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...