Vonnegut 1969p.125, 148). This can assure the reader of particular identity ofthe author with Billy. Billy Pilgrim has a unique ability to become "unstuck intime", which means that he can uncontrollably drift from one partof his life to another "and the trips aren't necessarily fun,"(ibid p.23). The whole book is organized in the same way Billymoves in time. It consists of numerous sections and paragraphsstrung together in no chronological order, seemingly at random.The whole narration is written in the past tense, so that thereader cannot identify where the author's starting point is. Thisaspect of the book is identical with the Tralfamadorian type ofbooks:

'There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.' (ibid p.88).

I think that this describes Slaughterhouse-Five quite fully. After having read about Billy being an optometrist, anotherexplanation of why the book has no frame occurs. The lastsentence of the paragraph about optometry reads: "Frames arewhere the money is," (ibid p.24). Wayne McGinnis has pointed outthat historical events, like the destruction of Dresden, areusually "read" in a framework of moral and historicalinterpretation and that is where this book differs from otherbooks of its kind (Bryfonski 1978 p.529). In my opinion, however, the narration is linear. One periodof Billy's life is told in a line - Billy's story from the war.I admit that the line of narration is broken by many otherevents, but every time a war story begins, it takes up thenarrative at the moment when the previous war story ended. Itseems that Vonnegut, who had wanted to write a war novel, nowwanted to avoid writing about it. The war seems to have beena great tempting magnet for him, and Vonnegut was trying toescape its power. He managed to do so, to some extent, but everynow and then the story falls back into World War Two.

The Themes of Slaughterhouse-Five The first theme of Slaughterhouse-Five, and perhaps themost obvious, is the war and its contrast with love, beauty,humanity, innocence etc. Slaughterhouse-Five, like Vonnegut'sprevious books, manages to tell us that war is bad for us andthat it would be better for us to love one another. To find thewar's contrast with love is quite difficult, because the bookdoesn't talk about any couple that was cruelly torn apart by thewar (Billy didn't seem to love his wife very much, for example.)V onnegut expresses it very lightly, uses the word "love" veryrarely, yet effectively. He tries to look for love and beauty inthings that seemingly are neither lovely nor beautiful. Forexample, when Billy was captured by the group of Germans, hedidn't see them as a cruel enemy, but as normal, innocent people."Billy looked up at the face that went with the clogs. It was theface of a blond angel, of a fifteen-year-old boy. The boy was asbeautiful as Eve." (Vonnegut 1969 p.53). An interesting contrast in Vonnegut's books is the onebetween men and women. Male characters are often engaging infights and wars, and females try to prevent them from it. Thewoman characters are often mentally strong, have strong will, andare very humane and loving. A good example is Vonnegut's dialoguein the first chapter, when he talks with his old friend O'Hare infront of O'Hare's wife:

Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation. 'You were just babies then!' she said. 'What?' I said. 'You were just babies in the war--like the ones upstairs!' I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood. 'But you're not going to write it that way, are you.' This wasn't a question. It was an accusation. 'I - I don't know,' I said. 'Well, I know,' she said. 'You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.' So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies. (ibid p. 14-15)

Another place where Vonnegut expresses the previously mentionedqualities of women is the part where Billy becomes "slightlyunstuck in time" and watches the war movie backwards:

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. (ibid p.74-75).

In reality, of course, the women were building the weaponsinstead of dismantling them. The most often expressed theme of the book, in my opinion,is that we, people, are "bugs in amber." The phrase first appearswhen Billy is kidnapped by the Tralfamadorian flying saucer:

'Welcome aboard, Mr. Pilgrim,' said the loudspeaker. 'Any questions?' Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired

at last: 'Why me?' 'That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?' 'Yes.' Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three lady-bugs embedded in it. 'Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.' (ibid p.76-77).

This rather extraterrestrial opinion can be interpreted as ourbeing physically stuck in this world, that we don't have anychoice over what we, mankind as a whole, do and what we head for.The only thing we can do is think about everything, but we won'taffect anything. This idea appears many times throughout thenovel. This is one of the examples, when Billy proposes marriageto Valencia:

Billy didn't want to mary ugly Valencia. She was one of the symptoms of his disease. He knew he was going crazy when he heard himself proposing marriage to her, when he begged her to take the diamond ring and be his companion for life, (ibid p.107).

This excerpt directly shows that Billy didn't like Valencia verymuch and that he actually didn't want to marry her. However, hewas "stuck in amber". Or, for example, Billy knew the exact timewhen he would be killed, yet didn't try to do anything about it.Anyway, he couldn't have changed it. The death bears comparisonwith mankind's fate. The main thing Vonnegut probably wantedpeople to think about has something to do with wars on Earth.Vonnegut says so in the part where Billy discusses the pro blemsabout wars with the Tralfamadorians (p.117). They tell him thateverything is structured the way it is and that trying to preventwar on Earth is stupid. This means that there always will be warson Earth, that we, people, are "designed" that way. There mightbe people striving for eternal peace, but those people must bevery naive and probably don't know humankind's nature. We knowthat wars are bad and we would like to stop them, but we are"stuck in amber." This point of view also might explain why there are novillains or heroes in Vonnegut's books. According to Ernest W.Ranly, all the characters are "Comic, pathetic pieces, juggledabout by some inexplicable faith, like puppets," (Riley 1974p.454). If there is no-one to take the blame for the bad

happenings in the book, it can only mean that the villain is GodHimself ("or Herself or Itself or Whatever" - from Vonnegut'sHocus Pocus, 1990). God Almighty had to be the one who put usinto the amber, who had created us the way we are.

There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces, (Vonnegut 1969 p.164).

Another theme of the novel is that there is no such thingas a soldier. There is only a man, but never a soldier. A soldieris not a human being any more. Vonnegut expresses this mostobviously in this extract from the time when Billy was imprisonedin Dresden:

When the three fools found the communal kitchen, whose main job was to make lunch for workers in the slaughterhouse, everybody had gone home but one woman who had been waiting for them impatiently. She was a war widow. So it goes. She had her hat and coat on. She wanted to go home, too, even though there wasn't anybody there. Her white gloves were laid out side by side on the zinc counter top. She had two big cans of soup for the Americans. It was simmering over low fires on the gas range. She had stacks of loaves of black bread, too. She asked Gluck if he wasn't awfully young to be in the army. He admitted that he was. She asked Edgar Derby if he wasn't awfully old to be in the army. He said he was. She asked Billy Pilgrim what he was supposed to be. Billy said he didn't know. He was just trying to keep warm. 'All the real soldiers are dead,' she said. It was true. So it goes, (Vonnegut 1969 p.159).

Stanley Schatt said: "Vonnegut opposes any institution, be itscientific, religious, or political, that dehumanizes man andconsiders him a mere number and not a human being," (Riley 1973p.348) and I think that this attitude shows up in many otherbooks by Kurt Vonnegut (Player Piano, Hocus Pocus etc.) Another obvious theme of the book is that death isinevitable and that no matter who dies, life still goes on. Thephrase "So it goes" recurs one hundred and six times: it appearseverytime anybody dies in the novel, and sustains the circular

quality of the book. It enables the book, and thus Vonnegut'snarration, to go on. It must have been hard writing a book aboutsuch an experience and it probably helped the author to look upondeath through the eyes of Tralfamadorians:

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes,' (ibid p.27).

The Main Message of the novel As you noticed, the book has different messages; everybodymay see something else as its main meaning. I think that Vonnegutwanted to tell us, the readers, that no matter what happens, weshould retain our humanity. We should not let anybody or anythingreign upon our personalities, be it a god, be it a politician oranybody else. We should be ourselves - human and humane beings.

I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction. The sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar, I read. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which greaw upon the ground. So it goes. Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them. And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes, (Vonnegut 1969 p.21-22).

References:

Brifonski and Mendelson (Editors); Contemporary Literary Criticism vol.8Detroit: 1978; Gale Research Co

Riley, Carolyn (Editor); Contemporary Literary Criticism vol.1

Detroit: 1973; Gale Research Co Riley, Carolyn and Barbara Harte (Editors); Contemporary Literary Criticism vol.2

Detroit: 1974; Gale Research Co Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.; Slaughterhouse-Five; or Children's Crusade, A Duty Dance with Death

New York: 1971; Dell Publishing

Author/Context

"The nature of his talent has been to realize just how strong the human imagination is; that no matter how pessimistic the conditions of the world may be, man still possesses the right to create his own reality." - Jerome Klinkowitz, on Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on November 22, 1922, the third child of two middle-class parents. His father was an architect and his mother came from a socially prominent family. He grew up during the Great Depression, and saw his life transformed as his family lost much of its money. Vonnegut has said that his greatest cultural debts are to the comedians, such as Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Jack Benny, and Charlie Chaplin, who kept him laughing even during the Great Depression. He worked on both his high school and college newspapers, and in 1943 enlisted in the United States Army. He went to Cornell University. His father told him to study something useful, so he studied chemistry and biology. He was sent to war when a bout with pneumonia during his junior year cost him his draft deferrment. In 1944, when he was home on leave, his mother committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills. On December 22, 1944, Germans captured him at the Battle of the Bulge and he was a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany, where he worked in a malt-syrup factory. In 1945, he experienced the Allied firebombing of Dresden, which killed between 135,000 and 250,000 civilians, even more than the U.S. dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war, he worked for the Chicago News Bureau and studied Anthropology at the University of Chicago but did not gain his Master of Arts degree until 1971, when the department of Anthropology decided that his novel Cat's Cradle could serve as a thesis. His rejected thesis proposals included a comparative study of revolutionary groups such as French Cubists and the American Plains Indians Ghost Dance movement, and another, a comparative study of the structure of the folktales of Russia, Kentucky, and other regions. His familiarity with story structure through the research for this proposal gave him an understanding of short stories, and he began writing and selling them to magazines such as Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post. At the same time, he worked in public relations for General Electric for several years but then quit and moved, with his wife and children, to Massachusetts to write full-time. His first five novels and his books of short stories (Player Piano, 1952; The Sirens of Titan, 1959; Canary in a Cat House (stories), 1961; Mother Night, 1962; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, 1965; and Welcome to the Monkey House (stories), 1968) did not gain widespread critical recognition. In 1965, when started a teaching position at the Iowa Writer's workshop, his career could not have been in worse shape. Many of the magazines which published him had become defunct, and he was only receiving publication in small science-fiction magazines. However, that year, two publishers decided to reissue his previous novels, and the American public finally began to see

that he was not a science-fiction writer but a serious writer who had a firm, if humorous grasp on middle-class American society. In 1968, he received a Guggenheim fellowship to return to Dresden. It was Slaughterhouse-Five which really put him on the map. The review was given the coveted and prestigious first page of the New York Times Book Review, and a personality piece followed on the next page. It had taken him nearly twenty years to be able to write about the massacre in Dresden, but the novel is known as one of great anti-war novels of our time. Critic Gerome Hicks wrote of Slaughterhouse-Five that the real Kurt Vonnegut "lives and breathes in the book, and that this is one reason why it is the best he has written." Kurt Vonnegut has since written eight novels, including Breakfast of Champions, two plays, several collected works of fiction and non-fiction, a requiem, and many, many uncollected works of fiction and nonfiction, including articles, interviews, and speeches. He is one of the most unique and well-known American writers of the twentieth century, known as both a humorist and a humanist, always reminding us with a reassuring irony not to give up on the human race.

Major Characters Billy Pilgrim: Billy Pilgrim is the main character and the debatable hero of Slaughterhouse-Five. He is rather bumbling and funny-looking, almost like a puppet or a rag doll throughout the book. He is an unexceptional man, except that he has become unstuck in time, and consequently, throughout the narrative of the book, he spontaneously and uncontrollably time-travels throughout scenes from his life, mostly revolving around his experiences as a soldier. He is in his mid-forties in the book's present. He is a veteran of World War II, where he was captured and kept as a prisoner of war in Germany, where he witnesses the total destruction of the town of Dresden. He did not engage in any active combat; on the contrary, he fumbled his way through the war, starting off as a chaplain's assistant and getting lost often. When he returned, he went to optometry school and married Valencia, the rich daughter of the owner, who died of carbon monoxide poisoning on the way to see him in the hospital. After a plane crash, which killed everyone on the plane but him, he began announcing to anyone who would listen that he had been taken to the planet Tralfamadore. He preached the unique Tralfamadorian views of time and space and continues to do so, letting his optometry practice dissolve. People, especially his daughter Barbara, think he is crazy. He dies, as he knew through his time travel he would, of a shot to the head inflicted by someone avenging Roland Weary on behalf of Paul Lazzaro.

Narrator: The author explains in the preface that he is the narrator of the book. He is attempting to write a war book when we first meet him, and he goes to his war-buddy Bernard V. O'Hare's house to try to reminisce and dig up some memories for material. They did not think of much. He explains that there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre because everything is supposed to be dead and can't say anything anymore. So he gives up on writing his war novel after the first chapter. The narrator tells Billy's story matter-of-factly, explaining all of the time travel, often adding his own appearances in the story, in the men's latrine and on a boxcar, for instance, and often adding his two-cents. The narrator is very anti-war and has forbidden his sons to have anything to do with it. The narrator has a unique writing voice made up of anti-war sentiment and subtle wisecracks.

Bernard V. O'Hare: Bernard V. O'Hare is the narrator's war buddy. They both fought in World War II. The narrator goes to see him to think up material for his war book, and they go to

Dresden and other European cities. The narrator seems surprised that his friend has aged a lot, and he does not drink anymore.

Paul Lazzaro: Paul Lazzaro is a soldier who was kept as a prisoner of war with Billy and the other Americans. The narrator writes that he has the worst and weakest body of all the Americans that arrived at the prison camp, with his rotting teeth and bones and boil-scarred skin. He is extremely hateful and violent, and thinks there is nothing sweeter than revenge. He had revenge on a dog that once bit him by feeding it steak with sharp metal pieces, and he swears to avenge his friend Roland Weary by having Billy Pilgrim shot. Valencia Merble: Valencia is Billy's wife. She is the daughter of the rich owner of the optometry school that Billy attended. He knew he was going crazy when he heard himself asking her to marry him. She is very, very overweight because she cannot stop eating; almost every time she makes an appearance in the book, she ie eating several candy bars. She loves Billy very much and didn't think anyone would ever marry her. She dies of carbon monoxide poisoning in her car on the way to visit Billy in the hospital after his plane crashes.

Montana Wildhack: Montana Wildhack is a beautiful movie star who the Tralfamadorians abduct in a saucer and take back to their planet to be Billy Pilgrim's mate. She is scared at first, but comes to love and trust him and eventually has his baby.

Edgar Derby: Edgar Derby is a soldier who is kept as a prisoner of war with Billy and the other Americans. He is old, but pulled strings so that he could fight in the war. His son is fighting in the war as well. He was a teacher before he was a soldier. He spoke up to the American-turned-Nazi-propagandist Howard W. Campbell Jr. when he came to speak to them in Dresden. Derby is eventually shot by a German firing squad for plundering a teapot from the corpse mines he was working in. This a potent memory for Billy and it repeats throughout the book, from the first chapter to the last.

Kilgore Trout: Kilgore Trout is the author's alter-ego, a mediocre and not very well-known science fiction writer. Billy is first introduced to his books by Eliot Rosewater, his bed-neighbor in the mental hospital he has checked himself into in his last year of optometry school. Rosewater is an avid fan of Trout's, and writes him unintelligible letters saying he should be the President of the World. Billy ran into Trout, who was bossing around the newspaper boys who work for him, in an alley and brings him to his eighteenth wedding anniversary, where the guests are all impressed that he is a real writer. The story of abduction in one of Trout's books suspiciously closely resembles what Billy insists happened to him on Tralfamadore.

Roland Weary: Roland Weary is a soldier who fights in World War II. He is fat and sadistic and hates constantly being rejected. He has always been unpopular because he smells like bacon even when he washes. He is wrapped in a ton of warm clothing, and as a result, he is very energetic and considers himself the leader of his group. He is traveling with two scouts when he comes across Billy. He considers the three of them to be a team, which he grandiosely calls The Three Musketeers. The scouts have no idea of this, and they do not like him. They ditch him with Billy, and while he is beating Billy up in his frustration at being ditched, they are captured and taken as prisoners of war.

In the boxcar on the way to the prison camp, he deliriously and repeatedly tells everyone in the car his version of the story, convincing them that he had a wonderful threesome called the Three Musketeers, who did wonderful and brave things for the country and for God, and that Billy had broken them up and killed him. Weary dies on the boxcar.

Minor CharactersGerhard Muhler: Gerhard Muhler is the cab driver for Bernard V. O'Hare and the narrator when they are in Dresden. He takes them to the slaughterhouse where they were kept as prisoners of war. He had been a prisoner of the Americans. His mother was killed in the bombing of Dresden. Nancy: Nancy is the narrator's daughter. He takes her with him to visit Bernard V. O'Hare in New York.

Alison Mitchell: Alison Mitchell is the narrator's daughter Nancy's best friend. She goes with them to New York to see the narrator's war buddy Bernard V. O'Hare.

Mary O'Hare: Mary is Bernard V. O'Hare's wife. When the narrator arrives at their house to talk with him about the war she acts strangely. She reveals that it is because she thinks that they were just babies when they were in the war, and she suspects that he will write a heroic war book that will glorify war, making it seem like more of them should happen, and her babies will someday be sent into war. The narrator appeases her, telling her that he will subtitle his book 'The Children's Crusade,' which he does, on the title page of Slaughterhouse-Five.

Sam (Seymour Lawrence): Sam is the narrator's publisher. He has a three-book deal. In the first chapter, he announces to Sam that he is done with his war novel, since nothing intelligent can be said about massacre.

Robert Pilgrim: Robert Pilgrim is Billy Pilgrim's son. He was trouble in high school, but he joined the Green Berets and got straightened out. He fought in Vietnam.

Barbara Pilgrim: Barbara Pilgrim is Billy Pilgrim's daughter. She is very upset that her mother is dead and her father seems to be insane, with his talk of aliens and such. She tries to keep him from preaching his Tralfamadorian knowledge, even coming and retrieving him from New York when he goes on the radio there.

Scouts: The scouts are the two soldiers who Weary travels with. He calls them the Three Musketeers and feels a great bond of friendship, but they eventually ditch him, making Weary so mad that he starts to beat up Billy and they are captured by a group of Germans. The scouts are eventually shot by German soldiers and die in the snow.

Werner Gluck: A sixteen-year-old who guarded the carts in the slaughterhouse. He was a distant cousin of Billy's.

Eliot Rosewater: Eliot Rosewater is the eccentric millionaire who collects Kilgore Trout's science fiction books. He is an avid fan and writes Trout that he should be President of the

World. Rosewater and Billy meet when he had the bed next to Billy in the mental hospital Billy checks himself into in his last year of optometry school.

Howard W. Campbell, Jr.: Howard W. Campbell, Jr. is the American-turned-Nazi propagandist. He speaks German and has written popular German plays and poems. He comes to the Americans when they are being held as prisoners of war in the slaughterhouse and promises them good food and other benefits if they join his group. Edgar Derby speaks up against him.

Lily: Lily is Bertram Copeland Rumfoord's fifth wife. She is much younger than him, pretty, and a high-school dropout who cannot read. She pretends to read Truman's statement about the dropping of the atomic bomb. Wild Bob: Wild Bob is a colonel who Billy meets as a prisoner of war. Wild Bob is delirious and addresses Billy as if he were addressing his troops, most of which were killed. He tells them that if they are ever in Cody, Wyoming, to ask for Wild Bob.

Bertram Copeland Rumfoord: Bertram Copeland Rumfoord is an Air Force Veteran with many medals and a well-known Air-Force historian who is trying to condense the twenty-seven volume Air Force history of World War II into a book. He has a very young, pretty, dumb girlfriend, Lily. He and Billy have beds next to each other in the hospital. He thinks Billy is crazy and annoying and does not believe it when Billy says he was in Dresden. He thinks that the weak should just die. The hospital staff thinks he is mean and bitter.

Blue Fairy Godmother: The Blue Fairy Godmother is an English soldier who works at the pseudo-hospital in the camp for the prisoners of war. He is called the Blue Fairy Godmother because that was his role in the Cinderella musical that the Englishmen put on for the Americans to welcome them.

Guide: The guide works at the zoo on Tralfamadore where Billy Pilgrim and Montana Wildhack are kept.

Lionel Merble: Lionel Merble is Billy Pilgrim's rich father-in-law, Valencia Merble's father. He is an optometrist, too, and owns the optometry school that Billy attended. He is killed in the plane crash that only Billy survives.

Maggie White: Maggie White is a guest at the eighteenth wedding anniversary party for Billy and Valencia. She is the wife of an optometrist, and not particularly bright. She talks to Kilgore Trout, the science-fiction novelist, at the party. He tells her about his books, and he petrifies her.

Lance Corwin: Lance Corwin is a character in Kilgore Trout's science-fiction novel The Gospel from Outer Space. He goes back in time and measures Jesus Christ at five-foot-three.

Maori: The Maori is a man who digs out corpses from the ruins of Dresden with Billy Pilgrim. He is also a prisoner of war. He dies from too much vomiting from the stench.

hobo: The hobo is on the boxcar with Billy on the way to Dresden. He is either optimistic or delusional, for he keeps telling Billy that it is not so bad, that he has been hungrier before. He dies on the ninth day, and those are his last words.

Billy's father: Billy's father died when he was young. He taught him to swim using the sink-or-swim method, which consisted of him throwing Billy into the deep end of a swimming pool at the YMCA.

Billy's mother: Billy's mother appears several times in the book. She is not very religious, but played organ at church and taught Billy how. She bought him a gory crucifix for over his bed. She comes to visit him in the mental ward at Ilium, New York, and he hides from her because he feels so ungrateful that she gave him life and he does not like it.

Objects/Places Dresden: Dresden is a city in Germany which was firebombed during World War II. Billy is held as a prisoner of war in Dresden, and is there for the bombing

Slaughterhouse: Billy and the other Americans are kept as prisoners of war in a slaughterhouse in Dresden, Germany.

Tralfamadore: Tralfamadore is the planet which Billy says he was taken in a saucer. He is able to time-travel and often travels to his future there while he is fighting in the war. The Tralfamadorians look like toilet plungers with little hands. They see time as something constant, where events always have happened, are happening, and will happen, as opposed to how Earthlings are stuck in the present and live moment-to-moment.

Children's Crusade: The narrator promises Mary O'Hare that he will subtitle his book 'The Children's Crusade' after she angrily tells him that they were just babies when they fought in the war. She is afraid that he will write a book glorifying the war, which will encourage more wars to happen, making it necessary for her babies to fight in wars someday.

mustard gas and roses: This is the narrator's repeating motif for something that smells bad or rotten. He uses it to describe his breath late at night when he makes phone calls to people he hasn't seen in a long time. He also uses it to describe the corpse mine from which the soldiers have to extract bodies of the victims of the Dresden bombing.

'Poo-tee-weet?': 'Poo-tee-weet?' is the sound of a bird chirping. Billy hears it at the very end of the novel, and it is foreshadowed when the narrator reveals at the end of the first chapter that his story will begin 'Listen:' and end 'Poo-tee-weet?'.

Ilium: Ilium is the city in New York where Billy and his wife Valencia live.

So it goes: 'So it goes' is the phrase that follows each and every mention of death in the novel, whether it is the mass death after the bombing of Dresden or the death of the lice and bacteria on the soldier's clothes as they are cleaned. It signifies the Tralfamadorian attitude toward death, which the protagonist Billy Pilgrim has adopted as his own. Their belief is that moments exist

not sequentially, with a past, present and future; but as a constant state of has happened, is happening, and will happen. Therefore, when a person or thing is dead, they are also alive, because every moment that they were alive is simultaneously existing-- it is just that their body is currently not in very good shape. So they say 'So it goes.'

Weary's knife: Roland Weary has a three-sided knife, which he shows to Billy and explains that it makes a wound which will not close. The Germans who capture he and Billy take it away from him.

Plane crash: Billy is the only survivor of a plane crash which happens when the plane crashes into the top of a mountain in Vermont on the way to an optometrist's convention. After the plane crash, he begins to talk freely about his experiences on Tralfamadore. Sodom and Gemorrah: Sodom and Gemorrah are biblical cities which God destroyed because there were wicked people living there. The family of Lot was spared, but told not to look back as they fled. Lot's wife looked back and she was turned into a pillar of salt. The narrator explains that people are not supposed to look back anymore, and that the book he tried to write about his experiences in the war was not good, because it was written by a pillar of salt.

Princess: Princess is the lady dog who arrives with the Germans who come to capture Roland Weary and Billy. They have heard her bark from afar and she sounds fierce, but the narrator reveals that she is a farmer's dog that they borrowed that morning and she has never been in war.

Sapphire ring: Billy bought Valencia a star sapphire ring for their eighteenth wedding anniversary. He was planning on presenting it to her in front of everyone, but he was so upset by the barbershop quartet which sang at the party that he felt faint and absent-mindedly handed it to her.

Late movie: Billy watches the late movie one night. Because he can time-travel, he watches it forward and backward. Backward, to summarize, the movie goes like this: American planes suck up shrapnel and fire from the ground and put it back in cylinders which they pack in their planes and which are sent back to be disassembled in factories, their dangerous contents hidden deep in the ground where no one can find them again.

Valley of the Dolls: Valley of the Dolls is the only book the Tralfamadorians have for Billy to read on the way to the planet in the saucer. All the rest of the books are in Tralfamadorian, a series of symbols which Billy cannot read.

Locket: Montana Wildhack, the movie star who is kept captive with Billy on Tralfamadore, wears a locket with these words engraved on it: 'God Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.' There is a picture of the locket and her breasts in the book. Billy has the same epigram on the wall of his optometrist's office.

Red Badge of Courage: Red Badge of Courage is a novel by Stephen Crane. It is the story of a young man's experiences in war. Edgar Derby reads it to Billy Pilgrim when they are in the hospital.

Zoo: Montana Wildhack and Billy Pilgrim are kept in a zoo on Tralfamadore, where they are kept in a sealed dome and observed in a habitat of furniture that the Tralfamadorians stole from a warehouse.

Febs: The Febs are a barbershop quartet whose name stands for 'Four-eyed Bastards.' Their music causes Billy to flip out at his eighteenth wedding anniversary, because they remind him of the guards during the war. They and everyone else but Billy die on the plane crash in Vermont on the way to an optometrists' convention.

Schlachthof-funf: Schlachthof-funf is the German for Slaughterhouse-Five. The Germans tell the Americans kept as prisoners of war in Dresden to remember this as their address in case they get lost.

Free American Corps: Howard W. Campbell, Jr., the American turned Nazi-propagandist, tries to get the Americans to join his racist, anti-Communist organization by visiting them when the are prisoners of war and promising them meat and potatoes if they join.

Syrup-spooning: Billy and other prisoners of war work in a factory that makes a sticky syrup full of vitamins and minerals which is for pregnant women. All the workers spoon syrup for themselves. This is illegal, so they hide the spoons everywhere. Edgar Derby shows up and Billy makes him a syrup lollipop on a spoon and Derby is so happy that he cries.

Diamond: The two-carat diamond is one of the two objects that Billy finds in the dead civilian's coat that the Germans gave him. He has it set as an engagement ring for Valencia. He could feel it in the pocket, but he knows not to take it out until he needs it, which was when he was confronted by a German soldier for his ridiculous outfit made of the red toga and silver boots he got from the Englishmen's theatre set.

Partial denture: The partial denture is one of the two objects that Billy finds in the dead civilian's coat that the Germans gave him. He could feel it in the pocket, but he knows not to take it out until he needs it, which was when he was confronted by a German soldier for his ridiculous outfit made of the red toga and silver boots he got from the Englishmen's theatre set. He keeps the partial denture in a drawer with his cufflinks, which he has accumulated because he gets a pair for each Father's Day.

Corpse mine: Several days after the bombing of Dresden, the prisoners of war are sent out to the burnt city, where they must dig up the dead bodies of those killed in the bombing. Billy Pilgrim digs with a Maori man, who dies from vomiting too much from the stench like mustard gas and roses.

Ilium School of Optometry: Billy goes to this school to become an optometrist. He marries the daughter of the owner.

umpire: The narrator describes 'umpires' as people who come and tell the soldiers who is winning or losing the war.

Billy's crucifix: Billy had a gory crucifix hanging over his bed that his mother bought for him in Santa Fe. When Roland Weary tells him gory stories and thinks he knows nothing of the sort, Billy knows that he could tell him a few things about the crucifix.

dirty picture: Weary has a dirty picture of a woman attempting sex with a Shetland pony. The man who took it claimed it was artistic, and the Greek pillars evoked mythology and classicism, but he was arrested and died in jail. The picture ends up in a porn shop in Time's Square that Billy visits when he escapes there to broadcast his Tralfamadorian knowledge. Three Musketeers: Roland Weary considered himself and the two scouts the Three Musketeers and made up all sorts of heroic visions about them in his mind. He was furious when they ditched him and he blamed Billy.

Lion's Club: Billy belongs to the Lion's Club, and he often time-travels back to their meetings. He has been elected president of the Lion's Club.

'mopping up': The Germans that capture Roland Weary and Billy Pilgrim are involved in an operation called 'mopping up,' which consists of gathering any enemy soldiers not killed in battle.

black ghetto: Billy Pilgrim drives past the black ghetto one night and it reminds him of when he saw Dresden destroyed.

Spot: Spot is Billy Pilgrim's dog, who died.

Luxembourg: Billy Pilgrim's war adventure start in Luxembourg, where he is captured by German soldiers and eventually becomes a prisoner of war in Dresden.

boxcars: Billy Pilgrim and other American soldiers who are prisoners of war are loaded into boxcars. Each time the chain of boxcars stops at a prison camp, it leaves some boxcars there.

delousing station: The Americans are stripped naked when they get to the prison camp and their clothes are sent through a delousing station, where poison gas is sprayed on the clothes to kill all their lice and bacteria.

Hospital: Billy is hospitalized twice. The first chronological time, he flips out during a musical that the Englishmen put on to welcome them to the prison camp and is taken to their makeshift hospital with no real doctors. The second time, he is in a mental ward for non-violent patients in Ilium, where he has checked himself in voluntarily in his last year of optometry school.

Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension: Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension is the title of a science-fiction novel by Kilgore Trout in which crazy people cannot be diagnosed because their diseases only exist in the fourth dimension.

The Gospel from Outer Space: The Gospel from Outer Space is the title of a science-fiction novel by Kilgore Trout in which a flying saucer visitor says that the problem with the story of

Jesus is that it teaches that it is only wrong to kill someone who is well-connected. He gives Earth a new gospel in which Jesus is a bum who God adopts, upon his death, as the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe.

Gutless Wonder: Gutless Wonder is the title of a science-fiction novel by Kilgore Trout in which a robot is accepted as soon as he clears up his bad breath. Trout predicts napalm in this book. The robot has no conscience, so he can drop the toxins on the people below.

Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse Five From a talk presented by Ray Boomhower , Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History managing editor, at a series on Indianapolis authors sponsored by the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library in 1994. A version of this talk appeared in the Spring 1999 issue of Traces.

On May 29, 1945, twenty-one days after the Germans had surrendered to the victorious Allied armies, a father in Indianapolis received a letter from his son who had been listed as "missing in action" following the Battle of the Bulge. The youngster, an advance scout with the 106th Infantry Division, had been captured by the Germans after wandering behind enemy lines for several days. "Bayonets," as he wrote his father, "aren't much good against tanks." Eventually, the Indianapolis native found himself shipped to a work camp in the open city of Dresden, where he helped produce vitamin supplements for pregnant women. Sheltered in an underground meat storage locker, the Hoosier soldier managed to survive a combined American/British firebombing raid that devastated the city and killed an estimated 135,000 people--more than the number of deaths in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. After the bombing, the soldier wrote his father, "we were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters; women, children, old men; dead from concussion, fire or suffocation. Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city." Freed from his captivity by the Red Army's final onslaught against Nazi Germany and returned to America, the soldier -- Kurt Vonnegut Jr. -- tried for many years to put into words what he had experienced during that horrific event. At first, it seemed to be a simple task. "I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen," Vonnegut noted. It took him more than twenty years, however, to produce Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade, A Duty-Dance With Death. The book was worth the wait. Released to an American society struggling to come to grips with its involvement in another war--in a small Asian country called Vietnam--Vonnegut's magnum opus struck a nerve, especially with young people on college campuses across the country. Although its author termed the work a "failure," readers did not agree, as Slaughterhouse Five became a best-seller and pushed Vonnegut into the national spotlight for the first time.

His experiences, it seems, have always helped shape what Vonnegut writes. Especially important was his life growing up as a boy in Indianapolis. Revisiting his birthplace in 1986 to deliver the annual McFadden Memorial Lecture, Vonnegut told a North Central High School audience: "All my jokes are Indianapolis. All my attitudes are Indianapolis. My adenoids are Indianapolis. If I ever severed myself from Indianapolis, I would be out of business. What people like about me is Indianapolis." This connection has not escaped notice by readers. Fellow Hoosier writer Dan

Wakefield once observed that in most of Vonnegut's books there is at least one character from Indianapolis and compared it to Alfred Hitchcock's habit of appearing in each of his movies.

The connection between the Vonneguts and Indianapolis stretch back to the 1850s when Clemens Vonnegut Sr., formerly of Westphalia, Germany, settled in the city and became business partners with a fellow German named Vollmer. When Vollmer disappeared on a trip out West, Vonnegut took over a business that grew into the profitable Vonnegut Hardware Company--a company Kurt Vonnegut Jr. worked for during the summers while attending high school at Shortridge.

Kurt's grandfather, Bernard Vonnegut, unlike his grandson, disliked working in the hardware store. Possessing an artistic nature, he studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also received training in Hannover, Germany. After a short stint working in New York, Bernard returned to Indianapolis in 1883 and joined with Arthur Bohn to form the architectural firm of Vonnegut & Bohn. The firm designed such impressive structures as the Das Deutsche Haus (The Athenaeum), the first Chamber of Commerce building, the John Herron Art Museum, Methodist Hospital, the original L.S. Ayres store, and the Fletcher Trust Building.

Kurt Vonnegut's father, Kurt Vonnegut Sr., followed in his father's footsteps and became an Indianapolis architect, taking over his father's firm in 1910. On Nov. 22, 1913, Kurt Senior married Edith Lieber, the daughter of millionaire Indianapolis brewer Albert Lieber. The couple had three children, Bernard, born in 1914; Alice, in 1917; and, Kurt Jr., who came into the world on Nov. 11, 1922.

Fourth-generation Germans, the Vonnegut children were raised with little, if any, knowledge about their German heritage--a legacy, Kurt believed, of the anti-German feelings vented during World War I. With America's entry into the Great War on the side of the Allies, anything associated with Germany became suspect. In Indianapolis, the city orchestra disbanded because its soprano soloist was German; city restaurants renamed kartoffel salade as Liberty cabbage; the Deutche Haus became the Athenaeum; and the board of education stopped the teaching of German in schools. The anti-German feeling so shamed Kurt's parents, he noted, that they resolved to raise him "without acquainting me with the language or the literature or the music or the oral family histories which my ancestors had loved. They volunteered to make me ignorant and rootless as proof of their patriotism." His parents did pass on to their youngest child their love of joke-telling, but, with the world his parents loved shattered by World War I, Vonnegut also learned, as he put it, "a bone-deep sadness from them."

As the offspring of a wealthy family, the two eldest Vonnegut children had been educated at private schools -- Bernard at Park School and Alice at Tudor Hall School for Girls. The Great Depression, however, reduced the elder Vonnegut's commissions to a mere trickle. Hit hard in the pocketbook, the Vonneguts pulled young Kurt from the private Orchard school after the third grade and enrolled him at Public School No. 43, the James Whitcomb Riley School, located just a few blocks from the family's Illinois Street home.

Kurt Jr.'s mother Edith, a refined lady used to comfort and privilege, attempted to reassure her son that when the Depression ended he would resume his proper place in society -- swim with

the children of Indianapolis's leading families at the Athletic Club, play tennis and golf with them at the Woodstock Golf and Country Club. But Kurt thrived in his new surroundings. "She could not understand," he later said, "that to give up my friends at Public School No. 43 . . . would be for me to give up everything." Even today, Vonnegut said, he feels "uneasy about prosperity and associating with members of my parents' class on that account."

Part of that unease may have come from the idealism he learned while a public school student -- an idealism that is often reflected in his writings. To Vonnegut, America in the 1930s was an idealistic, pacifistic nation. While in the sixth grade, he said he was taught "to be proud that we had a standing army of just over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing to say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity Europe for having more than a million men under arms and spending all their money on airplanes and tanks. I simply never unlearned junior civics. I still believe in it."

Along with instilling Vonnegut with a strong sense of ideals and pacifism, his time in Indianapolis's schools started him on the path to a writing career. Attending Shortridge High School from 1936 to 1940, Vonnegut during his junior and senior years edited the Tuesday edition of the school's daily newspaper, The Shortridge High School Echo. His duties with the newspaper, then one of the few daily high school newspapers in the country, offered Vonnegut a unique opportunity to write for a large audience -- his fellow students. It was an experience he described as being "fun and easy." "It just turned out," Vonnegut noted, "that I could write better than a lot of other people. Each person has something he can do easily and can't imagine why everybody else has so much trouble doing it." In his case that something was writing.

Looking back on his school days, Vonnegut felt lucky to have been born in Indianapolis. "That city," he writes in his collection Fates Worse Than Death, "gave me a free primary and secondary education richer and more humane than anything I would get from any of the five universities I attended." Vonnegut also had high praise for the city's widespread system of free libraries whose attendants seemed, to his young mind, to be "angels of fun and information."

After graduating from Shortridge, Vonnegut went east to college, enrolling at Cornell University. If he had gotten his way, the young man would have become a third-generation Indianapolis architect. His father, however, was so full of sorrow and anger about having had no work as an architect during the Great Depression, that he persuaded his son that he too would be unhappy if he pursued the same trade. Instead of architecture, Vonnegut was urged by his father to study something useful, so he majored in chemistry and biology. In hindsight, Vonnegut believed it was lucky for him as a writer that the studied the physical sciences instead of English. Because he wrote for his own amusement, there were no English professors to tell him for his own good how bad his writing might be or one with the power to order him what to read. Consequently, both reading and writing have been "pure pleasure" for the Hoosier author.

To the young Vonnegut, Cornell itself was a "boozy dream," partly because of the alcohol he imbibed and also because he found himself enrolled in classes for which he had no talent. He did, however, find success outside the classroom by working for the Cornell Daily Sun. Before the end of his freshman year, Vonnegut had taken over the "Innocents Abroad" column, which reprinted jokes from other publications. He later moved on to write his own column, called "Well

All Right," in which he produced a series of pacifistic articles. Reminiscing about his days at Cornell at an annual banquet for the Daily Sun, Vonnegut recalled that he was happiest at the university when he was all alone late at night "walking up the hill after having helped put the Sun to bed."

Vonnegut's days at the eastern university were interrupted by America's entry into World War II. "I was flunking everything by the middle of my junior year," he admitted. "I was delighted to join the army and go to war." In January 1943 he volunteered for military service. Although he was rejected at first for health reasons -- he had caught pneumonia while at Cornell -- the Army later accepted him and placed him in its Specialized Training Program, sending him to study mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and at the University of Tennessee.

Some have wondered how Vonnegut, who stresses pacifism in his work, could volunteer so eagerly to go to war. It is a question even Vonnegut has trouble answering. "As for my pacifism," he has said, "it is nothing if not ambivalent." When he asks himself what person in American history he would most like to have been, Vonnegut admits to nominating none other than Joshua Lawrence Chamberlin, college professor and Civil War hero whose valiant bayonet charged helped save the day for the Union at the Battle of Gettysburg.

Although Vonnegut received instruction on the 240-millimeter howitzer, which he later dubbed the ultimate terror weapon of the Franco-Prussian War, he eventually ended up as a battalion intelligence scout with the 106th Infantry Division, which was based at Camp Atterbury, just south of Indianapolis. It was while he was with the 106th that he met and became friends with Bernard V. O'Hare, who joined Vonnegut as a POW in Dresden and would go on to play a large role in the genesis of Slaughterhouse-Five.

On Mother's Day in 1944 Vonnegut received leave from his duties and returned home to find that his mother had committed suicide the previous evening. Edith Vonnegut had grown increasingly depressed over her family's lost fortune and her inability to remake that fortune by selling fiction to popular magazines of the day. "She studied magazines," her son recalled, "the way gamblers study racing forms." Although Edith was a good writer, Vonnegut noted that she "had no talent for the vulgarity the slick magazines required." Fortunately, he added, he "was loaded with vulgarity," when he grew up he was able to make her dream come true by writing for such publications as Collier's, Cosmopolitan, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Ladies' Home Journal.

Three months after his mother's death, Vonnegut was sent overseas just in time to become engulfed in the last German offensive of the war -- the Battle of the Bulge. Captured by the Germans, Vonnegut and other American prisoners were shipped in boxcars to Dresden -- "the first fancy city" he had ever seen, Vonnegut said. As a POW, he found himself quartered in a slaughterhouse and working in a malt syrup factory. Each day he listened to bombers drone overhead on their way to drop their loads on some other German city. On Feb. 13, 1945, the air raid siren went off in Dresden and Vonnegut, some other POWs and their German guards found refuge in a meat locker located three stories under the slaughterhouse. "It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around," Vonnegut said. "When we came up the city was gone. They burnt

the whole damn town down."

In recalling the aftermath of the bombing, which created a firestorm that killed approximately 135,000 people, for the Paris Review, Vonnegut described walking into the city each day to dig into basements to remove the corpses as a sanitary measure:

When we went into them, a typical shelter . . .looked like a streetcar full of people who'd simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting in chairs, all dead. They were loaded on wagons and taken to parks, large open areas in the city which weren't filled with rubble. The Germans got funeral pyres going, burning the bodies to keep them from stinking and from spreading disease. It was a terribly elaborate Easter egg hunt.

Freed from captivity by Russian troops, Vonnegut returned to the United States and married Jane Marie Cox on Sept. 1, 1945. The young couple moved to Chicago where Vonnegut worked on a master's degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago. While going to school, he also worked as a reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. Failing to have his thesis, "Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales," accepted, Vonnegut left school to become a publicist for General Electric's research laboratories in Schenectaduy, New York. As an aside, in 1971 the University of Chicago finally awarded Vonnegut a master's degree in anthropology for his novel Cat's Cradle.

While working for GE, Vonnegut began submitting stories to mass-market magazines. His first published piece "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," appeared in Collier's February 11, 1950 issue--an article for which he received $750 (minus, of course, a 10 percent agent's commission). Writing his father of his success, Vonnegut confidently stated: "I think I'm on my way. I've deposited my first check in a savings account and . . . will continue to do so until I have the equivalent of one year's pay at GE. Four more stories will do it nicely. I will then quit this goddamn nightmare job, and never take another one so long as I live, so help me God."

Vonnegut was almost as good as his word. He quit his job at GE in 1951 and moved to Cape Cod to write full time. Although he sold a steady stream of stories to a succession of magazines, the Hoosier writer did have to take other jobs to supplement his income. He worked as an English teacher in a school on Cape Cod, wrote copy for an advertising agency, and opened one of the first Saab dealerships in the United States. With his short stories, and novels like Player Piano, published in 1952, and The Sirens of Titan, released in 1959, Vonnegut was often typecast by critics as a science fiction writer. "The feeling persists," Vonnegut has said, "that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city." It was also during these years that his father and sister died.

In the novels Vonnegut published leading up to Slaughterhouse Five, which also included such works as Mother Night, Cat's Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, themes emerged that would find their full flowering with Slaughterhouse Five. There is, according to Vonnegut, an "almost intolerable sentimentality beneath everything" he writes--a sentimentality he might have learned from a black cook employed by the Vonnegut family named Ida Young. Young often read to the young Kurt from a anthology of idealistic poetry about "love which would not die,

about faithful dogs and humble cottages where happiness was, about people growing old, about visits to cemeteries, about babies who die." The essence of Vonnegut's work might be best expressed by one of his characters, crazed millionaire Elliot Rosewater, who proclaims: "Goddamn it, you've got to be kind." After all, Vonnegut has reminded us time after time, "pity is like rust to a cruel social machine."

After briefly touching on his World War II experience in other works -- Rosewater, for example, hallucinates that Indianapolis becomes engulfed in a firestorm -- Vonnegut finally, in 1969, delivered to the reading public a book dealing with the Dresden bombing. Slaughterhouse Five is the story of Billy Pilgrim, like Vonnegut, a young infantry scout captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge and taken to Dresden where he and his other prisoners survive the Feb. 13, 1945 firebombing of the city. Pilgrim copes with his war trauma through time travels to the planet Tralfamadore, whose inhabitants have the ability to see all of time -- past, present, and future -- simultaneously. The book is so short, jumbled and jangled, Vonnegut explained, because "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again."

Vonnegut's strange, yet fascinating, trip through World War II, which one critic called "an inspired mess," did not come easy. He worked on the book on and off for many years. In 1967 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and returned to Dresden with his fellow POW Bernard O'Hare to gather material for the book. Three years earlier Vonnegut had visited O'Hare at his Pennsylvania home and received, as he recounts in the opening chapter to Slaughterhouse Five, a rather chilly reception from his friend's wife, Mary, who believed the Hoosier author would gloss over the soldiers' youth and write something that could be turned into a movie starring Frank Sinatra or John Wayne. "She freed me," Vonnegut reflected, "to write about what infants we really were: 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. We were baby-faced, and as a prisoner of war I don't think I had to shave very often. I don't recall that was a problem."

He promised Mary O'Hare that if he ever finished his Dresden book there would be no parts in it for actors like John Wayne; instead, he'd call it "The Children's Crusade." Vonnegut kept his word. Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children's Crusade, A Duty Dance with Death, with its recapitulation of previous themes and characters (such old favorites as Kilgore Trout, Eliot Rosewater and Howard Campbell Jr. appear), brings together in one book all of what Vonnegut had been trying to say about the human condition throughout his career. With wild black humor mixed with his innate pessimism and particular brand of compassion, Vonnegut asks his readers not to give up on their humanity, even when faced with potential disaster -- offering as an example Lot's wife who was turned into a pillar of salt for daring to look back at her former home.

Although Vonnegut considered the book a failure -- it had to be, he said, as it "was written by a pillar of salt" -- the public disagreed. Written during the height of the Vietnam War, Slaughterhouse Five's compassion in the face of terrible slaughter struck a nerve with an American populace trying to come to grips with the war and a society that seemed to be, at best, headed for major changes. After all, Vonnegut's book was released during a year that saw such shocking events as Neil Armstrong taking the first step on the moon, the New York Mets winning the World Series, more than a half a million youngsters gathering on Max Yasgur's

dairy farm in New York for a music festival called Woodstock, and the uncovering of a massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American troops in a village named My Lai. Slaughterhouse Five's success, and the release of a feature film based on the book in 1972, gained Vonnegut a position as an American cultural icon. College students, in particular, responded well to Vonnegut's sense of the absurd, his Cassandra-like warnings about the bleak future the planet faced. "I do moralize," Vonnegut has admitted. He added that he tells his readers "not to take more than they need, not to be greedy. I tell them not to kill, even in self defense. I tell them not to pollute water or the atmosphere. I tell them not to raid the public treasury."

For those wondering about the phrase, "So it goes," which appears every time a character dies in Slaughterhouse Five (which happens one hundred and three times, by the way), Vonnegut was inspired to use the phrase after reading French author Celine's masterpiece, Journey to the End of the Night. Using the phrase, Vonnegut noted, exasperated many critics, and seemed fancy and tiresome to him too, but it "somehow had to be said."

Since its publication, Slaughterhouse Five has retained its reputation as Vonnegut's greatest, and most controversial, work. It has been used in classrooms across the country, and also been banned by school boards. In 1973 school officials in Drake, North Dakota, went so far as to confiscate and burn the book, an action Vonnegut termed "grotesque and ridiculous." He was glad, he added, that he had "the freedom to make soldiers talk the way they do talk." I, for one, like Vonnegut's idea on how to end book-banning in the United States. Under his plan, every candidate for a school board position should be hooked up to a lie detector and asked: "Have you read a book from start to finish since high school? Or did you even read a book from start to finish in high school?" Those who answer no would not be eligible for service on a school board.

A final thought on Slaughterhouse Five from its writer, who today continues to produce quality literature. Asked for his thoughts on the book, Vonnegut responded by claiming that only one person on the entire planet benefited from the bombing. "The raid," Vonnegut said, "didn't shorten the war by half a second, didn't free a single person from a death camp. Only one person benefited--not two or five or ten. Just one." That one person was Vonnegut who, according to his own reckoning, has received over the years about five dollars for every corpse.