Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death

Rating:
Awards:
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Narrator: Ethan Hawke
Category: Fiction
Publisher: Harper Audio
Release Date: 2003
Length: 6 hrs
Unabridged

An Overview:
In Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death , Billy Pilgrim is “unstuck in time.” He travels randomly through his life. At once he is a prisoner of war, then a successful optometrist, and then a captive on the planet Tralfamadore. It sounds like a sci-fi right? Not so fast. Slaughterhouse Five is a novel that does not fit easily into one category.

Despite the main character’s alien abduction, this novel cannot be pigeon-holed as science fiction for it is equally about Billy’s experiences during World War II where he survived the bombing of Dresden and how his life progressed once he returned home. In this regard it is an anti-war novel highlighting senseless violence and death.

Billy, loosened from the confines of time, knows every event that will occur in his life, the pains and the pleasures yet he makes no effort to change them. His nonchalant attitude about is due to the Tralfamadorians who see all of time as a straight line with no beginning and no end. They teach Billy to understand the implications of an unending continuum, like a movie that can always be rewound or fast forwarded.

For Tralfamadorians death is only a blip in infinity to which they respond, “So it goes.” Consequently, Billy takes everything as it comes, even his own eventual assassination. So it goes. Following Billy Pilgrim throughout the book as he involuntarily shuttles from one point in life to another, somehow lacks emotion.

Vonnegut tells us he was embarrassed by this or that, felt sorry for this person or that, yet the peculiar and humdrum events of Billy’s life all meld into the life (albeit out of order) of someone who could be everyman and no man, whose life and death are no more extraordinary than yours or mine might be. So it goes.

The Narration:
Ethan Hawke’s low voice is almost a whisper, almost the voice of an older man as he reminiscences about the war. Hawke is a great choice and captures the essence of the narrator with the conversational tone of the novel

Audiobook reviewed by Georgia Sparling

 

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Resources:
wikipedia: Slaughterhouse-Five