Slaughterhouse-Five | Vonnegut’s Anti-War Theme

In the following essay, F. Brett Cox explains how Slaughterhouse-Five represents Vonnegut’s efforts to come to terms with his personal war experiences. Other aspects of the novel are of secondary concern when compared to Vonnegut’s anti-war theme.

In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., had already published five novels and two short story collections, but he was not especially well-known or commercially successful. The publication of Slaughterhouse-Five in that year was an artistic and commercial breakthrough for Vonnegut. According to the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, one of the leading authorities on Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five was Vonnegut’s ‘‘first bestseller. [It] catapulted him to sudden national fame, and brought his writing into serious intellectual esteem.’’ Other critics have noted the novel as a summation of...

[The entire page is 1652 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass

Summary and Analysis – Themes – Characters – And much more...