Slaughterhouse-Five
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| Slaughterhouse-Five.. | |
 First edition cover |
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| Author | Kurt Vonnegut |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Philosophical, War novel, Dark comedy |
| Publisher | Delacorte Press |
| Publication date | 1969 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 186 pp (first edition, hardback), 215 pp (Laurel/Dell Books paperback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-385-31208-3 (first edition, hardback) |
Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death is a 1969 novel by Kurt Vonnegut. One of his most popular works and widely regarded as a classic, it combines science fiction elements with an analysis of the human condition from an uncommon perspective, using time travel as a plot device. The bombing of Dresden in World War II, the aftermath of which Vonnegut witnessed, is the starting point.
Contents |
[edit] Plot introduction
Slaughterhouse-Five spans the life of a man who has "come unstuck in time." It is the story of Billy Pilgrim experiencing different time periods of his life, most notably his experience in World War II and his relationship with his family. The book is a series of seemingly random happenings that, in combination, present the thematic elements of the novel in an unraveling order.
[edit] Explanation of the novel's title
The title page of Vonnegut's novel contains the title and a brief author biography, which presages many of the themes of the novel:
Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death by Kurt Vonnegut, a fourth-generation German-American now living in Cape Cod, who, as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, "The Florence of the Elbe," a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale.
The short title, "Slaughterhouse-Five," refers to the slaughterhouse (Schlachthof-Fünf in German) in which the main character, Billy Pilgrim, stays as a prisoner of war in Dresden during the firebombing. (Billy's fictional experience of the slaughterhouse parallels Vonnegut's own experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden.) Vonnegut, as he does in some of his other works such as Breakfast of Champions, offers an alternative title for this book: The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death. The narrator explains that the first part of the subtitle in the first chapter is a reference to the Children's Crusade of the 13th century, in which children were sold as slaves (some people dispute the facts of the actual historical event, but for literary purposes, the purposeful selling of children into slavery is the intended meaning).
In the first chapter of the novel, the narrator relates how he visited a former Army buddy[1] to discuss incidents he might use in the novel. His friend's wife gave him a cold reception and finally denounced him for wanting to write a novel in which he and his friends would be heroes instead of simply scared young men, and that would encourage more wars in which children would be sent to die. The narrator agrees that he and his friends were nothing more than children on the brink of adulthood. On the spot, he promised to call the novel "The Children's Crusade". He writes, "She was my friend after that".
Other portions of the title are explained in the narrative. For instance the "Duty-Dance with Death" refers to the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, which are discussed in the preamble.
[edit] Plot summary
A disoriented and ill-trained American soldier named Billy Pilgrim is captured by German soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge. Trained as a Chaplain's assistant, he arrives in Belgium just as his unit is overwhelmed by the Germans. There is not enough time to issue him with combat gear. He and other prisoners are sent far from the front to live in a makeshift prison, a disused slaughterhouse in the city of Dresden. During air raids the prisoners and their guards take shelter in a deep cellar, originally built to keep meat cool. Because of this shelter they are among the few survivors of the firestorm which consumes the city after an air raid.
Billy has become "unstuck in time" for unexplained reasons (though it's hinted towards the end that his surviving a plane crash left him with mild brain damage). He meets, and is later kidnapped by, aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who exhibit him in a Tralfamadorian zoo with Montana Wildhack, a pornographic movie star. The Tralfamadorians see in four dimensions, the fourth dimension being time. Tralfamadorians have seen every instant of their lives already; they believe that they can't choose to change anything about their fate, but can choose to focus on any moment in their lives that they wish.
Throughout the novel, Billy hops back and forth in time, reliving various occasions in his life and fantasy life; this gives him a constant sense of stage fright, as he never knows what part of his life is coming up next. He spends time on Tralfamadore; in Dresden; numbly wading through deep snow in WWII Germany before his capture; living married in America after the war; up to the moment of his murder on Earth many years later. By the time of his murder, Billy has adopted Tralfamadorian fatalism, which has given him great personal peace; he has spread this philosophy to millions of humans and has become a popular public figure on Earth.
Billy's fatalism appears to be grounded in reality (at least in the reality which Billy perceives); after noting that Billy had a copy of the Serenity Prayer in his office, the narrator says, "Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future." One of his Tralfamadorian captors, who seems sympathetic to humans, says that out of 31 inhabited planets it has visited, "only on Earth is there any talk of free will."
The book examines many events in Billy's life, including the death of his wife, his capture by the Nazis in World War II, and the infamous bombing of Dresden that was the inspiration for the book. Although the narrative of Billy's time in Dresden anchors the book, a major secondary theme is his easy and affluent life as an optometrist in the city of Illium, New York (Vonnegut's fictional stand-in for Troy, New York) which contrasts sharply with both his war experience, and with the life he knew before the war in what was post-Depression America. This also parallels Vonnegut's own transition from the dismal years of the 1930's to, as he describes it, a life where he is "fabulously well-to-do". In a sense this further parallels the experiences of many Americans of the time, for whom the post-war period was one of great and to some extent unexpected affluence.
The novel uses certain phrases repetitively, such as "so it goes"—which, used whenever death or dying is mentioned (be it that of a man, an animal, or the bubbles in champagne), serves to downplay mortality, making it routine and even humorous—and "mustard gas and roses", to denote the horrible odor of a rotting corpse or a drunk's breath.
Billy's death is the result of a strange string of events. After his unit is overrun in Belgium, Billy wanders the woods wearing only a light jacket and ordinary shoes. Suffering from hypothermia he meets Roland Weary, a soldier carrying prodigious amounts of equipment and wearing so much clothing he barely notices the winter cold. Rather than share with Billy, Weary makes it his cause to keep Billy alive despite his pathetic appearance and willingness to lie down and die. He spends the time until they are captured threatening and cajoling Billy. After they are captured, the Germans confiscate everything Weary has, including his boots, giving him clogs to wear. He eventually dies of gangrene from injuries to his feet caused by the clogs.
Because Weary blames Billy for his capture (and eventual death), Weary's morbid friend Paul Lazzaro vows to have him killed, as, according to him, revenge is "the sweetest thing in life." Billy, who travels in time, already knows where and how he will be killed: Lazzaro shoots him after a public speaking event in a future where the United States has been balkanized. During Billy's public speech he declares that following his lecture he will be killed, so he uses this fact to convey his message that because time is another dimension all three-dimensional slices as we know them exist simultaneously. Therefore, everyone is always alive and death is not a tragic event.
[edit] Characters
- Narrator — Some people see the intrusive, unnamed narrator, a persona who returns as a minor character through the story, as Kurt Vonnegut himself, as when the narrator reveals, "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book."[2] The novel opens by describing the narrator's connections with the Dresden bombing, and his reasons for writing the book.
- Billy Pilgrim — Billy is an optometrist in a dull and safe marriage and residing in Ilium, a fictional depiction of Troy, New York. Nearby Troy is the city of Schenectady, New York, where Vonnegut worked as a publicist for General Electric, and where several of his other novels are set. Billy Pilgrim randomly travels through time and is abducted by the "four-dimensional" aliens known as the Tralfamadorians. He is also a prisoner of war in Dresden during World War II, and his later life is greatly influenced by what he saw during the war. He travels between parts of his life repeatedly and randomly, meaning that he's literally lived through the events more than once. He travels back and forth in time so often that he develops a sense of fatalism about his life because he knows how he is going to die and how his life is going to work out. Vonnegut identified the inspiration for this character as fellow infantryman and prisoner-of-war Edward Crone,[3] who died in German custody a month before the end of the war in Europe. After the war, the Germans helped Crone's parents locate his grave, enabling them to rebury him in his hometown of Rochester, New York.[4]
- Roland Weary — A weak man with dreams of grandeur who weakly "saves" Billy multiple times (despite Billy's protests) in hopes for glory. This leads to their capture as well as the loss of their warm winter clothing and boots. Weary eventually dies of gangrene while on the train to the camp, and blames Billy with his final words.
- Paul Lazzaro — Another POW. A sickly, ill-tempered car thief from Cicero, Illinois, who hears Weary's dying words and eventually has Billy killed in revenge, many years after the war. He has a mental hit list and claims he can have anyone "killed for a thousand dollars plus traveling expenses".
- Kilgore Trout - An unsuccessful science fiction writer who manages newspaper delivery boys and has only received one letter from a fan. After Billy meets him in a back alley in his hometown of Ilium, New York, he invites Trout to his wedding anniversary. There Kilgore follows Billy around, thinking he has seen a time window. In fact, this incident is triggered not by Billy's time traveling, but by a buried wartime memory. Like the narrator, Trout can also be seen as a figure for the author; he appears in several other Vonnegut novels.
- Edgar Derby — An older man who pulled strings to take part in the war. He is in the German POW camp with Lazarro and Billy. He is sentenced to death for stealing a teapot in the Dresden corpse mines and executed by a firing squad. Vonnegut considers his ignominious death high irony. Derby's son is also a soldier in World War II, in the Pacific.
- Howard W. Campbell Jr. — An American who lived in Germany at the time of World War II. He was a famous playwright in the German language and later became a Nazi propagandist. He wrote an essay on the misery of American poverty, relating it to the appearance and behavior of American prisoners of war. He is later confronted by Edgar Derby while trying to recruit prisoners to fight for Germany on the Russian front in a foreign volunteer unit caleld the Free America Corps (similar to the Europäische Freiwillige and likely named after the British Free Corps). He is a main character in Kurt Vonnegut's earlier novel Mother Night.
- Valencia Merble — Billy's heavyset wife and mother of Billy's two children. Billy remains rather distant from her. She dies of carbon monoxide poisoning following a car accident on her way to the hospital where her husband is sent after an airplane crash.
- Robert Pilgrim — Son of Billy and Valencia. A troubled and disappointing youth who later becomes a Green Beret.
- Barbara Pilgrim — Daughter of Billy and Valencia. Described as a "bitchy flibbertigibbet" (as a result of her having to become head of the family at age 20) and having "legs like an Edwardian grand piano". She marries an optometrist. She treats her father like a child and an invalid after his accident and her mother's death.
- Tralfamadorians — An alien race that look like upright toilet plungers with a hand on top, into which is set a single green eye. They abduct Billy and teach him about time's relation to the world as a fourth dimension, fate, and death's lack of discrimination.
- Montana Wildhack — A pornographic actress whom the Tralfamadorians kidnap to be Billy's mate under their supervision.
- "Wild Bob" - A character that Billy meets during the war. He is crazy, and dies early on. He tells everyone to call him Wild Bob. He makes a speech in a soldier line-up, thinking the men from his section, the 451st Infantry Regiment, are near him. He tells them that "if they are ever in Cody, Wyoming, ask for Wild Bob," a phrase Pilgrim sometimes repeats to himself for inspiration.
[edit] Major themes
This novel explores the ideas of fate, free will, and the illogical nature of humans. The main character is "unstuck in time," meaning that he experiences the events of his life in a seemingly random order, with no idea which part of life he will "visit" next. As a result, his life does not end with death; rather, he repeatedly experiences his own death before its time and this experience is often intermingled with other experiences.
The concept of free will is questioned in this novel by Billy Pilgrim. His assertions that there is no free will is confirmed by a Tralfamadorian, who says, "I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe... Only on Earth is there any talk of free will". This device is central to Vonnegut's belief that the vast majority of humanity is completely inconsequential; that is, they do what they do because they must.
To the Tralfamadorians, everything always exists at the same time, and for them everyone is therefore always alive. They too have wars and tragic events (they destroy the universe testing spaceship fuels), but when asked by Billy what they do about wars, the Tralfamadorians reply that they simply ignore them. Vonnegut uses the Tralfamadorians to conflict with the theme he actually presents; life, as a human, is only enjoyable with the unknown. Tralfamadorians do not actually make any choices about what they do, but have power only over what they think (this theme is also explored in Timequake). Vonnegut (as the narrator) seems to believe this theory in the way he states in chapter one, "that writing an anti-war book is like writing an anti-glacier book," since both will always exist and are both equally difficult to stop. This concept is difficult for Billy to accept at first.
However, Vonnegut's writings elsewhere (for example, see The Sirens of Titan) suggest that the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five are intended to satirize the idea of fatalism. In the main body of the book, the Tralfamadorians represent the belief that war is inevitable. Their hapless destruction of the universe suggests that Vonnegut does not sympathize with their philosophy. To humans, Vonnegut seems to say, ignoring a war is not an acceptable choice when we actually do have free will.
This illogicality of human nature is brought up with the climax of the book. Ironically the climax occurs not with the bombing of Dresden, but with the execution of a man who committed a petty theft. In all of this horror, death, and destruction, so much time is taken on the punishment of one man. Yet, the time is still taken, and Vonnegut seems to take the outside opinion of the bird asking, "Poo-tee-weet?". The same birdsong ends the novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, as the protagonist gives away his entire fortune to the plaintiffs of hundreds of false paternity suits brought against him. It seems to represent a Dadaist comment on the absurdity of humanity.[citation needed]
[edit] Literary significance and reception
The reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five have been mixed since the March 31, 1969 review in New York Times. This glowing review concedes at the end that "you'll either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner."[5] In its year of publication, the book was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel, also collecting a nomination for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1970. However, it was bested for both awards by Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. The book has also appeared on Time magazine's list of 100 all-time best English-language novels written since 1923.[6]
[edit] Literary techniques
The novel employs the refrain "So it goes" when death, dying or mortality appear in the narrative, as a transitional phrase to another subject, as a reminder, and as comic relief.[citation needed] It is also used to explain the unexplained. There are 106 "so it goes" anecdotes laced throughout the novel.
As a representative postmodern text, the novel is metafictional. The first chapter of the book is not about Billy Pilgrim, but a preface about how Vonnegut came to write Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut apologizes for the fact that the novel is "so short and jumbled and jangled" and explains that this is because "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." In a similar way to Mother Night, but much more extensively, Vonnegut plays with ideas of fiction and reality. The opening chapter's very first sentence claims that "All this happened, more or less," and during Billy Pilgrim's war experiences Vonnegut himself appears briefly, followed by the narrator's note: "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book."
The novel also repeatedly refers to novels and fiction. Billy reads The Valley of the Dolls, looks at a Tralfamadorian novel, and also appears on a radio talk show with a panel of experts to discuss "the death of the novel."
[edit] Form
Slaughterhouse-Five opens with the narrator offering a narrative of the novel's genesis, ending with a discussion of the beginning and end of the novel. The "story proper" thus begins with chapter two although there is no reason to assume that the opening chapter is not also fictional. This technique may seem unusual, but is common to postmodern meta-fiction.[7] The story itself purports to be a disjointed and discontinuous narrative, following Billy's point of view "unstuck in time." While Vonnegut's work commonly contains such disorder, it should be noted that the narrative of this novel does follow the trajectory set out in the opening chapter:
It begins like this:
Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
It ends like this:
Poo-tee-weet?
Billy Pilgrim's life is reported by the narrator to be experienced as a series of discontinuities by the character, in which his birth, youth, old age, and death are all experienced out of normal, linear order. The novel has two narratives. One follows Billy's war experience, and while it is interrupted by experiences from other parts of his life, the narrative of his war experience has a fairly linear order. The other narrative is the discontinuous order of his life before and after the war experience. It could be argued that Billy's perspective has been compromised by his witnessing the destruction of Dresden, although he is "unstuck in time" before he arrives in Dresden.[8]
Vonnegut's prose style is comprised of short, declarative sentences, which contribute to the sense that this narrative is the simple reporting of fact.[9]
[edit] Point of view and setting
The story opens with the narrator describing his connections with the Dresden bombing, and his reasons for writing the book. He describes himself, his book, and the fact that he believes it to be a desperate attempt at scholarly work. He then flows this into Billy Pilgrim's story, as he starts Billy's story as, "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." This serves as a transition from Vonnegut's point of view to the true third person.
It is common misconception that, as the author, Vonnegut appears here and there in the story. In the wartime sequences, Billy Pilgrim overhears the narrators voice occasionally. For instance, when the POW's see Dresden for the first time, Billy hears someone describe it as "Oz". Vonnegut then writes, as he does elsewhere, "That was I. That was me." Despite popular belief, this character is not Vonnegut although they share distinct characteristics. The first two chapters of the book are not the voice of Vonnegut as himself and should not be seen as a prologue; the book is meant to be read as a whole. Written as a post-modernist text, the point of the novel is to show there is not absolute truth or point of view, rather, that there are multiple versions. Although Vonnegut was a survivor of the Dresdon bombings as a POW, etc, the narrative layer of the narrator is present to highlight the constructive nature of history and draw attention to the inevitability of multiple truths.
Although the character Kilgore Trout, whom Billy Pilgrim meets while the former runs a newspaper delivery business, may also be seen as a persona of the author, in appearance and attitude he has little in common with Vonnegut. His checkered career as a novelist, cheated by publishers and not even aware that he has a readership, does not reflect Vonnegut's own.
The structure of Slaughterhouse-Five resembles a Tralfamadorian novel, a different kind of literature Pilgrim encounters en route to Tralfamadore. The only Earth reading material available to Billy is a copy of Valley of the Dolls. He asks his captors what they read, and is given several thin booklets filled with symbols. The Tralfamadorians tell him that the symbols represent pleasing thoughts and events. When they are all read simultaneously, as the Tralfamadorians can do, the result is an emotion in the mind of the reader. Billy's time travelling juxtaposes events from the war, his wedding night, and his trip to his father's funeral, mixing black humor, tragedy and happiness in a few paragraphs.
[edit] Controversy
Because of its realistic and frequent depiction of swearing by American soldiers, its irreverent language (including the sentence "The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty,") and some sexually explicit content, Slaughterhouse-Five is among the most frequently banned works in American literature, and in some cases is still removed from school libraries and curricula.[10] Conversely, this book has also become a part of the curriculum of certain schools. The suitability of the work has even been considered by the Supreme Court of the United States, where it was one of the works at issue in Island Trees School District v. Pico,. The novel appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000 at number sixty-nine.
The bombing of Dresden in World War II, which was done through firebombing, plays a large role in the novel; Vonnegut stated in the novel that the firebombing killed 135,000 German civilians, citing historian David Irving as the source; Vonnegut was referring to Irving's then-bestselling book, The Destruction of Dresden. The exact number of casualties is uncertain, but most historians currently believe that the number was less than 40,000; see Bombing of Dresden in World War II.
The novel has been accused by various critics of being "quietist" because Billy believes that "the notion of free will is a quaint Earthling illusion."[11] The problem, according to Robert Merrill and Peter A. Scholl, is that:
Vonnegut's critics seem to think that he is saying the same thing [as the Tralfamadorians]. For Anthony Burgess, "Slaughterhouse is a kind of evasion--in a sense like J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan--in which we're being told to carry the horror of the Dresden bombing and everything it implies up to a level of fantasy...." For Charles Harris [see excerpt above], "The main idea emerging from Slaughterhouse-Five seems to be that the proper response to life is one of resigned acceptance." For Alfred Kazin, "Vonnegut deprecates any attempt to see tragedy that day in Dresden.... He likes to say with arch fatalism, citing one horror after another, 'So it goes.'" For Tanner, "Vonnegut has ...total sympathy with such quietistic impulses." And the same notion is found throughout The Vonnegut Statement, a book of original essays written and collected by Vonnegut's most loyal academic "fans."[11]
[edit] Allusions and references
[edit] Allusions to other works
Like many of Vonnegut's books, certain characters from other stories make notable appearances in order to bring his novels together. Kilgore Trout, a major character in many of Vonnegut's novels, appears significantly in Slaughterhouse-Five. He is a friend of Billy Pilgrim, and fulfills odd roles throughout the story. In one case he is the only non-optometrist at a party, and therefore is the odd-man-out. He takes the role of making fun of everything the ideal American family holds true, such as heaven, hell and sin. In his opinion, people do not know if the things they do turn out to be good or bad, and if they turn out to be bad, they go to hell where "the burning never stops hurting."
Other cameo appearances include Eliot Rosewater of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Howard W. Campbell, Jr. of Mother Night. There is also a character called Bertram Copeland Rumfoord, a relative of Winston Niles Rumfoord in The Sirens of Titan. Rumfoord family members appear in several of Vonnegut's works.
Also mentioned is Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose work The Brothers Karamazov Rosewater says contains "everything there was to know about life."
In the Twayne's United States Authors series volume on Kurt Vonnegut, Stanley Schatt makes the following observation on the name of the novel's main character:
By naming the unheroic hero Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut contrasts John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress with Billy's story. As Wilfrid Sheed has pointed out, Billy's solution to the problems of the modern world is to "invent a heaven, out of 20th century materials, where Good Technology triumphs over Bad Technology. His scripture is Science Fiction, man's last good fantasy."[12]
[edit] Allusions to actual history, geography and current science
The novel refers to the Bombing of Dresden in World War II. It also includes references to The Battle of the Bulge, the Vietnam War and urban riots in the 1960s. Billy's wife Valencia has a bumper sticker on her car stating "Reagan for President!". This refers to Ronald Reagan's unsuccessful 1968 campaign for the Republican Party nomination, not his successful campaign in 1980 for the Presidency.
[edit] Film, TV, musical and theatrical adaptations
A film adaptation of the book, also called Slaughterhouse-Five, was made in 1972. Although critically praised, the film was a box office flop. It won the Prix du Jury at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, as well as a Hugo Award, and Saturn Award. Vonnegut commended the film greatly.
In 2003 a section of the book, read by the author, was set to music in a piece called "Tock Tick."[citation needed]
In 1996, a theatrical adaptation of the novel was premiered at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, IL. The adaptation was written and directed by Eric Simonson and included actors Rick Snyder, Robert Breuler, and Deanna Dunagan. The play has been performed in several other theaters including a January 2008 New York premiere production at the Godlight Theatre Company in January 2008.[13]
A different adaptation by Simonson was specially written for the Risk Theatre Initiative in Dallas, Texas, and opened in February 2008, directed by Marianne Galloway.
[edit] References
- ^ The name given for Vonnegut's Army buddy is "Bernard V. O'Hare". This is almost certainly a partial pseudonym. The novel is dedicated to two people, including "Mary O'Hare", as promised by Vonnegut in the preamble. However "Bernard V." is probably not the name of her husband, who is described as "a District Attorney in Pennsylvania". Vonnegut has used similar names for characters in other novels, such as "Bernard B. O'Hare", a security guard in Mother Night. "Bernard V." may be a reference to Vonnegut's brother Bernard.
- ^ Vonnegut, Kurt (January 12, 1999 Edition). Slaughterhouse-Five. Dial Press Trade Paperback, p. 160. ISBN 978-0385333849.
- ^ Edward Reginald Crone, Jr., Remarkable Alums, Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Retrieved 03-01-2007.
- ^ Edward R. Crone, Jr, Find A Grave, 06-13-2003. Retrieved 05-08-2008.
- ^ Books of The Times: At Last, Kurt Vonnegut's Famous Dresden Book. New York Times (March 31, 1969). Retrieved on 2007-04-13.
- ^ TIME All-Time 100 Novels
- ^ Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. 22.
- ^ The narrative states that he first experiences time-travel while fleeing the Germans in the Ardennes. Exhausted, he falls asleep leaning against a tree and begins to experience events from the rest of his life.
- ^ Kurt Vonnegut's Fantastic Faces. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. Retrieved on 2007-11-10.
- ^ ALA | 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000
- ^ a b Robert Merrill and Peter A. Scholl, Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: The Requirements of Chaos, in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring, 1978, p 67.
- ^ Stanley Schatt, "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Chapter 4: Vonnegut's Dresden Novel: Slaughterhouse-Five.", In Twayne's United States Authors Series Online. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1999 Previously published in print in 1976 by Twayne Publishers.
- ^ http://www.vonnegutweb.com/sh5/sh5_steppenwolf.html
[edit] External links
- Vonnegut.com:
- Kilgore Trout Collection
- The Vonnegut Web
- Photos of the first edition of Slaughterhouse-Five
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