In the following essay, Hartshorne examines the novels Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse V as fables that may shed light on cultural and political phenomena of the 1960s.

Slaughterhouse-Five from the start suggested the possibility that Vonnegut had written the crucial personal experiences out of his system, and I think that this is one reason we have all tended to wait with particular interest, and perhaps a little uncertainty, for what would subsequently come from him. In prefacing [Happy Birthday, Wanda June], Vonnegut declared that he was through with novels and with characters who were "spooks"…. The end appeared at hand, if one dared take the autho...

[A] comparison between Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse V offers interesting insights into the shift in attitudes, the change in political culture, and the transition in the general cultural atmosphere [during the decade of the sixties]. The two books are particularly suited for comparison because there are many points of similarity between them. To mention only the most obvious, both deal with World War II, both assert a strongly antiwar position, both are highly critical of other features of modern life, both ...

Vonnegut has taken great care to date precisely various incidents and stages in the life of Billy Pilgrim [in Slaughterhouse-Five] and just as much care to date the appearances and intrusions of the narrator, who insists on at least a partial identification with Billy and becomes himself a character in the novel. Ultimately this observation leads to the realization that imbedded in the telegraphic, schizophrenic manner of the tale is a considerably detailed biography of Billy Pilgrim and that time-travel, t...

In the Autumn of 1973, English teacher Bruce Severy ordered Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five for use in one of his classes in Drake, North Dakota. On 7 November, on orders from the Board of Education, Mrs. Sheldon Summers, school custodian, burned 32 copies of the book because the Board members had decided that it was pornographic. After reading a brief article in the New York Times on the incident (16 November 1973), Vonnegut wrote to Charles McCarthy (head of the Drake Board of Education). His l...

Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade is a book that hasn't yet been written. Vonnegut is so obsessed, so horrified by his subject that he quite literally cannot approach it, can only hint at it, surrounding it with semicomic non sequiturs, a kind of toned-down Catch-22. The subject is the firebombing of Dresden. But this subject is not the content of this novel. The novel is about any number of other things, and it is also about Vonnegut's failure to write the novel, his sense ...