![]() Vonnegut had been an increasingly successful although not world-famous writer. Would-be censors misinterpret and mistrust Vonnegut’s message, failing to learn the lesson that suppressing ideas and questions about human conflict and religion and our place in the universe is dangerous. ![]() And it retains the ability to shock delicate sensibilities: It was among the decade’s fifty most challenged/banned books as recently as 2000-2009, according to the American Library Association. Today it frequently appears on lists of the twentieth century’s best novels. It was a National Book Award finalist and was nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards, high honors in science-fiction publishing. It was on bestseller lists for months, peaking at number four. Slaughterhouse-Five found an enthusiastic audience. By then, the United States had already lost well over thirty thousand soldiers in Vietnam and was being wracked by protests. They are absurdist relief, but becoming “unstuck in time” is how Billy deals with the shock of war and his fear of death.įirst serialized in the radical magazine Ramparts, the book was published fifty years ago-on March 31, 1969. Among the major figures are the Tralfamadorians, little green toilet-plunger-shaped aliens from a far-off galaxy whose concept of a timeless universe becomes Billy’s message to the world. Vonnegut himself makes a few appearances. There are several of Vonnegut’s best-known characters: ineffectual infantryman Billy Pilgrim blue-movie star Montana Wildhack doomed patriot Edgar Derby and hack science-fiction author Kilgore Trout. ![]() Vonnegut’s prose ranges from stark anticlimax (“There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces”) to low comedy (“A salmon egg flew out of his mouth and landed in Maggie’s cleavage”). But Dresden and its effects can be felt throughout the text. Within its pages, descriptions of the bombing itself total fewer than a thousand words. ![]() Nearly a quarter century after it happened, Vonnegut used his Dresden experience as the moral center of Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel that brought him wealth and celebrity and his greatest critical acclaim. However, they had been forced into weeks of gruesome corpse recovery, until finally the bodies-too numerous to collect, let alone properly bury-were burned with flamethrowers. “But not me,” Private Vonnegut remarked in a letter several weeks after the bombing. “If we had gone above to take a look” while the attacks were taking place, Vonnegut later wrote, “we would have been turned into artifacts characteristic of the fire storm: seeming pieces of charred firewood two or three feet long-ridiculously small human beings, or jumbo fried grasshoppers, if you will.” In between, on February 14, 1945, the captors and their malnourished captives rose from the depths to find that most of the buildings had been leveled and that many thousands of inhabitants had been incinerated. ![]() Hundreds more US bombers targeted the city’s infrastructure over the next two days. Fiery, hurricane-force winds roared through buildings, vehicles, and people. More than seven hundred Royal Air Force planes in two nighttime waves had unloaded some fourteen hundred tons of high-explosive bombs and eleven hundred incendiary devices on Dresden. Above, a beautiful German city was destroyed in a spectacular firestorm caused by explosives and incendiaries dropped from British and American aircraft. KURT VONNEGUT, age twenty-two, was in a meat locker deep underground with several dozen fellow American prisoners of war, a few guards, and scores of dressed animal cadavers. ![]()
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