Billy did not even find his regiment, which has long since been shattered by the last German offensive. Instead, he meanders unarmed and in ridiculous uniforms behind the lines around. When it wants the 18 year old Roland Weary soldiers to trim, both are arrested by the Wehrmacht. In the prison camp, in which one brings Billy, no one can really know what to do with him because he is not attributable rank nor unit. But he experienced a bizarre Morphine trip in a hospital before he experiences in a roundabout way in the basement of the slaughterhouse number five ("Slauterhouse five") the large-scale attack on Dresden: a thriving city is transformed into a lunar landscape of glowing debris and lifeless human flesh.
Another formative station in Billy's life is the kidnapping. Alien on the planet Tralfamadore in 1967, where he ends up as a living exhibit in a zoo On Earth back he teaches tralfamadorische philosophy, after they had no influence on the past, present and future. He is famous, and it can no longer harm him anything - not even his own murder.
The novel tells the war as a sequence completely abstruse situations where tragedy and comedy seem aneinanderzukleben as tight as two open bottles of superglue. Kurt Vonnegut's anti-war stance shows itself even more in the bizarre alien philosophy that can only be understood as a sarcastic invitation to switch off the brain: War can be overcome only by cynicism or even better, by completely loses his mind.
Vonnegut needs all 210 pages to a characteristic style of razor-sharp, bad metaphors and chorus-like repeated laconic commentary on the Terrible ("So It Goes") to create a microcosm of self-evident, which is just as absurd as the war itself. Never before has so effortlessly convinced of pacifism.
"Slaughterhouse Five" was partially banned in part due to the representation of cursing American soldiers and a ridiculous Jesus in the United States - a distinction that is worth more than many a literary prize. Vonnegut has seen itself as a GI the attack on Dresden and needed twenty years to find this novel form it. The facts, such as the number of the dead, he has relied on the representation of David Irving, which is known today that it was clearly exaggerated. Six months ago Vonnegut died 85zigjährig to the consequences of a fall.
"Slaughterhouse Five" I would rank among the ten best and brightest books I've ever read - and this is rather an understatement.
