Slaughterhouse Five

Description:

Theme:

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut explores the theme of the impacts of war, free will, and death.

Summary:

It is an account of Billy Pilgrim’s capture and incarceration by the Germans during the last years of World War II, and scattered throughout the narrative are episodes from Billy’s life both before and after the war, and from his travels to the planet Tralfamadore.

Famous Quotes:

It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor.

There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue.

Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold.

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.

How nice — to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.

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.

The nicest veterans…the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves.

I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren’t going to want to go on living.

Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money.

Literary awards

- Hugo Award Nominee for Best SF Novel (1970)
- Nebula Award Nominee for Best Novel (1969)
- National Book Award Finalist for Fiction (1970)
- Chicago Publishers’ Award (1970)

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