After hearing about Kurt Vonnegut for a long time, I finally decided to read some books by him. Sadly, his only book I found was Slaughterhouse-Five. Once back home, I started the reading.
The book's good to read. It's all jumbled up. Events are not linear - instead they are dispersed here and there. There's a lot of time travel - I thought Vonnegut could have equally implied mental trauma in the protagonist because of his involvement and a few near-death experiences in the Second World War.
The book begins with a guy trying to remember and write the events he saw in the Second World War. He goes to his friend's house to collect some interesting ideas. And so it goes.
From the second chapter onwards, the meat of the novel shows up. Billy is the protagonist of the novel. It's a childlike name. The guy's actual name is William, however, his father feels that having Billy as his son's name would create an impression of him as a friendly guy that people can easily connect to, and they will be able to remember his name as well. So it goes.
The narrator shows that Billy Pilgrim is capable of time traveling. Whether he actually meant to show Billy was capable of time travel or he wanted to portray Billy as a mentally disturbed guy - I am not sure. Or he might not even be having mental problems - he could just be seeing flashbacks of the events in the Second World War and beyond. He was being lost in thoughts.
There's an author of Science Fiction in the book. Billy reads most of his books. His radical ideas about time travel, about looking at the fourth dimension and thus looking time not as a linear progressive thing but rather as something that's always there, and where you can choose to be anywhere - these seem to be a bit borrowed from Trout's (the Sci-Fi author) books.
The book seems to send an anti-war message. That's what the author promises to his friend, O'Harre's wife in the first chapter. There's always the talk about the bombing of Dresden, which the author feels was kept secret. He believes so because 1,35,000 people, and almost all of the architectural city of Dresden was destroyed in the military raid, and yet people don't seem to know or talk about it much, as opposed to the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where less than 80,000 people in each place were killed.
Also he uses the phrase "So it goes" throughout the novel. I checked on Wikipedia if it's been noticed and talked of. According to Wikipedia, this phrase is used more than a hundred times throughout the novel. It's usually used when the author is describing bombings, murders, and the likes.
I enjoyed reading the book, but, failed to grasp what the author actually wanted to say.
