one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between
all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so
that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is
beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle,
no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love
in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at
one time.”
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When you come upon this passage in the novel, you may feel a shock
of recognition. It sounds a lot like the very book you’re reading, and
you realize that the author is describing the effect he wants his
novel to have.
The most striking aspect of the style of Slaughterhouse-Five is
the fact that the text is made up of clumps of paragraphs, each
clump set off by extra space before and after it. A few of the
clumps are only one sentence long. Some are as long as a page and a
half. Each of them makes a simple statement or relates an incident
or situation. Thus the novel is said to be written in an anecdotal
style: the book is a collection of brief incidents, and the effect
of each one depends on how the author tells it.
Vonnegut generally uses short, simple sentences that manage to say a
great deal in a few words. “Three inoffensive bangs came from far
away.” The report seems an innocent one until you find out that the
scouts have just been shot. The contrast between the “inoffensive”
sound and its deadly meaning provides a startling effect.
There is irony too in that “inoffensive,” for what is inoffensive to
one person’s ears is fatally offensive to another person’s life. Irony
is a form of humor that occurs when a seemingly straightforward
statement or situation actually means its opposite. Irony occurs again
and again in the incidents Vonnegut describes. It is ironic that,
for all that the Bible represents as a statement of ethics, a
soldier carries a bullet-proof Bible sheathed in steel. There is irony
in a former hobo’s telling Billy- inside a boxcar prison that could be
taking them to their death- “I been in worse places than this. This
ain’t so bad.” And because Dresden was an “open city” during most of
the war, it was full of refugees who had fled there for safety. Almost
all of them died in the bombing. That is ironic.
Another kind of humor that the author relies on heavily is satire, a
form of ridicule that uses mockery and exaggeration to expose the
foolishness or evil of its subject. Professor Rumfoord is a
satirical portrait of the all-American male ideal. And, almost every
description of a Kilgore Trout novel satirizes modern life in some
way. A killer robot becomes popular only after his bad breath is
cleared up (advertising values), or a money tree is fertilized by
the dead bodies of those who killed each other to get its “fruit”
(material values).
Vonnegut has a powerful gift for tangy imagery. He describes Billy
as a filthy flamingo and a broken kite, the Russian prisoner as “a
ragbag with a round, flat face that glowed like a radium dial.”
Sometimes his images border on the tasteless: an antitank gun
makes “a ripping sound like the zipper on the fly of God Almighty.”
But Vonnegut also creates images of almost heart-breaking
tenderness, as in the picture of Edgar Derby bursting into tears
when Billy feeds him a spoonful of malt syrup.
Vonnegut layers his storytelling with allusions (references) to
historical events. He evokes the Children’s Crusade in order to draw a
parallel between the “babies” he and O’Hare were in World War II and
the thirteenth-century religious expedition in which European children
were sent off to conquer the Holy Land. He refers to works of
literature: the novels of the French Nazi sympathizer Celine, the
medieval heroic epic poem The Song of Roland, and the Bible. He
paraphrases the Sodom and Gomorrah story from Genesis and mentions
Jesus occasionally. These allusions deepen our understanding and
appreciation of Billy’s story by suggesting historical and literary
parallels to the personal events in his life.
POINT OF VIEW
-
In Chapter 1 (and in portions of Chapter 10) the author speaks to
you directly in the first person about the difficult time he had
writing his book. The rest of the book is Billy Pilgrim’s story told
by a third-person narrator.
Because an outside narrator is telling Billy’s story, you learn
not only what Billy is doing and thinking at any time but what the
other characters are up to and what’s on their minds. Because Vonnegut
explains, in his first-person appearances as the writer-narrator, that
his own experiences in Dresden were the inspiration for
Slaughterhouse-Five, many readers assume that both the third-person
narrator and Billy Pilgrim represent the author. In this view, the
author is looking at the events of his own life- past, present, and
future- and trying to make some sense out of them the same way that
Billy is trying to order the events of his own life.
On several occasions the author actually reminds you directly
that, while he’s telling Billy’s story, he- Kurt Vonnegut- was
there, too. You’re reading about events that are based on the author’s
experience as a POW in Dresden. These interruptions also warn you that
you’re being told a story by a much older man, someone with a quite
different outlook on life from that of the “baby” who went to Dresden.
The flexible perspective of the narration allows Vonnegut to comment
frequently on the action, on life, and on writing itself.
FORM AND STRUCTURE
-
As explained in Chapter 5 of Slaughterhouse-Five, Tralfamadorians
read the clumps of symbols, or messages, that make up their books
all at once. But human beings must read the clumps of paragraphs
that make up Slaughterhouse-Five one by one, and the order in which the author has set them out for you provides the structure of the
novel.
Vonnegut starts with a chapter of introduction or prologue in
which he tells his own story of writing his “famous book about
Dresden.”
The rest of the book, Chapters 2 through 10, tells Billy Pilgrim’s
story. Vonnegut begins this narrative with a short, factual history of
Billy’s life to the present in 1968. You soon discover why he does
this: in the pages that follow, Billy’s adventures are not related
entirely in chronological order, and that little outline history in
the early pages of Chapter 2 lets you read on without having to puzzle
over the proper sequence of events.
The portion of Billy Pilgrim’s history that is presented
chronologically is the six months from December 1944 to May 1945, when Billy was a soldier and then a POW in Europe. This period is by far
the most important in Billy’s life, and the novel is about how Billy
comes to terms with what he saw and heard and did in those six months.
When Billy finally works it all out in his mind, he is free, the
author has finished his Dresden book, and the novel has ended.
Therefore the basic structure of Slaughterhouse-Five is determined
by the sequence of events Billy experienced in the final months of
World War II. Into this sequence Billy fits all the other happenings
of his life. He even believes that he first “came unstuck in time”
in the Luxembourg forest in 1944, though the narrator seems to suggest
that this weird phenomenon was actually the result of the brain damage
Billy sustained in the plane crash in 1968.
Because Billy is reinventing his life by reorganizing his memories
and adding his fantasies, it’s important that you keep your bearings
as you follow Billy’s own rearrangement of his history. For this you
may find helpful the following chronological sequence of the important
events in Billy’s life.
-
1922 Billy born in Ilium, New York.
-
1941 America enters World War II.
-
1944 Billy, now a soldier, captured by Germans in the Battle
of the Bulge. He spends Christmas on a POW train headed
for Czechoslovakia.
-
1945 Billy arrives in Dresden, is put to work in a factory, is
January housed in Slaughterhouse-Five.
-
1945 Dresden fire-bombed by the Allies. POWs and guards survive
February in an underground locker and begin to dig bodies out of
the rubble the next day.
-
1945 War ends in Europe and POWs are released. Billy goes home
May to Ilium.
-
1948 Billy recovers from a nervous breakdown, marries Valencia
Merble, fathers Robert and Barbara. The optometry
business in Ilium prospers.
-
1967 Barbara marries. Billy kidnapped the same night and taken
to Tralfamadore, where he is exhibited in a zoo and
mated with Montana Wildhack.
-
1968 Billy survives plane crash in Vermont. Valencia dies while
Billy is recovering. Billy goes to New York City to tell
about the Tralfamadorians.
-
1976 Billy assassinated in Chicago after speaking on flying
saucers and time.
THE STORY
-
Vonnegut’s method of storytelling sometimes makes it difficult to
follow him or to see his point in a welter of apparently unrelated
anecdotes. To help you along, the discussion of each chapter in this
section begins with a brief overview of the chapter’s structure.
CHAPTER 1
-
STRUCTURE: The string of anecdotes that lead up to Vonnegut’s
visit with the O’Hares all describe problems related to writing his
“famous book about Dresden.” After his visit to the O’Hares, things
start going well for him, and he is able to write the book. In the
last part of the chapter Vonnegut finds solutions to (or at least ways
around) his writing problems.
Let’s look at some of those problems the author complains about.
THE WORDS JUST WON’T COME. Although he thought it would be easy to
write about Dresden- “all I would have to do would be to report what I
had seen”- he just can’t seem to get started. Vonnegut may be afraid
that he has used up his talent, or somehow ruined it (the off-color
limerick suggests this idea), perhaps by writing so much science
fiction instead of “saving himself” for his “great book about
Dresden.”
EVERY TIME HE STARTS THE BOOK, HE ENDS UP GOING IN CIRCLES. The
Yon Yonson poem illustrates this dilemma. Once you start it, you go
around and around forever.
ANOTHER ANTIWAR BOOK WOULD BE POINTLESS. This problem is clearly
stated in the conversation Vonnegut has with the movie director. Books
don’t stop wars because wars are as unstoppable as glaciers are.
WRITING ISN’T THE NOBLE PROFESSION EVERYONE THINKS IT IS. Vonnegut
calls himself a “trafficker in climaxes and thrills and
characterization and wonderful dialogue and suspense and
confrontations.” He goes on to describe a diagram he made that reduces
every human being to a line of color and makes the destruction of
Dresden nothing but a brilliant stripe of orange. What was once an
atrocity has now become something abstract and “pretty.”
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—————————————————————–
NOTE: PARALLEL IMAGES This chapter is full of images that resurface
in altered form later in the book. In Chapter 4, for example, the
Tralfamadorians use the metaphor of bugs trapped in amber to
describe human beings caught in time. This image parallels the idea of
characters “trapped” in a diagram for a story. The “idiotic
Englishman” with his absurd souvenir turns up again in the guise of
Roland Weary displaying his weapons to Billy (Chapter 2) and later
(Chapter 6) as Billy himself, showing his “treasures” to the Dresden
surgeon. In a way the Englishman is also like Vonnegut trying to
interest O’Hare in his Dresden story. Vonnegut is not only
struggling with writing problems here, he is generating material
that he will rework into Billy’s story.
—————————————————————–
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WRITING WON’T HELP VONNEGUT FIND MEANING IN HIS LIFE. Vonnegut isn’t
very happy with himself. He’s getting old, he’s killing himself with
alcohol and cigarettes, he and his wife don’t communicate any more.
Maybe life itself is a rut he fell into: before he knew it he’s “an
old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls.”
WRITING DEHUMANIZES THE WRITER. The gruesome story of the
veteran’s being killed by an elevator points up this problem. Nancy
does to the veteran the same thing that Vonnegut wants to do with
Edgar Derby- she dehumanizes him by making him a character in a story.
This in turn dehumanizes her, making her unable to feel anything for
the suffering of others. Vonnegut fears that even if he does finish
his Dresden book, the very act of constructing a good story will
turn him into a callous creep.
-
—————————————————————–
NOTE: MACHINE IMAGERY One of Vonnegut’s favorite themes is the
uneasy relationship between man and machines, and this anecdote is
shot through with machine imagery. it’s even possible to see the
News Bureau as being run by its machines. And it’s ironic that the
veteran is killed by getting his hand caught in an iron gate that is
imitating life forms- iron ivy, iron twigs, iron lovebirds. Keep an
eye out for other instances of such imagery.
—————————————————————–
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WHAT CAN YOU SAY ABOUT A MASSACRE? The cocktail party anecdote,
where Vonnegut hears about the death camps, illustrates another
problem. How do you respond when someone tells you these ghastly
stories? “Oh, my God” doesn’t say very much, does it? That’s
Vonnegut’s point.
These problems frustrated Vonnegut for twenty-three years, until
he visited the O’Hares. You should look at this anecdote in some
detail. He begins by describing the trip from Cape Cod as seen through
the eyes of two little girls, his daughter and her friend. To them the
world is full of strange sights, including rivers and waterfalls to
stop and wonder at. The peaceful scene contrasts sharply with the
purpose of the trip, which is to reminisce about the war- as if that
time of destruction and death were “the good old days.”
O’Hare is embarrassed about reminiscing, and his wife Mary seems
intent on keeping him that way. She bangs ice trays, moves
furniture, and mutters to herself. When she finally tells Vonnegut off
he too is embarrassed because he realizes he’s been thinking and
acting like a fool about his “famous book on Dresden.”
-
—————————————————————–
NOTE: EMBARRASSMENT Doesn’t every anecdote in this chapter deal
with embarrassment? Vonnegut has consistently portrayed himself as a
fool: a grown man playing with crayons, an “idiotic Englishman” with
his stupid souvenir, an “old fart” who talks to his dog, a green
reporter trying to act tough. The point is that he doesn’t realize how
embarrassing his actions have been until he encounters Mary O’Hare.
Perhaps Vonnegut is saying that embarrassment, not horror, is the
proper way to feel about atrocities committed in war. It is those
people who are not embarrassed who are dangerous. They are the ones
who come up with the kind of thinking that says, “We have to bomb
Dresden so we can end the war sooner.”
—————————————————————–
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Vonnegut also has a tangible breakthrough while visiting the
O’Hares: he conceives the idea of calling his book “The Children’s
Crusade.” Coming up with a title may help a writer to crystallize
his thinking on a subject or get him going in the right direction.
This seems to happen to Vonnegut.
-
—————————————————————–
NOTE: THE CRUSADES There were approximately seven Crusades
between the years 1095 and 1271. The Christian powers of Europe sent
these military expeditions to Palestine in a mostly unsuccessful
attempt to regain possession of the Holy Land from the Moslems. The
name crusade comes from the Latin word crux, meaning cross. Vonnegut’s description of the Children’s Crusade is pretty accurate.
Note how Vonnegut puts together two ideas that ought to be totally
contradictory: holy and war. The book is full of such ironic