Slaughterhouse-Five Background

Genre: Genre-Bending

Slaughterhouse-Five is a postmodern, genre-bending novel that takes a satirical and skeptical tone, and combines various elements, such as science fiction, semi-historical fiction, semi-autobiography, and war fiction. Vonnegut himself describes his novel as “jumbled and jangled” as, in the end, “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” Slaughterhouse-Five, similar to the Tralfamadorian novels of Vonnegut, intends to have “no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects,” and is marked by its fragmented narrative.

Slaughterhouse-Five can be easily classified as science fiction where the protagonist, Billy, constantly time-travels and also gets abducted by aliens; however, unlike other traditional science fiction novels, it does not have a strong plotline. At parts, Vonnegut’s autobiography and incidents of World War II take precedence. The author provides factual details from his own experience of the Allied bombing on the city of Dresden, making the novel semi-historical. The novel also fits into the genre of war fiction but true to Vonnegut’s style, it departs from the traditional characteristics of a war novel. It lacks the narrative of battlefields and together with the absence of the emergence of a hero, Vonnegut dismantles the convention of romanticizing wars. The novel ultimately emerges as an anti-war novel.