I just finished Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. I know, I know… I was supposed to have read that in the 3rd grade, or the day I was born, for all the ravings about it and how it is a must-read ‘classic.’

I really enjoyed it. Which is a surprise to me and I’ll tell you why.

I normally enjoy stories with a cohesive story. I normally don’t enjoy stories where the author jumps around a lot, going into seemingly random moments according to whimsy. By all measures, Slaughterhouse Five shouldn’t be a book I enjoyed. There are a couple reasons why such a self-indulgent piece of work managed to hold up for me.

One of them is that Vonnegut chose interesting moments for his hero Billy Pilgrim to jump around within. Although the character is time traveling throughout the multitude of moments in his life, each of those moments seems to have a point, and if not a point, then at least a kind of poignance. In that sense it reads almost like a memoir, which it is more or less the fictive version of, as many of the events in Slaughterhouse come from Vonnegut’s own experiences in World War II and the bombing of Dresden. There are many interesting, amusing, wistful, and even touching moments.

These moments are also given a context. For fun, Vonnegut has the hero abducted by aliens who have no understanding of the human concept of time. When forced to explain their perception of time to the hero Billy Pilgrim, they do not see time as necessarily a linear sequence, one event following another. They see life as a large collection of events, each moment immortal in its own way. If a person dies, it is nothing to be sad about, because they are alive in a ‘past moment’ forever.

What I love about this is it creates a kind of philosophical dressing to complement the fact that the story jumps all over the place to various moments in Billy Pilgrim’s life. The nonsensical structure actually follows the logic of it’s own mythmaking–that the alien race understands time the exact way that Billy Pilgrim is traveling through it. This lends a logical beauty to the entire work which it would not have without the aliens’ concept of time.

The second element is that Slaughterhouse is written beautifully. It is laced with vivid metaphors throughout, and Vonnegut’s tact for description is exceptional. Note my use of the word exceptional. He is the exception for a work of this nature. Vonnegut’s ability to describe even the ordinary in an extraordinary way makes it fun to go along with whatever he’s explaining. He could be describing the grass grow or the paint peel, and I’m sure in its Vonnegut style it would be interesting. Most writers do not have that skill, or have not cultivated it to the same degree that Vonnegut has, for whatever reason.

Normally I wouldn’t enjoy this kind of self-indulgent work. And I suspect if it had been written by any other author, the masses wouldn’t have enjoyed it either. There is a lesson to be learned here. If you’re going to be self-indulgent, and whisk your story throughout whimsical flights of fancy, make sure you know what you’re doing. If your story isn’t much of a story in the traditional sense, at least make sure the audience has fun, and that you’ll reward them for putting up with your nostalgia and whatever else by making the moments interesting, and the descriptions vivid.

Tread carefully, for this brand of self-indulgence is often not executed well by amateurs.