Schöpp, Joseph C. "Slaughterhouse-Five: The Struggle with a Form that Fails." Amerikastudien/American Studies. 28.3, 1983. 335-45.

Posits Slaughterhouse- Five as an anti-historical novel. The novel’s shortcomings as a historical novel reflect the shortcomings of the novel’s history. For Schopp the form parallels the context. Useful to consider the novel as antiwar for the same reasons.

“Nothing can be learned from the past since it no longer exists; nothing can influence and shape the future since it is equally nonexistent. It is an inhumane world which is evoked in Slaughterhouse-Five, a world which, perhaps, adequately expresses the inhumanities of Dresden, Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Hiroshima where not only millions of men died but also the idea of man with his beliefs and hopes” (Schopp 344).

“History and fiction proved to be insufficient modes of representation where man had so utterly failed. The traditional concept of a story as a sequential narrative with a ‘consequential significance,’ it seemed, had been invalidated by the crude and brutal facts of reality” (Schopp 336).

“Books like Dumas’ The Three Musketeers or Robin Moore’s The Green Berets, which the novel mentions on several occasions, with their swashbuckling heroes, their cloak-and-dagger scenario, dilating upon ‘piety and heroism,’ portraying war’ in the most glowing and impassioned hues’ (39), perfect scripts and role models for ‘Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men’ (17), prove to be hopelessly antiquated. Even Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (69ff.), a realistic piece of war fiction in which the protagonist, awakening from his childhood dreams of gallant heroism, matures and is initiated into the complexities of life on the battlefields of the Civil War, fails as a model. Dresden rules out maturation” (Schopp 338).