Roland, who is living for the glory of being a veteran forms a counterpoint to Billy, who just wants to escape this war. Especially in the prisoner camp with the British soldiers, it becomes apparent that most of the soldiers are disillusioned with the war, or have come to realize the absurd cost of it. He then lives as a prisoner of war, where the conditions are harsh and Roland dies from gangrene and entrusts his revenge to a fellow inmate, and then they are all moved into the camp where they are keeping British soldiers, and finally they are moved to Dresden to work.īilly, being a not-ideal soldier candidate, with his leaner physique and disinterest in the glory, makes for a good PoV to see the war through. Billy is initially a part of a scout group, along with Roland and two others the former two get captured and the other two get killed. Now, the book is an anti-war themed story about a WWII veteran, Billy, who has the ability to time travel, which is why this book works on a non-linear timeline, with Billy slipping in and out of his present, going to the future or to the past, and it mainly centers around his time in the military, and the Dresden bombing. Which is why, seeing a graphic novel adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five, I was interested, simply because sometimes medium matters.

Now, generally I am not inclined to read classic novels simply because I find prose styles of these quite different from modern styles in that they aren’t able to sufficiently engage me in the text. Warnings: wartime, massacre, PTSD, animal cruelty, mentions of Holocaust The first-ever graphic novel adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great anti-war books.Īn American classic and one of the world’s seminal antiwar books, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is faithfully presented in graphic novel form for the first time from Eisner Award-winning writer Ryan North (How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler) and Eisner Award-nominated artist Albert Monteys (Universe!).īilly Pilgrim’s journey is at once a farcical look at the horror and tragedy of war where children are placed on the frontlines and die (so it goes), and a moving examination of what it means to be fallibly human. Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children’s Crusade by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Slaughterhouse five by kurt vonnegut jr