Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut is my current read. I’m enjoying it very much so far. I’m just under a quarter of the way into the book. I like the tone of the book so far. I like the matter-of-fact-ness about it.

Here’s a summary of it

“Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks) is an ordinary World War II soldier with one major exception: he has mysteriously become unstuck in time. Billy goes on an uncontrollable trip back and forth from his birth in New York to life on a distant planet and back again to the horrors of the 1945 fire-bombing of Dresden.”

This book was written in 1969 and here’s some themes of the novel that AI came up with:

• Free will and predestination
  Vonnegut argues that free will doesn’t exist and that all human actions are predetermined.
• The illusion of free will
  The Tralfamadorians, who are shaped like toilet plungers, discuss the philosophical question of whether free will exists.
• The inevitability of death
  Vonnegut uses a matter-of-fact tone to describe Billy’s encounters with death.
• Time and memory
  The novel includes time travel, and Billy leaps in time to experience his life’s events out of order and repeatedly.
• Acceptance
  Vonnegut’s famous line, “So it goes,” is repeated whenever a character dies.
• Human dignity
  Vonnegut believes that war is not heroic or glamorous.

Have you read Slaughterhouse Five? What did you think? (without too many spoilers)