juxtapositions, so keep an eye out for them.
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The senselessness of the historical Children’s Crusade provides
Vonnegut with a parallel to the destruction of Dresden. And he
learns that Dresden had been bombed before, just as pointlessly. The
quote from the great German poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749-1832) conveys Vonnegut’s view. The caretaker of the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) is showing the undamaged dome to his young visitor. This is what our great architect did, he tells Goethe. Then
he gestures at the bombed-out ruins around the church and says, that
is what the enemy did!
Vonnegut’s visit to the O’Hares has been fruitful, and on the way
home he finds additional material. At the New York World’s Fair he and
the girls see “official versions” of the past and future that make him
wonder about the present: “how wide it was, how deep it was, how
much was mine to keep.” This suggests one of the major subjects of the
book, the nature of time and how it works.
Suddenly Vonnegut is asked to teach in one of the most prestigious
writing programs in the country. And he gets a three-book contract.
Nothing had worked before, but everything is working now. He
finishes the book.
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NOTE: VONNEGUT’S SELF-DEPRECATION Vonnegut often mocks himself
and his writing. Some readers see this as false modesty, others
believe he’s sincere. Slaughterhouse-Five has a loot of intelligent
things to say about the destruction of Dresden- about the thinking
that caused it, about the effect it had on the people who survived it,
about what he sees as the right way and the wrong way to remember
it. The book is not a failure, for it made Vonnegut’s reputation and
is generally considered his masterpiece. And Slaughterhouse-Five
informed the public that Dresden- at least in terms of number of
people killed- was the worst single bombing attack of the war.
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Before concluding his account of the writing of Slaughterhouse-Five,
Vonnegut takes us back to Dresden in 1967. (You remember he
mentioned this trip at the beginning of the chapter.) Underneath the
rebuilt Dresden, where Vonnegut and O’Hare are having so much fun,
“there must be tons of human bone meal in the ground.” Bone meal is
a fertilizer made from grinding up the bones of slaughterhouse
animals. The present Dresden sprang up like a flower from the
sterile ground of “the moon” (what Dresden looked like after it was
bombed), aided by the fertilizer of crushed human bones.
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NOTE: RESONANCE This image, like so many others in
Slaughterhouse-Five, has an extraordinary resonance. In music,
resonance is the enrichment of sound by means of echoes. If you’ve
ever been in a large church when the choir is singing, you know how
rich that sound can be: the voices bounce off the walls and increase
the vibration in the air. In literature, an image is resonant when
it reminds us of other images and enriches our understanding by
connecting things that didn’t seem related before.
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The final anecdote in Chapter 1, Vonnegut’s “non-night” in Boston,
shows him “locking in” on the main ideas that Slaughterhouse-Five will
embody. The first idea he presents has to do with the difference
between time as we think of it and time as we experience it.
Remember the scene where Vonnegut and the two girls stood looking at
the Hudson River? This is our image of external time: it flows at a
steady rate in one direction, from the past through the present toward
the future. But in our minds we can jump from the past (memory) to the
future (fantasy or planning) without having to go through the “time”
in between. We can also go backward as well as forward in time. And
not only can it feel as though it takes a year for a second to pass,
but a lifetime can seem as though it’s over in a second. Vonnegut
may be suggesting that this internal time is more real to us than
the external time of clocks and calendars.
Vonnegut explores this idea in the quotations from the French writer
Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which say that the passage of time leads
inevitably to death, and if time could be stopped, no one would die.
We know that the flow of external time cannot be stopped. But internal
time is a different matter. Don’t we do exactly what Celine wants to
do- stop people from disappearing- in our memories? And isn’t that
what Vonnegut does with Dresden in writing Slaughterhouse-Five?
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NOTE: The novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1894-1961) had a
reputation in France equal to that of Ernest Hemingway in America. But
in the late 1930s Celine declared himself to be an antisemite and a
Nazi sympathizer, and after World War II was tried and imprisoned as a
war criminal. It seems amazing, but Vonnegut claims that Celine had
a great influence on him. In an essay published in 1974, he explains
what Celine meant to him and why he admires him so much. He is willing
to forgive what he calls Celine’s “racism and cracked politics”
because he was a great and inspiring writer: “…in my opinion, Celine
gave us in his novels the finest history we have of the total collapse
of Western civilization in two world wars, as witnessed by hideously
vulnerable common women and men.”
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Another idea that Vonnegut is fond of can be found in the American
poet Theodore Roethke’s poem, which implies that we are not masters of
our destinies, as we like to imagine, but that we get the hang of life
by doing what circumstances force us to do.
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NOTE: MAN VICTIM/AGENT Howard W. Campbell, Jr., the American Nazi
whom we will meet later, is a perfect example of this theme. In Mother
Night he’s an American spy whose radio broadcasts contain coded
messages about Nazi troop movements and battle plans. After the war he
is tried as a war criminal because of the obvious damage he did as a
Nazi propagandist. Whether he was a real Nazi or just pretending to be
one makes no difference.
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Another idea presented in this anecdote comes from the biblical
Sodom and Gomorrah story, an example of the kind of “good story”
Vonnegut doesn’t want his Dresden book to be. Sodom and Gomorrah are
destroyed because they are evil. Lot and his family are spared because
they are good. But there’s a wrinkle in this otherwise typical “tale
of great destruction”: Lot’s wife looks back and is turned into a
pillar of salt.
This is a particularly rich image. In the first place, she might
never have thought of looking back until she was told not to. (You
know the feeling of wanting something only after you’ve been told
you can’t have it.) But Vonnegut hints at another reason she might
have had: “Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where
all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back,
and I love her for that, because she was so human.”
Does this remind you of Mary O’Hare? Vonnegut often gives the values
he admires most to the women characters in his books, implying that
women are more humane than men. Some see Vonnegut’s preference for
women’s values as a subtle form of male chauvinism. According to
this interpretation, the tough reporter Nancy lost her humanity by
taking a man’s job, while Mary O’Hare retained hers by staying home
with the babies. Vonnegut seems to support this argument when he says,
“The very toughest reporters and writers were women who had taken over the jobs of men who’d gone to war.” On the other hand, the war made it necessary for women to leave home and go to work- and men started
the war.
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NOTE: LYSISTRATA In the literature of ancient Greece a very funny
play by Aristophanes, Lysistrata, offers an ingenious solution to
the problem of war. In the play, Athens and Sparta have been at war
for twenty years, and the women are fed up. So they go on a “sex
strike,” demanding that the men sign a peace treaty. After a while the
men become so desperate they have to agree. (In real life the war
dragged on for seven more years and ended only when Athens was
destroyed.)
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Even if you think that Vonnegut is a “closet male chauvinist,”
others say that his main point is not that a woman’s place is in the
home but that a human being’s place is not in a war.
CHAPTER 2
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STRUCTURE: In this chapter you meet Billy Pilgrim and get a taste of
his peculiar experience of time. Vonnegut summarizes Billy’s life from
his birth (1922) to the present (1968). Then he opens up two important
plot lines. The first involves Billy’s attempt to tell his story to
the world in 1968. The second is the beginning of Billy’s adventures
in the war.
Vonnegut begins with the premise that Billy Pilgrim is “unstuck in
time,” that he lives his life out of sequence, paying random visits to
all the events of his life, in no apparent order, and often more
than once. But notice the two words “he says.” Vonnegut uses them
three times in this section, and they warn you that what Billy says
may not always be fact.
Billy’s “official biography” condenses Billy’s life into the space
of a couple of pages. It resembles the diagram Vonnegut drew for his
Dresden story, which reduced Dresden to a few colored lines on the
back of a length of wallpaper. And the biography serves the same
purpose as the diagram: it allows you to see the whole story at a
glance.
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NOTE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY There are parallels here to Vonnegut’s own
life. He too was born in 1922, married and went to college after the
war, and worked in Schenectady, an upstate New York city much like
Ilium. We already know that he was captured by the Germans in World
War II and lived through the bombing of Dresden. He is also over six
feet tall.
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The thumbnail sketch of Billy’s life provides a framework into which
you can fit the out-of-sequence events of the novel. Clearly
Slaughterhouse-Five is not going to be just another “good story.”
For Vonnegut there is more than one aspect to any event: there is
the event itself, how it is experienced, how it is remembered
afterward, and, perhaps most important, how it is told.
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NOTE: MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVE It can be maddening to have to be
aware of all these levels at once. But Vonnegut’s point is that you
can’t fully understand the story until you realize that all these
levels exist simultaneously in any story. In effect you are being
encouraged to look at Slaughterhouse-Five in the way a
Tralfamadorian would- from every point of view, all at the same time.
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Billy’s biography ends in 1968, the “present,” and Billy is
writing to his local newspaper about the aliens who kidnapped him
the year before.
Are the Tralfamadorians “real”? Vonnegut speaks of them as though
Billy’s account is to be taken seriously. But he’s already cast
doubt on Billy’s credibility with those repeated “he says.” Notice,
too, that Billy never mentions the Tralfamadorians until after the
plane crash. This makes it possible, even likely, that he imagined
them in his delirium. The trauma to his brain, as often happens, has
released vivid memories as well as hallucinations. This could mean
that Billy’s “coming unstuck in time” didn’t happen in 1944, as it
seems to him, but in 1968, when his skull was cracked. Certainly
this is his daughter’s interpretation of her father’s stories. And not
only has he gone soft in the head, he’s determined to disgrace both
himself and her by proclaiming his lunacy to the world!
In the middle of their argument Vonnegut stops the action to provide
exposition- background information to help you understand what’s going
on- and to remind his readers that this is a story, not real life.
Every chapter is studded with similar moments in which Vonnegut
holds up the development of the story to indicate what he’s doing as a
writer.
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NOTE: EXPOSITION In a conventional story the author tries to
weave the exposition into the action. Usually this is done by making
what happens in the scene so engrossing that you’re not aware you’re
being given bits of necessary information. But Vonnegut believes
that a writer can’t separate his telling of the story from the story
itself. In Chapter 1 he went to a lot of trouble to demonstrate this
problem. And one way to deal with the problem is to acknowledge it.
Vonnegut is saying, We need exposition here, so here’s the exposition.
—————————————————————–
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The second plot line opens in the Luxembourg forest, where Billy and
his companions- two infantry scouts and the antitank gunner Roland
Weary- are lost behind enemy lines. It is here that Billy will first
“come unstuck in time.”
It’s hard to imagine anyone more different from Billy Pilgrim than
Roland Weary. In different circumstances these two might remind you of
an incongruous comedy team. To the scouts, who are “clever,
graceful, quiet” (perfectly adapted to their predicament), they aren’t
funny, they’re dangerous: Weary because he makes so much noise,
Billy because he just stands there when somebody shoots at him. If
this were an ordinary war story, the scouts- who are expert
soldiers- would probably be the main characters, Billy and Weary the
comic relief. But Vonnegut is more interested in the clowns than in
the good soldiers, perhaps because to him the clowns behave more
like real people would. He is also preparing us for the irony in the
next chapter, when the good soldiers will be killed and the clowns
spared.
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NOTE: ALLUSIONS AND PARODIES In this scene Vonnegut makes some
complex literary allusions or indirect references to other works.
The name “Billy” recalls the innocent victim/hero of Herman Melville’s
Billy Budd. “Pilgrim” suggests John Bunyan’s seventeenth-century
moralistic novel, Pilgrim’s Progress, in which the hero, called
Christian, encounters many adventures and setbacks on his journey from
the world of sin to the foot of the cross, where he finds salvation.
All of Billy’s story might be seen as a parody (take-off) of Pilgrim’s
Progress: Billy passes through absurd scenes of modern life to find
happiness among aliens from outer space.
The scene in the Luxembourg forest also parodies the conclusion of
the medieval French epic poem The Song of Roland. (Vonnegut even
tips you off to the allusion in Roland Weary’s name.) In that war tale
the protagonist and his best friend die heroically defending Western
(i.e. Christian) civilization against attack by Muslim Saracens. The
parody is quite detailed. The medieval Roland has a horn that he
refuses to blow until he’s really in trouble, while Weary has a
whistle he won’t blow until he is promoted to corporal. Roland is a
true Christian fighting the infidel (non-believing) Saracen. Weary,
a smelly footsoldier who doesn’t know what he’s fighting for, is up
against the Nazis, the modern-day infidels.
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Vonnegut makes it clear that Roland Weary can’t help being an
obnoxious jerk any more than Billy Pilgrim can help looking like a
filthy flamingo. Weary’s life has been a disaster because people are
always “ditching” him, so he compensates by fantasizing an adventure
in which he is a hero. Some readers see in this a parallel to
Billy’s fantasy of the Tralfamadorians, who choose him to represent
the human race in their zoo. But it’s also just common psychology. How
many times have you felt “left out” and dreamed of doing something
extraordinary that would “show” the people who snubbed you?
Notice the difference between Weary’s “Three Musketeers movie” which
is full of violence, triumph, and manly camaraderie, and Billy’s
gentle, noncompetitive fantasies. Billy wins friends by sock skating
and influences people by taking a public-speaking course.
Left to himself, Billy would have frozen to death days ago. So it
may be stress that brings on his first slip in time. Many people who
have come back from the brink of death have described the experience
of having their whole life flash before their eyes. This comes
pretty close to Vonnegut’s description of Billy’s “coming unstuck.”
Billy passes into death, moves backward to pre-birth, reverses
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