sically untellable story. There is, in short, no one to say "so it goes" [a key narrative device in the novel] when somebody or something dies (Klinkowitz 44).
As Vonnegut himself explains in the introduction to the book, the novel was always meant to be "about the destruction of Dresden" (2). Klinkowitz sees a parallel in the whole of Vonnegut's work, with Dresden, where Vonnegut in real life "looked into the abyss," being what Vonnegut's own life was "about" and Slaughterhouse-Five being what Vonnegut's literary opus as a whole was bound to be "about." As Klinkowitz puts it (46), Vonnegut's "sense of shock from that terrifying view has imprinted itself on his writer's personality ever since." Thus whatever the intrinsic literary merit of Slaughterhouse-Five, its importance as a piece of literary and publishing history, linked as it is with a defining moment of the uathor's life and with one of the half-dozen defining moments of World War II (itself a defining moment of history), seems difficult to overstate. Indeed, an edited collection of reviews (Mustazza) of Vonnegut's work is divided into two parts--the criticism up to and including Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969 and that which deals with fiction and drama produced afterward.
These factors, together with what must be seen as the timeliness of an antiwar novel's appearance in a period of United States history when sentiment against the increasngly unpopular Vietnam War and in favor of challenges to mainstream values and culture was at its height, help explain why the commercially influential New York Times gave Slaughterhouse-Five an almost solemn review pointing to its thematic, social, and political importance. The novel's theme, according to Scholes, writing in the spring of 1969, rests in the background of a foreground of violent death and emotional disconnection. That theme is kindness and regard for others: "Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot...