Unpopular Opinion: Slaughterhouse-Five is a Bad Novel
Unpopular Opinion: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is a bad novel. While taste is subjective when it comes to classics of all stripes, I found Slaughterhouse to be littered with problems from start to finish, from form to content.
The novel is the story of a man who unwillingly begins jumping through time. Well, sort of. The story of Billy Pilgrim, WWII veteran and optometrist, is actually revealed in the first section of the book to be the text of a novel by a narrator (perhaps Vonnegut himself). The up-front admission that henceforth all is fiction made it rather hard to care what happened to this fictional time traveler. While I’m one who cares almost absurdly for the fictitious people I read about, Vonnegut never managed to make me believe this was anything other than a novel.
Our psychonautic time traveler is at some point abducted by aliens known as Tralfamadorians. This would be well and good if it added something to the book or brought some kind of clarity to the plot. It really does neither, nor does it seem that Vonnegut really knew what to do with this plot thread and so let it drop without much comment. The aliens seem to serve the purpose of…
