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Ian "Marvin" Graye's Reviews > Slaughterhouse-Five
Slaughterhouse-Five
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Ian "Marvin" Graye's review
bookshelves: vonnegut, re-read, read-2014, reviews, reviews-5-stars
Feb 23, 2011
bookshelves: vonnegut, re-read, read-2014, reviews, reviews-5-stars
The Florence of the Elbe
Kurt Vonnegut tells us in an epigraph, “This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace.�
This much is true. Stylistically, it’s unique. It jumps all over the place, not to mention all over time.
The story-telling is cumulative and simultaneous, rather than linear and sequential.
Maybe this is the only appropriate way to tell a story about the firebombing of the open city, Dresden, “the Florence of the Elbe�, in which up to 135,000 Hansels and Gretels (mostly civilians) lost their lives or had them taken away (wiki records that the figure has been revised to 25,000).
The “hٴǰ� David Irving seemed to promote the higher figure, not out of sympathy with the civilians, but in an attempt to establish a moral equivalence with the Holocaust. Even the facts are schizophrenic.
However, the precise number is not really relevant to the morality of the act. It was still a horror, whether or not the motive was to end the war and reduce further killing.
Dresden Frauenkirche after the bombing
"God Willing"
The War was a playground where the evil in humanity was unleashed. Religious people are entitled to ask, where was God?
God doesn’t seem to be present in Vonnegut’s narrative. Perhaps all that is left of him is the aside, “Somewhere, a big dog barked.�
If you believe that God exists, was he sidelined in the theatre of war? Did he become all bark, and no bite?
On the other hand, if God doesn’t exist, or he remains stolidly neutral, then what hope is there that good will prevail over evil?
Only, perhaps, that good people will somehow prevail over bad people. Or that bad acts (including war crimes) will be punished according to law.
"Accident Will"
Vonnegut’s novel seems to acknowledge the horror, while at the same time revealing some reason for optimism.
In a delightful malapropism, the German cab driver, Gerhard Muller, to whom the novel is dedicated, says, "I hope that we'll meet again in a world of peace and freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will."
Instead of meeting again, “God willing�, he struggles for a suitable non-theistic alternative. If "Fate permitting" is too theistic or determinist, what can you call it, other than [an] “aԳ�? If there is nobody who can mean it to happen, how can it be meant to happen?
Billy Pilgrim's Progress
Throughout the novel, the chief protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, a Joe Average, makes some sort of progress of his own, beyond Dresden and the War. He comes to realise that real life smells like both “mustard gas and roses�.
Vonnegut relies on the devices of science fiction as the foundation of his story and as the basis for hope.
It’s almost as if there is a continuum of science, science fiction, fantasy, imagination, superstition and religion from which we have to construct our personal, social, spiritual and literary beliefs and styles.
Vonnegut positions “Slaughterhouse Five� all over this continuum as telegrams about “flying saucers, the negligibility of death and the true nature of time.�
Unstuck in Time
Even before the bombing, Billy Pilgrim comes “unstuck in time.�
Not only does this describe his experience of the world, it bonds him with the Tralfamadorians who kidnap him and return him by flying saucer to a zoo on their planet.
During these segments, the novel takes on the tone of “Gulliver’s Travels�, only it’s more apparent that Billy is learning about himself and humanity by observing and listening to the Tralfamadorians.
The big difference is the comprehension of time. For Tralfamadorians, time doesn’t pass, it doesn’t cease, it is never gone. It remains, it stays, in perpetuity, only it is perpetuated both forward and backwards:
"When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past...all moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist...
"It is just an illusion...that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.
"When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.
"Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’�
"So It Goes"
When understood in this context, the expression “So it goes� isn’t just resignation or acceptance of death, it’s actually a celebration of life.
Death doesn’t mean that you have ceased to live. It just means that, in one moment out of many (albeit they are all compressed or sublated into the one moment), you no longer exist, but you still exist in all of the others.
Interestingly, Vonnegut adds to this passage the words “And so on�. Again, it’s a continuum. We’re somewhere on it, we keep on and we keep going on.
Free Billy
When time is collapsed on itself, there is no before and after, and therefore no cause and effect:
"All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all...bugs in amber.�
Billy Pilgrim adheres to a naïve belief in Free Will, which is evidenced by the framed prayer on his office wall:
"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference."
The Tralfamadorians consider this amusing, because Earth is the only place in the universe that believes in Free Will.
Vonnegut reveals:
"Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.�
Determinism
Vonnegut’s view of Determinism is more problematic.
The absence of cause and effect is related to his explanation of time:
"Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber? Well, here we are...trapped in the moment. There is no why.�
(view spoiler)
If there is only one moment, albeit perpetual, the question “w� doesn’t arise. Life is pure existence. It just is. It needn’t be any more complicated than that.
It’s not so much that what is happening or what has happened has been determined from outside.
It’s more that it has already happened, and evidence of its occurrence is contained or preserved in the recorded moment (the amber).
We can’t change the record, because it’s a document, simultaneously, of the coexistence of what humans have come to think of separately as the past, present and future.
What Remains to Be Done?
The Tralfamadorians do say that “every creature and plant in the universe is a machine.�
This is obviously consistent with a level of Determinism, but it’s equally consistent with the view that we have already performed or done everything that could be expected of us.
It’s already happened and it can’t be changed. Even the end of the world, which was caused when somebody presses a button. Billy asks why they can’t stop it being pressed:
"He always pressed it and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.�
It’s not so much the Determinism, as the nature of Time.
Still, the question remains, is Gerhard’s world of peace and freedom possible? Is there anything we can do about it? Will it happen of its own accord? Has it already happened? Has it already been preserved in amber?
If our attempts to do good might have no effect, should we at least avoid doing evil?
Brief, Urgent Messages in the Telegraphic Schizophrenic Manner
It turns out that the Tralfamadorians have books, “brief clumps of symbols separated by stars�.
"Slaughterhouse Five� is somewhat modeled on them. Perhaps the answers to the above questions are in these books?
"…each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message - describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other.
"There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep.
"There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.
"What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.�
If we humans could think of, and enjoy, life, not just books, as many marvelous moments, all beautiful and surprising and deep, then perhaps there would be no evil. And nothing would hurt. Peace.
And so on.
Kurt Vonnegut tells us in an epigraph, “This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace.�
This much is true. Stylistically, it’s unique. It jumps all over the place, not to mention all over time.
The story-telling is cumulative and simultaneous, rather than linear and sequential.
Maybe this is the only appropriate way to tell a story about the firebombing of the open city, Dresden, “the Florence of the Elbe�, in which up to 135,000 Hansels and Gretels (mostly civilians) lost their lives or had them taken away (wiki records that the figure has been revised to 25,000).
The “hٴǰ� David Irving seemed to promote the higher figure, not out of sympathy with the civilians, but in an attempt to establish a moral equivalence with the Holocaust. Even the facts are schizophrenic.
However, the precise number is not really relevant to the morality of the act. It was still a horror, whether or not the motive was to end the war and reduce further killing.
Dresden Frauenkirche after the bombing
"God Willing"
The War was a playground where the evil in humanity was unleashed. Religious people are entitled to ask, where was God?
God doesn’t seem to be present in Vonnegut’s narrative. Perhaps all that is left of him is the aside, “Somewhere, a big dog barked.�
If you believe that God exists, was he sidelined in the theatre of war? Did he become all bark, and no bite?
On the other hand, if God doesn’t exist, or he remains stolidly neutral, then what hope is there that good will prevail over evil?
Only, perhaps, that good people will somehow prevail over bad people. Or that bad acts (including war crimes) will be punished according to law.
"Accident Will"
Vonnegut’s novel seems to acknowledge the horror, while at the same time revealing some reason for optimism.
In a delightful malapropism, the German cab driver, Gerhard Muller, to whom the novel is dedicated, says, "I hope that we'll meet again in a world of peace and freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will."
Instead of meeting again, “God willing�, he struggles for a suitable non-theistic alternative. If "Fate permitting" is too theistic or determinist, what can you call it, other than [an] “aԳ�? If there is nobody who can mean it to happen, how can it be meant to happen?
Billy Pilgrim's Progress
Throughout the novel, the chief protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, a Joe Average, makes some sort of progress of his own, beyond Dresden and the War. He comes to realise that real life smells like both “mustard gas and roses�.
Vonnegut relies on the devices of science fiction as the foundation of his story and as the basis for hope.
It’s almost as if there is a continuum of science, science fiction, fantasy, imagination, superstition and religion from which we have to construct our personal, social, spiritual and literary beliefs and styles.
Vonnegut positions “Slaughterhouse Five� all over this continuum as telegrams about “flying saucers, the negligibility of death and the true nature of time.�
Unstuck in Time
Even before the bombing, Billy Pilgrim comes “unstuck in time.�
Not only does this describe his experience of the world, it bonds him with the Tralfamadorians who kidnap him and return him by flying saucer to a zoo on their planet.
During these segments, the novel takes on the tone of “Gulliver’s Travels�, only it’s more apparent that Billy is learning about himself and humanity by observing and listening to the Tralfamadorians.
The big difference is the comprehension of time. For Tralfamadorians, time doesn’t pass, it doesn’t cease, it is never gone. It remains, it stays, in perpetuity, only it is perpetuated both forward and backwards:
"When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past...all moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist...
"It is just an illusion...that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.
"When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.
"Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’�
"So It Goes"
When understood in this context, the expression “So it goes� isn’t just resignation or acceptance of death, it’s actually a celebration of life.
Death doesn’t mean that you have ceased to live. It just means that, in one moment out of many (albeit they are all compressed or sublated into the one moment), you no longer exist, but you still exist in all of the others.
Interestingly, Vonnegut adds to this passage the words “And so on�. Again, it’s a continuum. We’re somewhere on it, we keep on and we keep going on.
Free Billy
When time is collapsed on itself, there is no before and after, and therefore no cause and effect:
"All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all...bugs in amber.�
Billy Pilgrim adheres to a naïve belief in Free Will, which is evidenced by the framed prayer on his office wall:
"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference."
The Tralfamadorians consider this amusing, because Earth is the only place in the universe that believes in Free Will.
Vonnegut reveals:
"Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.�
Determinism
Vonnegut’s view of Determinism is more problematic.
The absence of cause and effect is related to his explanation of time:
"Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber? Well, here we are...trapped in the moment. There is no why.�
(view spoiler)
If there is only one moment, albeit perpetual, the question “w� doesn’t arise. Life is pure existence. It just is. It needn’t be any more complicated than that.
It’s not so much that what is happening or what has happened has been determined from outside.
It’s more that it has already happened, and evidence of its occurrence is contained or preserved in the recorded moment (the amber).
We can’t change the record, because it’s a document, simultaneously, of the coexistence of what humans have come to think of separately as the past, present and future.
What Remains to Be Done?
The Tralfamadorians do say that “every creature and plant in the universe is a machine.�
This is obviously consistent with a level of Determinism, but it’s equally consistent with the view that we have already performed or done everything that could be expected of us.
It’s already happened and it can’t be changed. Even the end of the world, which was caused when somebody presses a button. Billy asks why they can’t stop it being pressed:
"He always pressed it and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.�
It’s not so much the Determinism, as the nature of Time.
Still, the question remains, is Gerhard’s world of peace and freedom possible? Is there anything we can do about it? Will it happen of its own accord? Has it already happened? Has it already been preserved in amber?
If our attempts to do good might have no effect, should we at least avoid doing evil?
Brief, Urgent Messages in the Telegraphic Schizophrenic Manner
It turns out that the Tralfamadorians have books, “brief clumps of symbols separated by stars�.
"Slaughterhouse Five� is somewhat modeled on them. Perhaps the answers to the above questions are in these books?
"…each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message - describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other.
"There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep.
"There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.
"What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.�
If we humans could think of, and enjoy, life, not just books, as many marvelous moments, all beautiful and surprising and deep, then perhaps there would be no evil. And nothing would hurt. Peace.
And so on.
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Reading Progress
February 23, 2011
– Shelved
October 25, 2012
– Shelved as:
vonnegut
July 6, 2014
–
Started Reading
July 8, 2014
– Shelved as:
re-read
July 8, 2014
– Shelved as:
read-2014
July 8, 2014
– Shelved as:
reviews
July 8, 2014
– Shelved as:
reviews-5-stars
July 8, 2014
–
Finished Reading
Comments Showing 1-29 of 29 (29 new)
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Fantastic review. I have been thinking about "Slaughterhouse 5" in last few days. Your review peppered with quotes from the book makes me want to re-read it again. I wish you had written more about the narrator and Paul Lazarro.
Thanks, Venkat. I was keeping an eye out for Paul Lazarro all the way through, and was disappointed to learn that the line "Nobody fucks around with Paul Lazarro" (which I've remembered for what seems like decades) actually comes from the film rather than the book. I made some notes about the narrator, but they didn't fit the thematic approach I ended up using.
Thanks for the wonderful explication of Tralfamadorian thought. I never knew what to make of the off-world excursion or how to think about the causality issues in their sense of time. Some have said it was just an escape to madness as a solution to undigestable slaughter. I do take comfort in those conceptions of "now is forever" and the life of the past still existing in time (or out of time as it were). More than just a playful conception to me. But I couldn't get past it seeming to make free will and moral choices an illusion. And even though relativity makes time a fourth dimension with space, the unescapable forward arrow of time due to Newton's Second Law (entropy will increase) undermines the truth and beauty of mentally collapsing past and future with that simultaneity concept. That Ouroboros of beginning and ends. But leave it to Vonnegut to deflate any serious philosophy here with the "bugs trapped in amber" metaphor and raise things to cosmic humor.
Michael wrote: "Thanks for the wonderful explication of Tralfamadorian thought. I never knew what to make of the off-world excursion or how to think about the causality issues in their sense of time. Some have s..."Wow this is brilliant. I never look at the 2nd law when I think of "time". But as a premise can't we argue that this whole shifting-turning-juggling-jumping across-through-beyond the time continuum is to achieve a sense of equilibrium. (I am just referring it as a metaphor nothing literal in it).
Again your comment is in a sense 'revelatory' to me.
Michael wrote: "I couldn't get past it seeming to make free will and moral choices an illusion."Thanks, Michael. I can't say I pinned down what Vonnegut really meant about Free Will. I didn't take him to be discouraging us from acting as if we have free Will. We do, it's just that in the oneness of time, it's already happened before and it's now set in stone. The fact that the whole of time has been captured by a helmet cam, doesn't mean that it was predetermined. Just that, once it has happened, it has been determined. If that makes sense!
Ian wrote: "Thanks, Venkat. I was keeping an eye out for Paul Lazarro all the way through, and was disappointed to learn that the line "Nobody fucks around with Paul Lazarro" (which I've remembered for what se..."In some strange way Lazarro brings in a tangent on the idea of free-will or the lack of it. I almost missed him in the whole book. I thought he was just a stock character. He is almost an anti-Billy-Pilgrim. ( Or I might just be too dumb)
P.S. I might need some help understanding the entropy issues.
Ian wrote: "P.S. I might need some help understanding the entropy issues."Newtons second law states that entropy (For an isolated sytem) can never decrease but will always increase to reach a thermodynamic equilibrium (i.e. It strives to achieve maximum possible value).
An simple version of the same we found in:
Venkat wrote: "Newtons second law states..."I get it now, but I think that V was implying that the striving and movement towards equilibrium has all occurred. It might imply that the amount of energy is actually infinitely greater than that which exists at one moment in time, because the entire lifetime of energy has to co-exist at the same time.
Spectacular. So happy to end my day reading this review. Round of applause from San Francisco, Ian.
Ian wrote: "Venkat wrote: "Newtons second law states..."I get it now, but I think that V was implying that the striving and movement towards equilibrium has all occurred. It might imply that the amount of en..."
Yeah I have a similar sort-off feeling. BTW this reminds of the closing pages of '2001: A Space Odyssey' (Where the star-child starts realizing things).
It also made me wonder about recurrence and circularity. If the total amount of energy remains constant, is it a multiple of the number of moments, or does each moment only shift it around, so that the total remains the same?
Brian wrote: "Spectacular. So happy to end my day reading this review. Round of applause from San Francisco, Ian."Thanks, Brian, and greetings from Bris Angeles!
In the Wiki article on was this Tralfamadorian element:The words yesterday and tomorrow both translate to the same word in Hindi: कल ("kal"),[9] meaning "the day remote from today."
Ian wrote: " I can't say I pinned down what Vonnegut really meant about Free Will. I didn't take him to be discouraging us from acting as if we have free Will. We do, it's just that in the oneness of time, it's already happened before and it's now set in stone."As a high schooler, I loved the Tralfamadorians, and I gobbled up what they were saying. But after many re-readings and many years of thinking about the book (and many more re-readings of everything else Vonnegut has said and written), I've come to decide that as temporal beings we (and I'm speaking for humans here) should not take comfort in the Tralfamadoran view of time, nor should we use it as an excuse to fail to exercise our precious free will.
Their explanation for time and the ramifications on our choices and actions is seductive, and it allows Billy Pilgrim to continue passively on through life failing to act or do anything meaningful. Certainly this is not what Vonnegut would have for us as humans.
If so, then that would mean that we are also to take the director Harrison Star at his word when he tells the narrator that it's useless to write an anti-war book. Might as well right an anti-glacier book, says Starr. And Vonnegut certainly does not believe those words. He is writing SH-5 at the height of the Vietnam War, and he knows that we in America could have avoided that war if we had used our free will. And I'm pretty sure Vonnegut believes members of the Allied Air Command could have used their free will a bit more effectively and not have fire bombed Dresden.
The levels of irony throughout SH-5 are so layered and so complex, that it invites readers to accept not only the words of the Tralfamadorians (and after all, aren't they really Billy Pilgrim's fractured mind's attempt at making sense of the horrors he has encountered in the war?), but to take at face value lines like, "Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.� But that's only a third true. Instead, the words of the Serenity Prayer, as cheesy as it may sound to us sophisticated citizens of the Twenty-First Century, provide a better understanding of what Vonnegut would have us take away from the novel as a course for human action and a means to exercise our free will.
It reminds me of how as a teen I also used to take at face value the words of Bokonon in Cat's Cradle. I used to read that book thinking Vonnegut really wanted us to live happy lives believing untruths. Again, Vonnegut's irony escaped me, and it took me many years and several re-reads before I got a better handle on what he was saying.
None of this is to say that what the Tralfamadorians tell Billy about time isn't true. It's just that we aren't Tralfamadorians.
Thanks, PG. I find the issue of determinism problematical, both in general and in SH5. I approach it with a bias in favour of free will. The basic problem is that we could probably never tell whether determinism is true and at play in any circumstances. It is kind of an invisible hand. The ego is tossed around by both the id and the super-ego, for starters, let alone any external causes and forces. Do they determine or shape or limit us and our actions?
The reality is that we don't know, so we carry on regardless. We act "as if" ("als ob") we have free will, and I don't see us stopping.
The Tralfamadorian concept of time is not necessarily an argument against free will. If I read it correctly, it is more or less saying that everything has already happened and been recorded in the one moment. What happened might have been the product of free will. So I think we just get on with how we were going to act anyway, because that is probably how it happened and was recorded in time.
The anti-war/glacier analogy is actually a different issue. It recognises that sometimes an ego or a force comes up against another ego or force, and it can't prevail. There are conflicts between different egos and forces. It isn't always possible for one or both to prevail. Wars are conducted by the powers that be. We don't stop protesting even though we know we might not prevail.
So, if what the Tralfamadorians say about time is true, it doesn't stop us purporting to exercise free will, exactly as we currently do.
On this argument, deja vu is actually a crack in the record of time that allows us to see and experience the present as past.
Great review! Please forgive my rambling as I try to address the free will v. determinism stuff...The quote I always come back to is Vonnegut's attempt to explain the oddness of the book in the first chapter: "It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre."
To me, this is very much a personal novel (hence that first chapter not being an introduction, but a part of the actual text itself) wherein Vonnegut tries and fails to make sense of war. Billy is able to make a little sense of it, but only by essentially becoming a passive being who accepts everything as inevitable and doesn't engage with anyone (or life at all). BUT I don't think Vonnegut is condoning this as a viable life philosophy; he's rather commenting on how inconsequential one feels when faced with the enormity and absurdity of war. (I should also mention I'm in the camp that thinks Billy has severe PTSD and that the science-fiction elements of the book are how he attempts to cope with the devastation he's witnessed.)
As for Vonnegut, he seems to empathize with Billy, but I think in the end he's saying that part of being human is trying with all your might to make sense of tragedy, even as you know it will never make sense. Hence the quote I mentioned earlier and the existence of the book in general.
Thanks, Adam. Great perspectives. You've made me wonder about a few things. Just as we have to make sense of a massacre or a tragedy, we have to make sense of life itself. We can do this individually or as part of society (in which case we are part of common sense).The other thing is a bit macabre. Is life itself a tragedy or a massacre? Are we simply placed on earth as part of a farming enterprise, and we are effectively massacred or harvested at the time of death?
Not quite what you had in mind, but that's what you made me think about!
Awesome review. You touched on concepts that I didn't consider when reading this. Maybe Billy was stuck in time like an ant in Amber.
Thanks, David. Maybe we're all stuck in time! I'll see what I think when I finish reading Heidegger!
"I need to read this again. It has been far too long." he grumbles to himself.
Vonnegut and Brautigan. Memories are made of this!
Awesome review, Ian!! You deftly cover all topics and I love that science continuum reference which was quite a fascinating tool to deploy in telling of war story.
Interesting review! I love your analysis on "unstuck in time" and Vonnegut's repeated use of "so it goes." I think the idea that "a person only appears to be dead in that particular instant but is still very alive in other moments" is a rather comforting concept that the Tralfamadorians hold. I wonder if Vonnegut himself believed in this concept. Regardless, I'll have to read the book again in the future as your analysis provided a different perspective. For me, the book was a bit difficult to read as I found it tedious and confusing. Hopefully, I'll be a more active and engaged reader the next time around.
Hannah wrote: "Interesting review! I love your analysis on "unstuck in time" and Vonnegut's repeated use of "so it goes." I think the idea that "a person only appears to be dead in that particular instant but is ..."Thanks, Hannah. It took me a while to realise the book is beautiful and surprising and deep.
Thank you for the amazing review!I read this in the early 1970s and loved it. Some real life lessons here. I actually met Vonnegut at a book signing in those days. He was quite dour 😉
Here are the titles of Kilgore's works in "Slaughterhouse-Five":
Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension
The Gospel from Outer Space
Untitled 1 - (Money Tree)
The Gutless Wonder
The Big Board
Untitled 2 - (Jesus And the Time Machine)
Full extracts can be found here: