Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (Book Analysis): Detailed Summary, Analysis and Reading Guide

By Bright Summaries

Unlock the more straightforward side of Slaughterhouse-Five with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!

This engaging summary presents an analysis of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, which tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, who suffers from a very unusual condition: he time-travels back and forth throughout his own life. In his youth, Billy is one of the few survivors of the bombing of Dresden during the Second World War, but he learns to overcome the lingering trauma of this experience when he is kidnapped by aliens known as Tralfamadorians and adopts their fatalistic worldview: that death, like everything else, is inevitable. Billy then decides to devote his life to spreading this doctrine. This satirical novel about the deep psychological scars left by the trauma of war was heavily inspired by Vonnegut’s own experiences as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany, and is considered one of the most significant anti-war novels of the 20th century.

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This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you:

• A complete plot summary
• Character studies
• Key themes and symbols
• Questions for further reflection

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• Language: English
• Publisher: BrightSummaries.com
• Release date: Mar 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9782808013208

Book preview

AMERICAN NOVELIST AND SHORT STORY WRITER

Born in Indianapolis in 1922.

Died in New York in 2007.

Notable works:

Cat’s Cradle (1963), novel

Jailbird (1979), novel

A Man Without a Country (2005), essay collection

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1992. His father Kurt Sr. was an architect, and his mother Edith was from a wealthy brewing family. Vonnegut wrote for and edited student newspapers at high school and Cornell University, where he found writing to be more enjoyable and less stressful than his degree in biochemistry.

Having enlisted in the US army in 1943, he was sent to Europe in late 1944, captured soon after, and lived through the Allied bombing of the German city of Dresden as a prisoner. When he returned home, he married Jane Marie Cox and studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, working as a reporter at night, before becoming a full-time writer in 1952. Vonnegut’s early novels were extremely varied in style and content, sometimes containing elements of science fiction, and were moderately successful. He rose to fame when his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five became a bestseller. He wrote sporadically for the next decade due to personal difficulties, but then published a series of successful novels through the 1980s and 90s. He died in 2007 in New York.

Today, Vonnegut’s work remains extremely popular with the general public and is also widely studied in academic environments. Fellow writers often comment on the ease with which he wrote, despite the fragmented style he employed and the often difficult and painful subjects that he tackled.

A SEMI-AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ANTI-WAR NOVEL

Genre: novel

Reference edition: Vonnegut, K. (1991) Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: