Before you begin reading the novel

Before undertaking the novel, it makes sense to learn a little about the author. Try this:

Slaughterhouse-Five was one of my favorite reads of all time and one which influenced my overall politics and views of war. I loved the movie as well. And this new graphic novel treatment adds another interesting and unique take on the material. I only wish it had been 30 or 40 pages longer. Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969) is a satirical novel by Kurt Vonnegut about World War II experiences and journeys through time of a chaplain's assistant named Billy Pilgrim.It is generally recognized as Vonnegut's most influential and popular work. 1 Vonnegut's use of the firebombing of Dresden as a central event makes the novel semi.

biographical notes at TheFreeDictionary.com: lots of explanatory links to consult as needed

The novel is centered around the time-travel experiences of the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, who is based on, but not to be taken as identical with, Vonnegut himself. Two intense personal experiences that Vonnegut reworks into Billy Pilgrim's life are his capture by the Germans in the World War IIBattle of the Bulge and his witnessing of thefirebombing of Dresden, where he had been taken as a POW.

You might want to get acquainted with these events before you embark on the novel. The links above are a good place to start. Eventually you may want to learn more.

You might find interesting Lothar Metzger's eyewitness account of the Dresden firebombing. Some veterans' reactions to the event are featured at the Annenberg/CPB History of World War II site at Learner.org. And, of course, a simple Google search on the word pair Dresden firebombing will turn up lots of material.
As for the Battle of the Bulge, there is a lot of material on the web if you're interested in learning more. A Google search on the phrase will turn up a host of scholarly and personal accounts. One of the best sites for a beginner would be the one on the film PBS did on the Battle of the Bulge as part of its American Experience Series

Issues to be mindful of as you read the novel

(1) Key to the novel is the opening section in which, apparently, the author speaks in his own voice about a visit he made to talk with an old war buddy Barnard V. O'Hare as he was completing the manuscript for the novel. It explains how the novel came to be outfitted with its subtitle ('OrThe Children's Crusade |A Duty-Dance with Death') and how it came to be dedicated to O'Hare's wife. This section makes explicit the author's purpose in writing the novel, as well as his skepticism about whether there is any hope it might contribute to its intended effect.

[The chapter itself provides you with the essential information you need to understand this allusion. But, hey, one reason to read is to discover windows upon history you might want to explore one day. Just in case, I've cooked up a page with links to information on The Children's Crusade, some of which you might be moved to explore.]
A striking fact about the film is that it dispenses with this 'frame' narrative.

(2) As you read the novel, be alert for the signs it posts as to what episode the author decides to cast in the role of the climax of the work.

How (if it does) does this decision accord with the announced purpose of the novel as a whole?
The film settles upon a different episode as its climactic moment. How does this affect a viewer's conception of the overall theme of the film?

(3) Similarly, you'll want to contrast the way Vonnegut chooses to conclude his novel with the way George Roy Hill chooses to conclude the film.

How do these choices affect the sense we make of these works as a whole?

(4) Here is something that might help to bring these three formal features into thematic focus:

Billy Pilgrim's view of history is what he takes from the Trafalmadorians. This view is resolutely deterministic. (See how this is so?)
As such, it appears inconsistent with the frame narrative's indication of Vonnegut's purpose in writing the novel. (Can you see how this is so?)
One way to resolve this apparent contradiction is to interpret Billy Pilgrim's time travel as hallucinatory, and his Trafalmadorian beliefs about history as a refuge, by a sensitive human being, from on the one hand the terror and on the other hand the spirit-stultifying boredom of the actual history that he has lived through, which his sensibility finds unbearable. A measure, in other words, of the horrific inhumanity of modern war, and of the empty materialism of modern life, is (on this interpretation) that it is capable of driving a decent human being into protective madness. At the same time, such a reading leaves history open to change by deliberate human action, for example, the appeal by an individual of conscience to other individuals of conscience who, through concerted action, might be able to prevent the recurrence of war and to invent a more humane social life than we see in middle-class Ilium.
Given the differences just pointed to between the novel and the film, the question arises: does the film leave its viewers with a conviction that history is open to human agency? Or does it leave us with the sense that nothing can be done to prevent a future that is in effect 'already written,' as the Trafalmadorians hold? Is the sane human response to the human condition social action? Or is it the aesthetic contemplation of 'happy moments' as a mode of amnesia towards the unavoidable ugliness of the rest of what is?
For more on these issues, see the agenda of curiosity set out in Item (6), below.

(5) Or consider the prayer Billy has framed on his office wall in his optometry practice. (This is in section 12 of Chapter 3: p. 77 in the Delta trade paperback edition; p. 60 in the Dell mass paperback edition.) Note that it breaks down into 4 parts, which we'll emphasize here by changing the formatting:

God grant me
the serenity | to accept | the things I cannot change,
courage | to change | the things I can, and
the wisdom | always to tell the difference

Several facets of this wish are worthy of note:
1. Although a place seems to be made for human agency (item 3 is about making changes), the ultimate emphasis even here is on the passivity of the petitioner: he or she is powerless, in himself/herself, to muster the three necessities (including the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish what is changeable from what is not): it's all up to God, on whose decision the petitioner's abilities are dependent, and must wait. (2, 3 and 4 are all governed by 1.)
2. Ultimately, the value of both serenity (in resignation) and courage (in opposition) depend on wisdom: if we confuse what we cannot change with what we can -- mistaking what we can change for what we can't, or what we cannot change for what we can -- our serenity or courage is misplaced.
3. The framework in which change, if possible, is imagined is implicitly individual: from the way the prayer is phrased, we would suppose that the change that concerns us is what the particular single person who utters the prayer is able to accomplish by his own efforts.
So some key issues this little pop-prayer brings to the table are
1. What do the Trafalmadorians, and Billy, consider to be changeable and what do they consider to not be changeable? (Can you cite the evidence?)
2. What does Vonnegut presumably consider to be changeable and what does he presumably consider not to be changeable? (Can you cite the evidence?)
3. What place, if any, does concerted action (social co-operation, collective effort) have in effecting significant change in the social, historical domain -- for example, in restraining war, or in devising ways of life that are humanly fulfilling, instead of trivial and mechanical (for example, devoted to consumption of commodities and to social climbing [getting

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