Slaughterhouse-Five

                                           by

                      Kurt Vonnegut

   

                             100 Most Challenged Books

Vonnegut, K. (1996). Slaughterhouse-five.

New York, NY: RosettaBooks, LLC.

Have you ever known someone who channel-surfs?  They take the remote control to the T.V. and just keep hitting buttons to skip from one station to another.  They have an incurably itchy remote trigger finger and an attention span of .02 seconds.  I’ll bet Kurt Vonnegut was one of those folks.

           

Reading his novel Slaughterhouse-Five is a lot like watching Kurt channel surf back and forth between television shows that flash by so quickly it’s hard to tell what they are.  They blur into one collage that somehow makes up a unified literary whole.  And along the way, a boy named Billy makes three new friends:  Hogan, Donna and Rod.

           

“Hogan’s Heroes” gets a new recruit when the Slaughterhouse-Five’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, joins the army, gets captured by the Nazis, is imprisoned in a meat locker that provides the book’s title, and survives the bombing of Dresden.  

Donna Reed gets a new neighbor when Billy returns from the war, gets married, and settles down into the perfect post-war domestic life. 

Then Rod Serling gets a new visitor to “The Twilight Zone” when Billy remembers being captured by aliens.

But this lovely scene of literary channel surfing resulted in a wipeout when Kurt introduced into his novel such un-Donna-Reed-like items as profanity, sex and homosexuality.  Tisk-tisk.  Naughty-naughty.   Those made school districts remove Slaughterhouse-Five from classes and libraries, until the Supreme Court stopped such censorship.  Thank heavens the last T.V. show Kurt apparently settled on was Judge Judy.      

 

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