/lit/ - Literature

Vonnegut is as overrated as Bukowski.

It might help to understand Vonnegut's wartime experience. Unreal written weirdness abounds, yet there is quite a bit of real world context to this book.

If you choose to stick with it though to the end, see if you can locate the climax of the story. It will be better if you don't research this until you are finished reading. If your answer is different from what Vonnegut said, well, he makes a good point.

If you choose to give up without finishing, allow me to suggest Hocus Pocus as an alternative. It's wrapped in Vonnegut's satire and freakish writing style and all, while remaining a straightforward story that Slaughterhouse Five is not.

>>8561

Yeah, it may be that you just can't into Vonnegut. It's no big thing.

I like Vonnegut, but I can't read his novels sequentially. I average about one of his novels a year.

If you are not under the gun with some required reading what you could do is ignore him for a few years. Time changes tastes, you might be able to get into him later. For similar reasons I should make another attempt at the last five novels in the Narratives of Empire series by Vidal. While I usually like Vidal's writing, these bored me to distraction a decade ago.

>>8566

Maybe, but there's little in the text to suggest there were any jokes so far, not even bad ones. Nor is Vonnegut talking about what he did in the war, not even with some details changed, like Céline.

>>8560

It's funny, I was looking around the Internet trying to find what he said about the climax and all I could find were your typical book summary "the climax occurs at the firebombing of Dresden." So I'm getting angry and then I remember that he spells it out at the beginning of the book. Was it not included in earlier editions? I have the ubiquitous Dell reprint from the 90's.