Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Finished August 21, 2026

Alright, so I’ve listed this post as Slaughterhouse Five since that was the original intention, but the actual book is Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963–1973. So this post is about all of the stories, since I did read them all, not just Slaughterhouse Five.

On that note, I think if I had just read Slaughterhouse Five and not all the others, I might’ve actually liked it felt differently by the end of things.

Let’s go through my quotes and excerpts first and then blather about opinion at the end. So, for Cat’s Cradle:

And I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?”

It doesn’t take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.

This is it:

“Nothing.”

I thought this was amusing at the time. But after what, 700? 800 pages? the schtick kinda got old.

Now God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater:

These facts became known to young Norman Mushari when, upon graduating from Cornell Law School at the top of his class, he went to work for the Washington, D.C. law firm that had designed both the Foundation and the Corporation, the firm of McAllister, Robjent, Reed and McGee. He was of Lebanese extraction, the son of a Brooklyn rug merchant. He was five feet and three inches tall. He had an enormous ass, which was luminous when bare.

I realize with this one I’m actually giving you the best parts of the book, both Rosewater and the entire Vonnegut volume. And that particular story did have potential even if the whole “redistribution of wealth” thing (much like the “mankind is dumb and awful” thing) got very old very quickly.

Also getting old quickly is the Shetland pony reference, seen not for the first time in Slaughterhouse Five:

Weary had a block of balsa wood which was supposed to be a foxhole pillow. He had a prophylactic kit containing two tough condoms “For the Prevention of Disease Only!” He had a whistle he wasn’t going to show anybody until he got promoted to corporal. He had a dirty picture of a woman attempting sexual intercourse with a Shetland pony. He had made Billy Pilgrim admire that picture several times.

One part that did make me smile:

There was another long silence, with the colonel dying and dying, drowning where he stood. And then he cried out wetly, “It’s me, boys! It’s Wild bob!” That is what he had always wanted his troops to call him: “Wild Bob.”

None of the people who could hear him were actually from his regiment, except for Roland Weary, and Weary wasn’t listening. All Weary could think of was the agony in his own feet.

But the colonel imagined that he was addressing his beloved troops for the last time, and he told them that they had nothing to be ashamed of, that there were dead Germans all over the battlefield who wished to God that they had never heard of the Four-fifty-first. He said that after the war he was going to have a regimental reunion in his home town, which was Cody, Wyoming. He was going to barbecue whole steers.

He said all this while staring into Billy’s eyes. He made the inside of poor Billy’s skull echo with balderdash. “God be with you, boys!” he said, and that echoed and echoed. And then he said, “If you’re ever in Cody, Wyoming, just ask for Wild Bob!”

Moving on…so while Billy was abducted by aliens and in the human zoo, they brought him a mate (named Montana Wildhack) for their entertainment:

Montana was naked, and so was Billy, of course. He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who’ll get one.

This next bit isn’t talking about Montana Wildhack (it’s about Maggie White, which doesn’t matter) but I can’t not include it:

She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. Men looked at her and wanted to fill her up with babies right away.

And now we get to Breakfast of Champions:

A lot of the people on the wrecked planet were Communists. They had a theory that what was left of the planet should be shared more or less equally among all the people, who hadn’t asked to come to a wrecked planet in the first place. Meanwhile, more babies were arriving all the time−kicking and screaming, yelling for milk.

This is an extremely common thing throughout his stories and I get it is/was super trendy but…the planet hasn’t exploded. The world hasn’t ended (yet). Rather than having an overpopulation crisis, we’re now experiencing (or on the verge of) a low birthrate crisis. And being concerned about overpopulation didn’t stop him from having several kids. The world being so horrible and going to hell didn’t stop him from that either. Just saying.

Meanwhile, continuing Breakfast of Champions:

Dwayne Hoover, incidentally, had an unusually large penis, and didn’t even know it. The few women he had had anything to do with weren’t sufficiently experienced to know whether he was average or not. The world average was five and seven-eighths inches long, and one and one-half inches in diameter when engorged with blood. Dwayne’s was seven inches long and two and one-eighths in diameter when engorged with blood.

Dwayne’s son Bunny had a penis that was exactly average.

It continues:

Harry LeSabre, Dwayne’s sales manager, had a penis five inches long and two and one-eighths inches in diameter.

Cyprian Ukwende, the black physician from Nigeria, had a penis six and seven-eighths inches long and one and three-quarters inches in diameter.

Don Breedlove, the gas-conversion unit installer who raped Patty Keene, had a penis five and seven-eighths inches long and one and seven-eighths inches in diameter.

Nope, not done with penises yet:

The erection center caused the dorsal vein in his penis to tighten up, so blood could get in all right, but it couldn’t get out again. It also relaxed the tiny arteries in his penis, so they filled up the spongy tissue of which Dwayne’s penis was mainly composed, so that the penis got hard and stiff—like a plugged up garden hose.

Me:

I shit you not, there was way more than what I included. I just got tired of typing it all. I was starting to have flashbacks to Ulysses with some of this shit. But there were even more dick measures and mentions of wangs slumbering like a salami.

But then we get to this:

“This is a very bad book you’re writing,” I said to myself behind my leaks.

“I know,” I said.

“You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did,” I said.

“I know,” I said.

And that’s when it all made sense to me and actually just made me a little sad.

Not as sad as he is (was) though. How about The Big Space Fuck:

In 1989, America staged the Big Space Fuck, which was a serious effort to make sure that human life would continue to exist somewhere in the Universe, since it certainly couldn’t continue much longer here on Earth.

ha. ha. ha.

Surprise! We’re still here!! Sorry to disappoint!

So. After being bludgeoned with poorly-disguised depression and moral superiority, I wasn’t going to bother with the appendices, etc. But I skimmed and I saw this:

I called attention to the fact that during the Dow protest at Harvard a couple of years back, the actual inventor of napalm was able to circulate through the crowd of protestors unmolested. I didn’t find the fact that he was unmolested reprehensible. I saw it as a moral curiosity, though I did not mean to suggest to students at Ann Arbor that the inventor of napalm should have been given one hell of a time. I wasn’t sure what I thought.

“I wasn’t sure what I thought.” Which is a perfectly fine, reasonable admission. But it also came across a bit empty. And also typical of the type—a lot of bitching but no real answers.

So at the end of it all, looking back it’s depressing all over again. Perhaps if I’d read just one story and hadn’t seen the repetition, it would have been fine. Or if I’d read this when I was younger, I probably would’ve loved it (except for the wealth redistribution bit, because even as an idiot teenager I wasn’t that naive) because from about 12-18 I was also depressed while thinking I was smarter and wittier than everyone else. So the tone of the book would’ve probably resonated with teenager-me.

I could see Vonnegut being a likable guy. I mean, I am a fan of dark humor, I get it. But there was also this weird filmy layer of hypocrisy that I couldn’t quite shake. And as I type that, I realize that shouldn’t color my reading experience as much as it does, that I shouldn’t be blurring the author and the work. But in something like this, where the author is so much the work, I think it’s hard not to.

Anyway, for whatever reason, I had high hopes going into this one (don’t ask me why; that’s my own damn fault) and was pretty disappointed.

Rating: 3 stars. Read one story, not all of them. Just ask for Wild Bob.

Oh! I did want to say that in Appendix B was the essay (?) “Wailing Shall Be in All Streets.” I found these few pages to be infinitely more powerful and genuinely moving than the entirety of Slaughterhouse Five.