A review by thefilmcake
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

4.0

First time I've read this one. My first thought was to wonder what the Slaughterhouse Five of the "War on Terror" will be. And when? I'm not as familiar with the literary scene as I am with film, so I'm at a complete loss as to how the recent military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have been depicted in fiction. I wonder what classics will be born from that mess. Is there a literary counterpart to The Hurt Locker already out there?

There are themes here that could very well be common to a book about the current soldier's experience. There's a fractious nature of memory and even something approaching mental illness that comes from experiencing such chaos. It's its on PTSD. And the book also hints at the multitude of memories that may be lost, or never even created, as a result of deaths due to war.

It also seems to say that if we do have free will and have some control (not that it says we do) that the world spins on without us such that it sure feels like we have no real control.