Review: Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut
I’m re-reading a lot of novels from my teenage years at the moment. The latest is Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. My original reaction was kind of mixed – I liked the post-modern structure of the novel and the use of the chorus-phrase “So it goes”. But the content seemed rather one-note, only shallowly exploring its themes. Re-reading it, I found that that the bits I enjoyed before are less engaging and the bits I didn’t enjoy still do nothing for me.
On the plus side, Vonnegut has nice turn of phrase every now and then. For example: “This was a fairly pretty girl, except that she had legs like an Edwardian grand piano” and “Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”
I guess this pretty much sums up why it didn’t work for me:
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. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.
This may be true, but it’s just not very interesting. And it’s not a profound enough insight to justify the poor characterisation and lack of dramatic confrontation.
Anyway, since I was bored while reading it, I made this graphic, which charts the occurences of the phrase “So it goes” against the pages in my copy of the book:
