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 horrors of war (Bronson 376). Writing about the 1997 film version of Vonnegut's World War II novel Mother Night, Klinkowitz (44) compares the depiction of authorship in that film to that of the film version of Slaughterhouse-Five, noting that Slaughterhouse-Five as film lacks the literary resonance of the novel. It
is unable to incorporate one of the novel's most important elements: Kurt Vonnegut himself, who is present as the writer struggling to tell his ba...