Slaughterhouse-Five

There’s something charmingly disconcerting about the Vonnegut style of writing, from Kurt’s Slaughterhouse-Five to Mark’s The Eden Express. Both Vonneguts write with a unswayed tenor of bleakness mixed with dark humor, to make their favorite topics (war, insanity, study of humanity) more palatable. Slaughterhouse-Five is particularly adept at balancing humor and candor in its portrayal of enlisting children in war efforts, with all the absurdity this entails (e.g., lack of fully-developed prefrontal cortices).