Slaughterhouse 5 - Final Post

I think often about how humbling an experience college is. I have to, because I am no longer the person evaluating. Rather, I am under the magnifying glass of my superiors. Often, I imagine Dr. Kaplin reading one of my essays.

“*…there is an entire generation of Koreans comma splicing and punctuating BEFORE their citations!” That’s what he must think every time he reads one of my papers.

*This ellipsis is making his eye twitch

I reflected on these moments often while reading this book. Kurt Vonnegut writes in exactly the sort of way I would tell me students not to write.

Not surprisingly, upon given an assignment where you ask a student to describe an event in a descriptive way, their thoughts immediately go to this strange temporally-focused recollection.

I opened my door. Then I went to my car. There was another door. I opened it, too.

And so on.

I never noticed that Vonnegut’s writing style is basically a refined version of this. Even in a story about time travel, a book that is not even linear by nature, it is the same sort of format. “This happened. Then, there was this. Not long after…”

Anyway, this long winded introduction is an attempt to not reveal anything about the book. It is one 

of those books I see myself revisiting in a few years to try and pick up some things that I might have missed along the way. I am still not quite sure why the entire story is told from the perspective of a guy who only met the antagonist once, and it was while he was “shitting his brains out.”

In conclusion: Slaughterhouse 5 lives up to the hype. And, for those of you who have already read it, I would recommend the book “Rant” by Chuck Palahniuk.