Critical Reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five

This research will examine reviews and selected criticism of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five. The research will set forth the context in which criticism of Slaughterhouse-Five, both at the time of its pubication in the lae 1960s in the current period appears relevant to an understanding of the importance of the novel in Vonnegut's work and in American literary history, and then discuss whether and/or the degree to and adequacy with which various critical approaches to the novel address answer the problems of interpretation that the novel poses.

The first observation that must be made about the critical importance of Slaughterhouse-Five to Vonnegut's work is that it is undoubtedly the measure against which the whole of Vonnegut's fiction is likely to be judged. In virtually every discussion of Vonnegut's work as novelist or playwright, reference is made to him as the author of Slaughterhouse-Five. Consider for example a late 1998 reprint in the Paris Review (188ff) of the entire text of a Vonnegut play (A Soldier's Story) that ran briefly in New York in 1993; the introduction to the text notes Vonnegut's unique voice of war literature as a survivor of the World War II bombing of Dresden, the core incident of the book. In a review of Vonnegut's latest novel TimeQuake, characterization and time travel the newer novel are said to suffer by comparison to the older Slaughterhouse-Five, in which both elements were built around what is said to be a credible response to the

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upt time shifts parallels the abruptness of experience in a war setting. That such abruptness and disconnection characterizes Slaughterhouse-Five is telegraphed in the novel's long subtitle, which refers, in part, to the novel's "somewhat . . . telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore" (Vonnegut i). In 1969, the absurdity and surrealism associated with the experience of surviving Dresden could be set beside the same attributes associated withpursuing an unpopular and unwinnable war in Vietnam. In that regard, Klinkowitz, who appears to be Vonnegut's primary literary chamption, says that before Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969 Vonnegut had been perceived as a fairly minor American writer, confined to representation in the literary genres of magazine and pulp science fiction and fantasy. Slaughterhouse-Five, however "so perfectly caught America's transformative mood [in 1969] that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age" (22). The ability of Slaughterhouse-Five to capture the popular imagination of the late 1960s so profoundly appears to have led to what has been described as a "quantitative peak in the 1970s" of scholarship, much of it of uneven quality, devoted to Vonnegut (Dav

Category: Literature - C