's wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them" (Scholes 1). Asserting that the book should be read and reread, that seminal review appears to have set the tone for the novel's popularity when first published. But Vonnegut's appeal was not wholly confined to popular culture. Mustazza (22) acknowledges that (especially relative to Slaughterhouse-Five), but adds that as an icon of popular culture, he also "more academic and journalistic critical scrutiny" than most other American writers of popular American fiction in the late twentieth century.
The implication in the popular reception in the late 1960s of S5 that it offered a sense of hope amid the ashes of the apocalypse appears to have shiftd over the decades to a view, more typical of academic criticism of Slaughterhouse-Five, that Vonnegut's work offered a far starker and bleaker vision of human experience--more in keeping with the atmosphere of the abyss than with human possibility. One aspect of this is covered in Lupack's essay on
...