F. Brett Cox is an assistant professor of English at Gordon College in Barnesville, Georgia In the following essay, Cox explains how Slaughterhouse-Five represents Vonnegut's efforts to come to terms with his personal war experiences. Other aspects of the novel are of secondary concern when compared to Vonnegut's anti-war theme.
In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., had already published five novels and two short story collections, but he was not especially well known or commercially successful. The publication of Slaughterhouse-Five in that year was an artistic and commercial breakthrough for Vonnegut. According to the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, one of the leading authorities on Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five was Vonnegut's "first bestseller. [It] catapulted him to sudden national fame, and brought his writing into serious intellectual esteem." Other critics have noted the novel as a summation of many of.....
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