25 Discussion Questions for Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (With Analysis) | Chapterly Blog
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the most original and influential anti-war novels ever written. Slaughterhouse-Five discussion questions push readers to grapple with the novel's unconventional treatment of trauma, its argument about the nature of time and free will, and its darkly comic insistence that the only sane response to the insanity of war may be to say "So it goes." Whether you are in a college literature course, a contemporary fiction book club, or studying American literature, these questions will produce a discussion as strange and rewarding as the novel itself. Published in 1969, the novel draws on Vonnegut's own experience as a prisoner of war who survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945. The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, becomes "unstuck in time" and experiences his life in a non-chronological jumble — moving between his war years, his suburban postwar existence, and his time as a captive on the planet Tralfamadore. The novel is both autobiography and science fiction, both comedy and tragedy. These 25 questions are organized by theme. Slaughterhouse-Five Discussion Questions: War and Violence Vonnegut spent over twenty years trying to write his Dresden novel, and the book he finally produced is as much about the impossibility...