Billy Pilgrim
During World War II, at the age of 23, Kurt Vonnegut was captured by the Germans and ended up imprisoned in the city of Dresden, “the Florence of the Elbe.” He was there when the Allies firebombed Dresden in a massive air attack that killed 130,000 people. Vonnegut survived with other prisoners holed up in a meat locker deep beneath …
Billy Pilgrim can’t stay in one place. Like Winston Niles Rumfoord before him, Pilgrim has become unstuck. But while Rumfoord bounces around in space, appearing in his sitting room on Earth for only a few minutes at regularly scheduled intervals, Pilgrim is smeared across time, living many moments and timelines at once. He is a baby, a middle-aged optometrist in …
Greetings, Mr. and Mrs. America, from Earth to Titan and past to present, and all the ships in space. Let’s go to Dresden Slaughterhouse, Building Five. <***> Nice to see Kilgore Trout, Eliot Rosewater, Howard W. Campbell, Prof. Rumfoord (of the Rhode Island Rumfoords), and all of the others who’ve joined us from Kurt Vonnegut’s earlier stories. Here’s Kurt himself, …
We know that Slaughterhouse-Five took a long time to write because Vonnegut tells us so: “I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time” (2). The first approach was documentary: “I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have …
The boss cleans up after, the boss is always the last one to turn out the lights and lock the door, which means the boss is the last one to look for spills and messes and things-out-of-place that will be a nuisance tomorrow. A good boss does that, anyway. She’d worked for jerks who left clean-up for others, went off …
An appraisal on select fan letters to Kurt Vonnegut, from guest writer Jake Huff
