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Rating: Kurt Vonnegut, an American of four generations but of German origin, was twenty-two years old when he participated in the Second World War as an infantry soldier in the ranks of the US army. Captured during the Battle of the Bulge, he found himself involved in the bombing of Dresden on February 13, 1945. Buried under the rubble of Slaughterhouse-Five, he witnessed a military action completely useless for strategic purposes, which, using only conventional weapons, razed the "Florence of the Elbe" to the ground, resulting in approximately 135,000 victims (in Hiroshima, the atomic bomb killed 71,379 people).
The entire literary work of Kurt Vonnegut arises from the trauma of Dresden. The miracle of surviving death and the impression of having witnessed an apocalyptic event give rise to a unique and lucid perspective. The sad daily life of man is dotted with mishaps, escalations of violence, disasters, and massacres; these errors are the fruit of progress that, driven by the law of the market and the greed for profit at any cost, drains resources and strength from activities more worthy of consideration. The engine of history is fueled by the human madness of unscrupulous military, opportunistic politicians, war criminals (those whom, in an interview, he defined as psychopathic personalities or PPs who occupy important seats as if they were leaders and yet are sick people who, unlike normal people, are incapable of worrying about the consequences of their acts) while the rest of humanity, with its baggage of prejudices, limitation and superficiality, indifference and resignation to the world's evils, stands by watching. And Vonnegut has no doubt. Even if he could start over, man would make the same stupid mistakes.
STORY: Everyone on Mars comes from Earth. They thought they would be better off on Mars. No one can remember what was so bad on Earth.
This results in an obsessive and tenacious need for dissemination that tormented Vonnegut until the definitive publication of "Slaughterhouse-Five" more than twenty years after his return home. With a stylistic choice that uses the comic, the absurd, the tragicomic to nullify any possible rhetoric of the heroic, any poetic and romantic vision of war; with a balance between a life that is all too normal, that of his alter ego Billy Pilgrim, burdened with the weight of terrible memories lived as an eternal present, and alternating with a journey in space and the experience of being the representative of the human race in the science fiction zoo of Tralfamadore, where he is displayed alongside porn film star Montana Wildhack; in a new temporal dimension made of a myriad of disconnected fragments inspired by the Tralfamadorian vision of time where "the Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just as we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and look at any moment that interests them [...] When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad shape in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments."
All the while keeping in mind Billy's prayer ("People would be surprised if they knew how many things in this world are due to prayers")
GOD GRANT ME
THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT
THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE,
THE COURAGE
TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN
AND THE WISDOM
TO KNOW
THE DIFFERENCE.
"Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future...maybe that was why every so often, without any apparent reason, he would start crying?"
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