War & Peace Quote by Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut opens Slaughterhouse-Five by yanking the rug out from under the idea that war can be cleanly narrated. "All this happened, more or less" is a wink and a warning: memory is unreliable, storytelling is manipulative, and the demand for a tidy, morally legible account is itself part of the problem. The follow-up - "The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true" - tightens the screw. He’s not claiming authority; he’s admitting distortion while insisting on the one thing that shouldn’t be up for debate: the brutality was real.

The intent is twofold. First, Vonnegut signals that the book will mix the documentary with the bizarre (time travel, aliens, fractured chronology) without pretending those flourishes are just entertainment. They are his way of representing trauma: repetitive, disordered, impossible to file into a heroic arc. Second, he undercuts the reader’s appetite for authenticity. Even when the facts are "true", the meaning we extract from them is unstable, because war overwhelms the usual tools - plot, causality, character growth.

Context matters: Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden as a POW, an experience that arrived in American culture wrapped in competing narratives - strategic necessity, moral catastrophe, Cold War propaganda. His hedging language ("more or less", "pretty much") mimics how societies soften atrocity with euphemism, then turns that softness into an accusation. The irony lands because it’s defensive and bitter at once: if you want a neat war story, you’re already complicit in the lie.