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I love Vonnegut's writing mostly because of how very American his perspective is, for any 'anti-war' perspective needs to have American influence, in my opinion. I love the idea of laughing in the face of evil, and growing up in such a nation that safe guards the very concept of drafting as "honorable" instead of barbaric and tragic, makes anyone who writes criticisms of these practices as sac religious. Vonnegut identifies this attitude and utilizes it to strengthen his comedic voice. It is not too serious, in order to notify audiences the laughable absurdity of not identifying American nationalism for what it is: deathly and destructive.

After WWII the popular narrative about THE WAR was that it was a 'good war', just and fought fairly. Whenever the US fought (the popular myth went..), the war was just and the objectives were honorable and good. Anything that detracted from this narrative was pretty much ignored.

By the time the generation that fought WWII was in their 40's, their kids started fighting in Vietnam. You hear about the war fighting, but the political/cultural fight at home was the real reason the war was 'lost'. White suburban kids protested in the streets, and for once they were the ones getting assaulted by the cops. The pro-war faction was beginning to lose the hearts and minds battle significantly.

Into the mix came Slaughterhouse Five. This was a book written not by a member of the generation protesting, but by a WWII soldier, taken prisoner in the Battle of the Bulge. No one could impugn this man's bravery or his experience, he'd been in the worst WWII had to offer. The picture he painted was of the insanity of it all, and not a picture of inevitable triumph, but of defeat and futility in spite of victory and for the generation that fought WWII this was heresy.

So in the continuing battle between pro and anti war factions that continues until this day, Slaughterhouse Five is part of the zeitgeist when critical thinking about war came into the American mainstream.

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Kurt Vonnegut's blend of anti-war sentiment and satire made him one of the most popular writers of the 1960s, a time when Vietnam dominated the headlines in a way the country's current wars do not. On Thursday, the Library of America is republishing four novels written when Vonnegut was at his height of popularity - Cat's Cradle; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions.

The central theme in Vonnegut's fiction from the 1960s is the irrationality of governments and the senseless destruction of war. In a 1987 interview, Vonnegut said he was determined to write about war without romanticizing it.

"My own feeling is that civilization ended in World War I, and we're still trying to recover from that," he said. "Much of the blame is the malarkey that artists have created to glorify war, which as we all know, is nonsense, and a good deal worse than that - romantic pictures of battle, and of the dead and men in uniform and all that. And I did not want to have that story told again."

So he approached the subject with humor. His breakthrough to millions of readers came in 1963, with his fourth novel, Cat's Cradle, about a secret military experiment, called "Ice Nine," that leads to the destruction of civilization. But his most striking anti-war statement came six years later, and was quickly adapted by Hollywood. Slaughterhouse-Five depicts the firebombing of Dresden by Allied warplanes in 1945. The city was destroyed. More than 100,000 civilians were killed.

The novel is semi-autobiographical. Like its hero, Vonnegut was an American POW, imprisoned in a Dresden slaughterhouse during the air raid.

"The destruction of Dresden was my first experience with really fantastic waste," he explained. "To burn down a habitable city and a beautiful one at that ... I was simply impressed by the wastefulness, the terrible wastefulness, the meaninglessness of war."

We have become such a pitiless people.

He highlights that meaninglessness by having his main character, Billy Pilgrim, become unstuck in time, reliving random moments of his life - as a young prisoner in Dresden, and as a middle-aged optometrist, captured by aliens for an outer space zoo exhibit.

The story struck a chord with young people facing the draft and a seemingly senseless war in Vietnam. Sidney Offit was the editor of Intellectual Digest when the book came out and is editor of the new Library of America edition of Slaughterhouse-Five and three other Vonnegut novels.

"His reputation was so overwhelming amongst young people," Offit says. "And in a sense, his books were politicized in the culture. They were representative of a point of view that was sweeping the country. Religion is a strong word - but it was almost a religious devotion. And that generates from serious critics who always talked with skepticism: 'Those young people are responding to what? There's nothing complex' - the genius of it was its accessibility."

What made them readable in the 1960s makes them readable now, says Offit - as does their continued relevance.

As a teen, Sagal fell in love with Vonnegut's novels. He recently reread those books as an adult and found them even better than he remembered.

"There is a serious theme that runs through," Offit explains. "And that theme - that concept of our inhumanity and our self-destruction, and our irrationality - if anything is becoming stronger. God, you read the Times in the morning, it seems like Kurt Vonnegut's worst nightmare has come true."

In a 1991 interview, shortly after the Gulf War, Vonnegut said he was saddened by what he saw in America.

"We have become such a pitiless people," Vonnegut lamented. "And I think it's TV that's done it to us. When I went to war in World War II, we had two fears. One was we would be killed. The other was that we might have to kill somebody. And now killing is Whoopee. It does not seem much anymore. To my generation, it still seemed like an extraordinary thing to do, to kill."

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Kurt Vonnegut: Still Speaking To The War Weary

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Vonnegut's blend of anti-war sentiment and satire made him one of the most popular writers of the Vietnam era, and his words still resonate with a new generation fighting abroad. On Thursday, the Library of America will republish four of the late author's novels, including Slaughterhouse-Five.

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Billy Pilgrim is a person without the 'shields' of people to love, a meaningful career or a strong faith. This leads to an existential crisis reinforced by the horrific events Billy sees, which Billy has no answer to. Instead becoming unstuck in time and his other delusions are his way of finding happiness and meaning in a world with no fundamental truths. The anti war message is just a small part of the message of the absurdity of reality.

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Analysis of "The Children's Crusade" as a literary concept.

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Analysis of "The Children's Crusade" as a literary concept.

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Soldiers viewed elders as wiser due to their years and people tend to relax judgment when they have a leader to follow. This makes it easier to atrocities to arise.

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The book, at least in Vonnegut's eyes, is first and foremost an anti-war novel. He says as much in the introduction.

But it is more than that, of course.  Vonnegut successfully manages to make the human conception of time seem absurd. (He enjoys explaining ordinary things in ways that made them seem alien. Another example would be his portrayal of American culture in Breakfast of Champions.)

I believe Slaughterhouse was an earlier expression of this intuition, which of course Vonnegut was only being half-serious about (he was always half-serious). As he saw it, the Tralformadorian's view of time was beautiful in that they could see beyond the brutal and relentless way time flows to human beings. And Pilgrim, by jumping to and fro as he does, ceases to worry more than he needs to about the problems he faces in life. It would be wise to assume that this was something that Vonnegut wishes he could have done. By his own account, he was a fairly nervous man.

And I wouldn't be so quick to judge Pilgrim as suffering from PTSD. Vonnegut isn't a realist, he's an absurdist. Though the narrator is by far incredibly unreliable, I think the story is more enjoyable if you suspend your disbelief and just take the ride without making superfluous judgments. Is Pilgrim crazy, or is he really "unstuck in time"? It doesn't matter, leave that question alone.

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In my reading of the book, the phrase "So it goes" was always meant to be Vonnegut's reaction to tragedy. I think there is a lot of literature that tries to say something smart, intellectual or long-winded about people dying for no reason, but to Vonnegut, there is not really much to say. That's why the phrase is so purposefully short and meaningless. Trying to say anything about pointless death is an act of futility.

Towards the end of the book he talks about how the birds react to the tragedy of the Dresden bombings and his continuing refrain "so it goes" is a reflection of that.

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“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.” I do think it's one of the most poignantly beautiful things I've ever read, but I don’t think I quite understand it. Billy thinks this when he and Valencia are discussing the war, and notes that it is startlingly true, but isn’t the awfulness of war one of Slaughterhouse-Five’s main themes? Having led such a disillusioned life, why does Billy consider putting this on his headstone?

I think when people first read the quote, myself included, they think it's a beautiful way to live - find the beauty in everything, and nothing will hurt. However, you need to take it in the context of the book. Billy time travels; he knows when he will die, and what the rest of his life entails. The knowledge creates a sense of apathy within Billy which alienates and isolates himself from everyone else. Similarly, the phrase "so it goes" shows the apathy of Billy. Many people think those two quotes are an inspirational way to live; if something bad happens, just merely think so it goes, and do nothing about it. But you have to remember Vonnegut was a satirist - life isn't beautiful, and it's going to hurt a lot of the time. You have to face the realization of the absurdity and meaninglessness of the world around, and only then will you take control of your life.

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"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist."

This very quote I feel encapsulates a great deal of this novel. The aftershocks of grief, when suppressed, appear as great out-of-nowhere outbursts. A post-war America became trigger happy, and everyones got PTSD. Philosophically yes this idea that 'grief is senseless' is logical enough, but that is assuming a great deal in the American people that I just don't think holds up. It is absurd to believe theres no reason to cry, and such prideful thinking only leads to violence that once explained is too painful to fully understand. The idea of a memory lives on, however. Once again an American trope of memorializing every disaster. I do not disagree with that type of thing, but it coincides all the same.

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Abridged from in-margin notes.
Must admit I wasn't aware that Vonnegut's novels involved as much science fiction as they do. Possibly because of this, I understood Billy Pilgrim's travels through time to be entirely in his own mind, as a result of trauma during the war and the plane crash.

This seems supported since his delusions mirror ideas he had read in Kilgore Trout's novels before the crash. Further, he never spoke about his time travels or alien encounters before the plane crash and gave the reason that 'I didn't think the time was ripe.', which seems like his mind trying to maintain internal consistency. Overall, I thought the story was intended to be from the point of view of a delusional Pilgrim post plane crash, excepting of course the parts told in first person. As a result of this interpretation I didn't think much of the discussions between Pilgrim and the Tralfamadorians on themes such as free will and death, and saw the novel overall as being much more cynical and tragic than perhaps it was intended to be.