It’ll be like a funfair where you’re excitedly moving from one attraction to another.

While Vonnegut’s writing can come across as madness, and you may get irritated at the lack of structure that you’re so used to, let go of that anal need to follow the protocol of literature and explore this fantastic book. Men looked at her and wanted to fill her up with babies right away.” “She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. I wanted to take note of them all, but realized I may end up re-writing the whole book! You’ll be taken to space.Īs always there are just so many wonderful quotes in Slaughterhouse 5. You’ll be taken to past, future and present. As a reader you’ll jump from one year to another, then back again as Billy’s life events are all accounted for. In Slaughterhouse 5 we follow Billy Pilgrim- p risoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber? Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. – That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Remarque is more realistic by touching on deep humane connections and emotions, while Vonnegut does the same but with a touch of alien, sarcasm, ‘fill in the blanks yourself’ kind of way. Remarque follows the tried and tested, Vonnegut throws the reader about the plot and events like a rag-doll.

While Remarque gives you a heartbreaking and brutal yet beautiful account of the war times, Vonnegut will break your mind and twist the concept of how a book should/could be written. He’s right up there with Erich Maria Remarque even though those two authors write in a completely different style.

There is no doubt that Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors. except that there is a first page and a last page to the book.Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. So it's hard to say where the stories of Billy Pilgrim and the narrator truly begin and end. This book is like one of those nested Russian dolls where you open one and inside is a smaller version of the exact same thing: nearly every chapter foreshadows what's coming next and looks back at what has just come before it. And the final phrase of Slaughterhouse-Five, following a depiction of the massacre at Dresden, is, of course, Poo-tee-weet? One last word on the last word of the book: right in the first chapter, the narrator tells us that birds say 'll there is to say about a massacre, things like Poo-tee-weet?' (1.15.2). There is a real sense that everything happens simultaneously in this book, and we just get to some things before others thanks to the order of the pages. At the same time that Billy listens to a barbershop quartet at his wedding anniversary party in Chapter 8, he remembers his German guards seeing the destruction of Dresden in 1945 (8.22.1). For example, we know that poor old Edgar Derby, even while he's walking around in Billy's memories, has already been shot. In other words, throughout the book, references to future and past events intermingle. At the beginning of Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator tells us that this novel is about Dresden discusses poor old Edgar Derby with his war buddy, Bernard O'Hare and, hey, even informs us that the novel 'ends like this: Poo-tee-weet?' (1.22.12).

All of that stuff, though-the firebombing of Dresden, Edgar Derby, even the bird-also comes into the first chapter of the novel. In the final section of the book, we get scenes of: (a) the aftermath of the Dresden firebombing (see 'In a Nutshell' for more on this) (b) the execution of high school teacher and American POW Edgar Derby for stealing a teapot from the ruins of the city and (c) a bird tweeting at Billy Pilgrim. The weird thing about the ending of Slaughterhouse-Five is that it actually comes in the beginning and the middle of the novel as much as it does at the end. This matters because Billy's ideas also influence the shape of the novel itself. It is an Earthling illusion to think of time moving forward or backward, because all of these moments take place at once. (Seriously.) According to the Tralfamadorians, each single moment in time goes on forever. One of Billy Pilgrim's big obsessions is this f lat circle-y idea of time that he claims to get from the toilet plunger-shaped aliens of the planet of Tralfamadore.

Slaughterhouse five poo tee weet quotes