Useful Links

study links:

 study guide: http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/slaughter/

lesson plans: http://www.enotes.com/slaughterhouse-five-lesson

study questions: http://www.english.uwosh.edu/henson/231/vonnegut.html

quotes: http://classiclit.about.com/od/slaughterhousefive/a/aa_slaughterqu.htm

 

 

video links:

I managed to find some video interviews with the author himself!

<This one has 8 parts, but part number 3 is the one about Slaughterhouse Five.

here he is just talking about his grading system for his books (the book they are referring to here is Timequake, but he gives Slaughterhouse Five an A+). The interviewer doesn’t really let him talk much.

Reality

Vonnegut never states explicitly if  Billy Pilgrim is just crazy, or is telling the truth. He leaves everything ambiguous and up for debate, beginning or ending statements with “billy says,” enforcing the idea that Billy may be a biased source and that Vonnegut and Billy are not the same person.

After all, Billy only spoke of the aliens after his accident. It is possible that he maintained some head trauma and imagined the aliens into being.

It is also possible that he created the aliens in his mind to explain and rationalize the experiences throughout his life, especially the war. The Tralfamadorians believe that you can’t change events in time, and everything is what it is. Such a view would be comforting to a man who lived through a massacre and never came to terms with it or expressed, or even acknowledged his grief.

However, I like to believe that the aliens really did kidnap him. Kurt Vonnegut gave the reader the choice and I will take it for no other reason than that I can!

Book vs. Movie

I have had plenty of heartbreaking experiences where I have read and loved a book, then watched the movie and was flabbergasted by how BAD it was, so I prepared to watch this movie with trepidation. However, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Slaughterhouse-Five is a much better movie than I anticipated! It stays very faithful to the original text, (plus or minus a few things) but doesn’t quite manage to convey the same undertones. But of course, because it was made in the seventies, the special effects look a little ridiculous, which I overlooked.

Two major differences between the two are the beginning and the ending.

 The entire first chapter of the book is omitted, hence the characters of Kurt Vonnegut and his “old war buddy” are also removed from the entirety of the movie.  This doesn’t really affect the storyline and is an appropriate cut, if a disappointing one.

The movie ending has a Hollywood-acceptable happy ending on Trafalmadore, but the books ends more ambiguously, with Billy in a sketchy porn store. I thought this was an odd choice on the director’s behalf, but one could interpret it as highlighting one of the themes of the book: One is going to live and relive every moment, so try to make most of them happy ones.

The bombing scene was rather underwhelming, but I also felt the same when reading the book. There probably is not an accurate way of portraying such a horrible massacre, especially if one lived through it, but I was expecting the movie version to do the event justice.

There are other minor alterations, and we also never see a Trafalmadorian, even though we are granted a description in the novel, but overall it was a solid movie with excellent casting, especially the lead role. I scoured the Internet for a clip, but I couldn’t find one. Here’s the movie poster though:

Summary

 

Chapter two opens with: “Listen:  Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.  Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between.  He says.” (The repition of ‘he says’ implies that Billy might just believe these things to be true, instead of them actually being true, but that is left up to the reader’s interpretation.)

Billy Pilgrim is just your average guy. He grows up in the 1920 and 30s and is drafted into WWII, where he is a chaplain’s assistant until he is captured and becomes a POW. This is the first time Billy comes “unstuck in time.” He is eventually transported, along with many other POWs, to a warehouse (called slaughterhouse five) in the non-military German town of Dresden. Billy is there when the city is bombed by American planes, killing over one hundred thousand people. The next morning when the survivors in slaughterhouse five (American POWs and four guards) walk outside, they see that Dresden has become a wasteland. They have no food, so they forge on toward the suburbs and find a stable they stay in for a while, until the authorities make the POWs excavate the bodies from the city. A man is caught stealing a teapot and is hanged without trial, and they return to the stable until May when the American POWs are repatriated.

Billy returns to his hometown, finishes optometry school and gets engaged to the wealthy daughter of the school’s owner, Valencia, a very large woman. He has a psychotic break and is sent for a short stay in a hospital; after he leaves, he marries Valencia and they have two children. On the night of his daughter’s wedding, Billy is kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore and is placed in a zoo on their planet. They explain to him that every moment in time is always happening, and also that Earth is the only planet that ever talks about “free will”. They make him “mate” with a movie star who is also placed in the zoo and return him back to Earth moments after the time that he left. He never speaks of the event to anyone until he gets hurt in a plane crash (full of optometrists; he is the only survivor). As he is recovering the hospital, his wife dies in a car accident on her way to visit him. After he gets out of the hospital he calls into a radio station and tries to tell everyone about the true nature of time. His daughter is forced to take care of him (his son is a Green Beret in the military) and everyone believes that he has gone crazy.

 

A summary of this novel is incredibly hard to write, because “[t]here is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, [and] no effects.” (That sentence is in Chapter 5, where a Tralfamadorian is trying to explain to Billy what a Tralfamadorian novel is like. Vonnegut has intentionally structured the novel in the same way as he says the Tralfamadorians do in an attempt to show the reader how Billy percieves his life). The Tralfamadorian says: “There isn’t any particular relationship between 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,” and Vonnegut has done that brillantly. I summarized the book in a linear order because otherwise I think my head might explode.

NOTE: The only order that the memories seem to have is that the reader experiences the war in chronological order, though it is broken up by scenes from before and after the war. As in, we would  NOT read first about the man stealing from the dead, then about Ronald Weary (a character that Billy meets early in the war), but we COULD read Ronald Weary, a cut to Billy cheating on his wife after the war, cut to Billy’s childhood, then Billy being captured as a POW.

Major Themes

There are two major themes in this book: “Free will doesn’t exist,” and “war, though inveitible, is horrible.”

1. Free Will

It would be impossible to believe in free will if every moment of time has already been planned out, and, according to the Tralfamadorians, it has.

2. War

Vonnegut says in chapter one that this is an anti-war book, but he also agrees with his editor when he tells Mr Vonnegut that protesting war is like protesting a glacier. Both will still happen, no matter what.

Critical Analysis

Literary devices!

1. Parallelism – There are quite a few instances of parallelism in Slaughterhouse-Five, one of which being the birdsong “Poo-tee-weet?” that Vonnegut tells the reader at the beginning will be the last sentance in the book. Vonnegut says that that is “all there is to say about a massacre”. The birdsong also makes an appearance outside of Billy’s hospital window around the middle of the book.

2. Repetition – The most-repeated phrase in the book is “So it goes,” which is repeated after every death (of which there many). It reinforces the idea that every moment is simultaneously always happening and has already happened, and that is just the way things are and one cannot change it. That is then a support for one of the major themes, that free will doesn’t exist.

3. Structure – the structure of this novel particularly important, as we are following a man who sees time in a non-linear fashion; therefore the book is structured in a non-linear fashion (scenes ranging from Billy’s birth to his death in a seemingly random order). If Vonnegut had written the novel so that the reader follows Billy’s life linearly, the structure of the novel wouldn’t mesh with what Vonnegut is telling the reader.

Censorship

As I was studying up on Mr. Vonnegut, I came across an interesting piece of information: Slaghterhouse Five is number 69 on the American Library Association’s Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000.

‘Frequently challenged’ means that many individuals in America have expressed their concerns in having this book be kept/put into curriculum of schools or even kept in public libraries, and have bid for its removal from the aforementioned places.  I can see why these people would have issues with the book, as swear words appear often (to be fair, many of the characters are soldiers, and soldiers are known to curse rather profusely), sex is depicted, some lines could be considered blasphemous (“The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty”), it acknowledged that homosexuals were victimized in the Holocaust, and has views opposing those of certain groups of people. In short, this book contains all four of the main motivations of the actions of a ‘censor’ – a person who is challenging a book. Those are:

* Family Values

* Religion

* Political Views

* Minority Rights

After presented with such information, one may ask why this book was ever allowed into libraries in the first place. There are many reasons, so as not to bore you, let me list two.

1. It has served to raise awareness of the questionable acts of America at Dresden

2. It has raised philosophical questions and ideas in layman’s terms and in an amusing manner, becoming a vehicle for higher thought in the less educated

 

Sources:

http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/oif/challengesupport/dealing/censormotives.cfm

The first chapter

So far, I have read the first two chapters, and, flipping through the next chapter, I can see that the first chapter is very different from the rest of the book. It is very autobiographical, and written in the first person.

At first, I thought that he was simply writing as if he were a narrator/character , as he did in Breakfast of Champions (an excellent book), but comparing it to various biographies I’ve read, he was, in fact, telling his own life story. This gives the reader a true insight into who the author is and gives us a background for what lead up to this story.

Author Bio

  

Kurt Vonnegut was born on November 11, 1922, and died in 2007. He wrote 14 novels and many short stories, and is also recognized as a graphic artist. His writing is characterized by pessimism and (sometimes childish, and sometimes quick) humor. Many of his works are social commentaries, and deal with war (he was an advocate for pacism after his time as a soldier).

His mother killed herself by overdosing on sleeping pills in May 1944, and his father was, for the most part, unemployed. Vonnegut himself studied biochemistry from 1940-1943 at Cornell, at which point he volunteered to join the military. In 1944 he was taken as a POW, and was “…imprisoned in a meat-locker under a slaughterhouse, and was among the few people who survived the total destruction of the city [Dresden, Germany]” (http://www.litweb.net/biography/428/Kurt_Vonnegut.html) In 1945, Dresden became occupied by Soviet soldiers and he was brought back to the United States.

He married childhood friend Jane Marie Cox that same year, with whom he had 3 children, and adopted three more. He tried for an MA in anthropology at Chicago University from when he returned from war until 1947, but his final thesis was “unanimously rejected,” although in 1971 he submitted his novel Cat’s Cradle, and he was granted his degree. In 1970 Vonnegut divorced Jane, and in 1979 he married a photographer named Jill Krementz. His career took off after he wrote Slaughterhouse Five in 1969, which is considered one of the 100 greatest novels from 1923-2007 by Time magazine. He died from old age.

http://www.vonnegut.com/artist.asp

http://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/authors/about_kurt_vonnegut.html

http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/0,24459,slaughterhouse_five,00.html

Publication

Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death  was published in 1969.

My copy was published by The Dial Press, A Division of Random House, Inc. in 2005 and 1999.