
What “Slaughterhouse-Five” Tells Us Now - prostoalex
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-kurt-vonneguts-slaughterhouse-five-tells-us-now
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afro88
If you ever find yourself in Dresden there's a fantastic tour based on
Slaughterhouse Five, run by a local man who loves the book and is quite a
character. A unique lens to learn about the city through.

[http://kurtvonnegut-tour.com/](http://kurtvonnegut-tour.com/)

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clairity
> "It tells us that most human beings are not so bad, except for the ones who
> are, and that’s valuable information."

this sentiment underlies the misperception of risks like terrorism, school
shootings, and child abduction.

tangentially, _billy pilgrim_ was a great little southern folk rock band. wish
they'd made more music.

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tempguy9999
I read it and thought it a remarkable book. I lent it to a mate who thought
the same. Said mate lent it to his dad who had fought in the 2nd WW. His dad
apparently said it was the best book on the war he'd ever read. If true,
that's really saying something.

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empath75
I read this book from a Summer Reading List as a Stephen King fan in the
1990s. I assumed from the name, that it was a horror novel like Cujo.

It was not a horror novel like Cujo but it sort of was in its own way. It had
a huge impact on me, though. I'm fairly sure it was the first book that ever
made me cry.

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8bitsrule
"Billy Pilgrim ... “comes unstuck in time” and begins to experience chronology
the way Tralfamadorians do, he understands why his captors find comical the
notion of free will."

The belief that time is linear is not universal. Another fictional take on
'eternal recurrence' is explored in Ouspensky's 1915 _Strange Life of Ivan
Osokin_. The protagonist becomes conscious of having lived the same life
repeatedly, and struggles to fix his mistakes.

It's a valuable metaphor, though I reject the concern that the timeline of
every quark is scripted.

~~~
nine_k
I remember this idea brought to the logical extreme (though I don't remember
author's name).

A character gets born, lives, dies, repeatedly, in different circumstances. At
one.moment he manages to remember something that a being from outside time
tells him _between_ incarnations, in "limbo" / "bardo" type of setting.

All the people in the world is that same character, only transpoted in time.
All the worst villains he faces are himself, all the best saints he meets are
his (future) selves. This world is entirely by him.

~~~
looeee
The Egg is the most famous story based on that idea, I think.

[http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html](http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html)

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oceanghost
I generally respect Salman Rushdie (the author of the article), But I really
feel he's missed the point. I am far less qualified to criticize literature
than he, but I'm going to do it anyways.

SL5 is about one thing. PTSD. PTSD was not a diagnosis when the book was
written, but it is at least clear to me, that the book is about a fractured
man trying to repair itself by creating a world view that is comforting to it.
His becoming unstuck in time is, in my mind, simply a sci-fi flashback, or
perhaps, flash-forward in this case?

~~~
funkjunky
That's a pretty reductive viewpoint. While PTSD is certainly a component of
the story, it is all but a facet of the humanity and consequences of war

~~~
oceanghost
All viewpoints are reductive. That's exactly the point of them.

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neilv
In early high school computer programming class (which officially was about
programming in a particular language), our teacher didn't just teach that. The
class put substantial time into things like history of programming (e.g., Ada
Lovelace), and the thing I remember most was that we read and discussed
Vonnegut's "Player Piano". In hindsight, that class was formative.

~~~
onemoresoop
In his seminal book on advanced industrial society, One-Dimensional Man,
Herbert Marcuse makes the case that even many ostensibly democratic nations
are, at heart, totalitarian. Totalitarianism, he argues, need not manifest as
dystopian wastelands with labor camps, dictatorship, secret police, and all
those other Orwellian characteristics: “For ‘totalitarian’ is not only a
terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic
economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of
needs by vested interests.”

Player Piano, which purports to be “not a book about what is, but a book about
what could be,” is such a totalitarian society – not one organized by
terrorism but by economic-technical coordination of vested interests. Its
society is one that appears, as its main character Paul Proteus notes, as a
“clean, straight rafter,” that, once the surface is scraped away, is rotten to
the core.

[0] [http://www.vonnegutreview.com/2013/06/player-piano-one-
dimen...](http://www.vonnegutreview.com/2013/06/player-piano-one-dimensional-
society.html)

~~~
r00fus
So I really struggle with the concept of subtle economic coercion (ie, the
basis of western society) being described as "totalitarian".

It's like 1st-world problems being described as legitimate oppression.

~~~
a1369209993
Note that subtle != mild.

If going against society results in you losing your job (because your employer
doesn't want to deal with bad publicity), losing your home (because you can't
make rent/mortgage payments), losing your friends (because anyone who hangs
out with a [racist/rapist/fetus-murderer/scammer/person who refuses to sign
things they can't read/etc] suffers guilt by association), and possibly
starving to death in the street (if you can't convince anyone to charity you
some food), then that society is totalitarian, no matter how subtle they are
about it.

Current western society isn't nearly that bad[citation needed], but that's
neither because it's impossible nor for lack of anyone trying.

~~~
danharaj
All of these things still happen to LGBT people in western society.

~~~
mattcaldwell
It saddens me that this was downvoted, because it's entirely true. It doesn't
just apply to LGBT people, though. There are all kinds of minority groups that
are treated as second-class citizens in modern Western (and Eastern) cultures.

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pstuart
The movie adaptation of the book is as well done as one could ask for of such
a work, at such a time. Joe Bob says check it out.

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emmelaich
I loved the book when I read it as youngster. Now .. it's faded a bit.

A little factoid I found interesting -- Vonnegut was inspired in part to write
it by the holocaust denier David Irving's book "The Destruction of Dresden"

[http://lipstadt.blogspot.com/2007/04/kurt-vonnegut-and-
david...](http://lipstadt.blogspot.com/2007/04/kurt-vonnegut-and-david-irving-
in.html)

quote

> "Vonnegut helped perpetuate that myth and spread this form of denial. He
> probably did so initially unwittingly. But since the publication of that
> book enough has been written to show this is not true and he could have
> corrected it has he been so inclined"

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zeristor
Is there an eBook edition? Strangely there’s an Italian eBook but I’ve not
found an English one.

~~~
dredmorbius
[http://libgen.io/search.php?req=slaughterhouse+five&open=0&r...](http://libgen.io/search.php?req=slaughterhouse+five&open=0&res=25&view=simple&phrase=1&column=def)

[http://booksdescr.org/ads.php?md5=B238DC565A4E2BB3FA5FBA8D9E...](http://booksdescr.org/ads.php?md5=B238DC565A4E2BB3FA5FBA8D9E522C5A)

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neilv
A detail missed due to the HN title matching the linked page's title: the
byline is Salman Rushdie.

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soperj
I wonder what Mr.Vonnegut would have to say about the historians that try to
minimize the causalities that occurred during the firebombing of Dresden.

~~~
oh_sigh
What historians try to do that? Are they respected in their field? And are you
sure about their intentions? Are they trying to minimize casualties, or just
trying to find an accurate number(which may be smaller than reported
casualties).

~~~
Melchizedek
[http://www.unz.com/article/how-many-germans-died-under-
raf-b...](http://www.unz.com/article/how-many-germans-died-under-raf-bombs-at-
dresden-in-1945/)

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jandrese

        [Harrison Starr] raised his eyebrows and inquired, “Is it an anti-war book?”
    
        “Yes,” I said. “I guess.”
    
        “You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”
    
        “No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”
    
        “I say, why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?”
    
        What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were
        as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.
    

Well good news for humanity. We're well on our way to stopping glaciers, so
maybe we can stop war after all.

~~~
mirimir
Soon after stopping glaciers will come stopping technological human
civilization. Maybe that won't stop war, but it'll reduce scale considerably.
So it goes.

