Slaughterhouse-Five
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Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death is a 1969 novel by best-selling author Kurt Vonnegut. One of his most popular works and widely regarded as a classic, it combines science fiction elements with an analysis of the human condition from an uncommon perspective, using time travel as a plot device and the bombing of Dresden in World War II, which Vonnegut witnessed, as a starting point.
When the book was released the bombing of Dresden was not widely known and was rarely discussed by veterans and historians, despite claims that the bombing caused the death of up to twice as many civilians as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The book led to an increased awareness of the bombings and a reevaluation of the justifications given for aerial bombing of cities by the Allies during the war.
A successful film adaptation of the book, also called Slaughterhouse-Five, was made in 1972.
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Plot
A disoriented and ill-trained American soldier named Billy Pilgrim is captured by German soldiers and is forced to live in a makeshift prison, the deep cellars of a disused slaughterhouse in the city of Dresden, Germany. Billy has become "unstuck in time", for unexplained reasons, and he randomly and repeatedly visits different parts of his life, including his death. He meets, and is later kidnapped by, aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who exhibit him in a Tralfamadorian zoo with an Earth woman. The Tralfamadorians see in four dimensions, the fourth dimension being time. Tralfamadorians have seen every instant of their lives already; they cannot choose to change anything about their fate, but can choose to spend time in any moment in their lives that they wish.
Throughout the novel, Billy bops back and forth in time, reliving various occasions in his life; this gives him a constant sense of stage fright, as he never knows what part of his life is coming up next. He spends time on Tralfamadore; in Dresden; numbly wading through deep snow in WWII Germany before his capture; living married in America after the war; up to the moment of his murder on Earth many years later. By the time of his murder, Billy has adopted Tralfamadorian fatalism, which has given him great personal peace; he has spread this philosophy to millions of humans and has become the most popular public figure on Earth.
Billy's fatalism appears to be grounded in reality (at least in the reality which Billy perceives); after noting that Billy had a copy of the Serenity Prayer in his office, the narrator says, "Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future." His Tralfamadorian captors say that out of 131 inhabited planets they have visited, "only on Earth is there any talk of free will."
The book examines many other events in Billy's life, including the death of his wife, his capture by the Nazis in World War II, and the infamous bombing of Dresden that was the inspiration for the book. The novel uses certain phrases repetitively, such as "so it goes"—which, used whenever death or dying is mentioned (be it that of a man, an animal, or the bubbles in champagne), serves to downplay mortality, making it routine and even humorous—and "mustard gas and roses", to denote the horrible odor of a rotting corpse or a drunk's breath.
Literary techniques
Two techniques Vonnegut pioneered were the use of choruses and the "plant-connect" analogies. Vonnegut used the chorus "So it goes" as a transitional phrase to another subject, as a reminder, and as comic relief.
The "plant-connect" analogies are probably best explained with an example. Vonnegut uses the phrase "radium dial" to describe both a Russian's face in the prisoner's camp, and his father's watch in the dark. This emphasizes a connection between the two. The Russian's face reminded him that the other people in the camp were human, and that moment of recognition is thus filled with hope for him. So it was with his father's watch, a bastion of security and familiarity in an unfamiliar place.
Another literary technique used by Vonnegut is the metafiction device. The first chapter of the book is not about Billy Pilgrim, but a preface about how Vonnegut came to write Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut apologizes for the fact that the novel is "so short and jumbled and jangled" and explains that this is because "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre". In a similar way to Mother Night, but much more extensively, Vonnegut plays with ideas of fiction and reality. The opening chapter's very first sentence claims that "All this happened, more or less" and during Billy Pilgrim's war experiences Vonnegut himself appears briefly, followed by the narrator's note: "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book."
Possible explanation for time travel
While time travel lends itself to the fantasy/science fiction aspect of the story, it has been suggested that what Vonnegut had Billy Pilgrim experience is akin to post-traumatic stress disorder (still generally referred to as 'shell shock' at the time of writing). After intense stress during a situation such as combat, the extreme stress can put a major strain on the person and disrupt normal mental function, with symptoms including hallucinations and flashbacks.
Cameo appearances
Like many of Vonnegut's books, certain characters from other stories make notable appearances in order to bring his novels together. Three are Eliot Rosewater of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; the fictional, eccentric science fiction author, Kilgore Trout; and Howard W. Campbell, Jr. of Mother Night. There is also a character called Rumfoord, although this does not seem to be the same man as Winston Niles Rumfoord in The Sirens of Titan.
Controversy
Because of its realistic and frequent depiction of swearing by American soldiers, and some sexually explicit content, Slaughterhouse-Five is among one of the most frequently banned works in American literature, and has often been removed from school libraries and curricula. Conversely, this book has also become a part of the curriculum of certain schools. The suitability of the work has even been considered by the Supreme Court of the United States, where it was one of the works at issue in Island Trees School District v. Pico 457 US 853 (1982).
"Reporting" aspects
Vonnegut likened the post-bombing Dresden to the surface of the moon. The Dresden casualty statistics cited in the book were drawn from David Irving's then-bestselling book The Destruction of Dresden, but those figures have since been retracted.
However, since the total amount of high explosive dropped was several times greater than the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb, and since target photographs also showed the destruction of 90% of the city, there is no reason to doubt Vonnegut's account of the destruction of Dresden, which he witnessed as a prisoner of war.
Slaughterhouse-Five also mentioned in passing that homosexual men were among the people targeted for death in the Nazi Holocaust, something that was also not widely known at the time.
Further reading
- Slaughterhouse-Five, ISBN 0440180295
- Slaughterhouse-Five: Reforming the Novel and the World by Jerome Klinkowitz, ISBN 0-8057-9410-7
- Modern Critical Interpretations: Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five edited by Harold Bloom, ISBN 0-7910-5925-1
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