Slaughterhouse-Five Themes

In Slaughterhouse-Five, the primary upshot of what Billy Pilgrim learns from the plunger-shaped aliens is this: if we cannot change anything about time, there is no such thing as free will. We supp...

Slaughterhouse-Five ain't about officers or heroes. It's about privates, most of whom don't want to be—and shouldn't be—on the battlefield. And it's about prisoners of war, men who have been de...

Billy Pilgrim and the narrator of Slaughterhouse-Five both spend a fair amount of their time reliving their experiences in World War II... and not because they just had so much fun. The narrator re...

From Billy's uncomfortably-realistically-detailed crucified Christ (Chapter 2, Section 19) to the horses with shattered hooves in the rubble of Dresden (Chapter 9, Section 19), much of the sufferin...

The Tralfamadorians are pretty clear that their novels hold absolutely zero moral lessons. After all, what would be the point of a moral lesson when you can't do anything to change the future? Slau...

Because Slaughterhouse-Five is an anti-war book, Vonnegut sure isn't presenting us with any heroes. And to make sure we don't wonder if the men in the novel have the self-determination or free will...

Obviously, Slaughterhouse-Five is a book about prisoners of war... and it doesn't get much more confined than that. But even more, it's a book about the many, many ways people get trapped: by the a...

In the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator promises Mary O'Hare that he will write a novel about World War II that will not attract the attention of manly men like John Wayne or Fran...

As we discussed in "Genre," Slaughterhouse-Five really draws attention to the fact that it's a book and is being written by an author. This is part of what makes it a textbook "postmodern" novel—...