Slaughterhouse Five

So I finished my first Vonnegut book. I was pretty excited. The book that I read was Slaughterhouse  Five which is a pretty well known book. I have heard of it, but it didn’t really seem like it would interest me much but I have to say it wasn’t half bad. My friend was reading it, and he finished it fairly quickly and told m about it and it sounded really trippy. He suggested that I read it, and since everyone has, I thought what the heck, ill try a little conformity. The book starts off with Vonnegut talking, which is pretty much the whole book, because he is narrating, but he is talking about how this book will be bad, and he knows it, he expects it. Then he goes into talking about how it is an anti-war book and how ridiculous it is to write an anti-war book because as long as there is life there will be war, which indeed is a wise statement. He seems to view war and not a necessary evil, but one that will always exist, and I can’t say that I can argue with that. But then he moves on into the book and he talks about how he meets up with his old war buddy and they are talking and sort of reminiscing to try and get some ideas for his book but they can’t really think of anything to talk about because it has been so long. I don’t know that was kinda the boring part. But then it gets into the good stuff and he starts talking about how he was abducted by aliens and how he was taken to their planet as an animal on display. These aliens talk to him though and they ask him various questions and then they start talking about themselves. They talk about how on their planet they don’t feel sad when one of them dies because they are supposed to. Everything has already happens, and every time it happens the same way. If you do something, that is how you were supposed to do it. There are all these different dimensions i guess, and you can go to a different anytime you want and see whatever you want. It’s okay if someone dies, because they are really still alive, only in another time. I think this thinking makes sense, and although it may not be true, I wouldn’t be opposed to trying it. So Vonnegut pretty much spends the whole book going back to different times where he learned different things, and I am not really sure why it is an anti-war book, but regardless, it makes you think, and it is a really short book so I would recommend reading it. I think one of my favorite parts in the whole book is when Vonnegut is on the alien planet and he the aliens who are observing him get to ask him some questions. Vonnegut is responding to the questions and he thinks its a really smart answer, but in fact he says something really stupid and all the aliens are upset. He said something about how the world ends and he wished he could know or something, and all the aliens think he is retarded because they know how the world ends. Vonnegut asks how and they say that they blow it up because they were testing some new jet fuel. Vonngeut is like, well if you know, then why don’t you stop it and the aliens are all like, its already happened, it will always happen, you can’t change it. I just think that that is a cool way to look at life.