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I first read this book as a fifth grader more than thirty years ago. The very fact that a ten year old could read it with no difficulty at all certainly highlights the best of Vonnegut -- his completely natural, clean, flowing colloquial style. Without question, this man is a great American writer in the tradition of Mark Twain. Just as Vonnegut is the modern Mark Twain, so Billy Pilgrim is like Huck Finn, only floating through time instead of floating down the Mississippi. The difficulty with this novel, however, is that unlike Huck Finn the protagonist never grows up, never takes responsibility for his actions, and never really learns anything of lasting value. Most reviewers seem to think that the message of SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE is that "war is wrong." This would parallel Twain's message in Huck Finn that slavery is wrong. Problem is, while Huck takes action and strikes out at slavery directly, by freeing Jim, Billy Pilgrim remains merely a passive spectator throughout his life. Vonnegut tries to excuse this with a lot of sci-fi gimmickry, about being "unstuck in time" but in the end what really comes across is not the evil of war but one man's personal surrender. There are other problems, more specific to Vonnegut's writing. The whole outer space adventure is fascinating at first, with Billy being a pampered prize exhibit in an intergalactic zoo, with a beautiful porn star as his mate. As a confused, lustful teenager I spent hours and hours fantasizing about this -- it's just what a very immature adolescent would think of as the ideal sexual situation. But now that I'm middle aged, I wonder about certain things. Vonnegut stresses over and over again that the tiny Tralfamadorian aliens think Billy is a "perfect male specimen." They don't know enough about the male physique to see he's a runty middle aged man. Fair enough. But then, why do they find a stunning porn star for him to mate with? Evidently they know a lot more about women's bodies than men? Why didn't they just pick up a male porn star so they could have a matched set? Then there's the obvious contempt Vonnegut has for women. In the Tralfamadorian sections, the aliens quiz Billy endlessly about life on earth, war, suffering, justice, free will, and so on. But nobody seems to think Montana Wildhack has anything to contribute to the discussion. And evidently there are no female aliens to ask her about the female perspective. The very fact that Vonnegut does this without thinking shows how narrow minded he really is. In the war sections, one notices that beneath the hippy-pleasing pacifist rhetoric there is a lot of callousness, and some strange examples of the double standard. It goes without saying, as many critics have noted, that Vonnegut refuses to discuss the bombing of Dresden in the context of Auschwitz. "So it goes" replaces more basic insights like, "what goes around, comes around," "you reap what you sew" and "you raise hell, you get hell." But there are more subtle manifestations of this. For example, Roland Weary, the vicious American soldier who picks on Billy, is particularized with great skill. His behavior is not just shrugged off with a "so it goes." Vonnegut describes it with passion. But what Vonnegut does not do is acknowledge the fact that there are SS and Gestapo agents all over Germany who make Roland Weary look like an amateur. The only Germans we ever see are noble, long-suffering and thoroughly civilized. Even as he condemns America for fighting an unjust war in Vietnam, Vonnegut implies that the German people are in no way to blame for fighting a far more unjust war against an entire continent of people. On the one hand, he insists that free will is an illusion, and no one is responsible for anything, and on the other he condemns American brutality as if we all are personally responsible for everything our government does. The fact is, as rich and rewarding as SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE is as a reading experience, it's not a book you can reread after thirty years and still respect as a classic. Vonnegut has the style and grace of Mark Twain, but not the clear moral vision.