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'''Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death''' is a 1969 novel by 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, the aftermath of 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. 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.
Plot introduction
''Slaughterhouse-Five'' spans the life of a man who has become unstuck in time. It is the story of Billy Pilgrim experiencing different time periods of his life, most notably his experience in World War II and his relationship with his family. The book is a series of seemingly random happenings that, in combination, present the thematic elements of the novel in an unraveling order.
Explanation of the novel's title
"Slaughterhouse-Five" refers to the slaughterhouse (named ''Schlachthof-Fünf'' in the novel) in which the main character, Billy Pilgrim, stays as a prisoner of war in Dresden during the firebombing. (This parallels Vonnegut's own experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden). Vonnegut, as he does in some of his other works such as ''Breakfast of Champions'', uses an alternative title for the book; in this case it is ''The Children's Crusade.'' He explains this in the first chapter as referring to the Children's Crusade of the 13th century, in which children were sold as slaves (the facts of the actual historical event are disputed, but for literary purposes, the purposeful selling of children into slavery is the intended meaning). This is used to duplicate war which, in Vonnegut's opinion, is comparable to the sale of children into slavery.
Plot summary
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. Billy has become "unstuck in time" for unexplained reasons (though it's hinted towards the end that his surviving a plane crash left him with mild brain damage) so 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 Montana Wildhack, a pornographic movie star. 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 focus on any moment in their lives that they wish.
Throughout the novel, Billy hops back and forth in time, reliving various occasions in his life and fantasy 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 a 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." One of his Tralfamadorian captors, who seems sympathetic to humans, says that out of 31 inhabited planets it has 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.
Billy's death is the result of a strange string of events. Billy was an incredibly inept fighter, which, according to fellow soldier Roland Weary, led to the capture of both. Because Weary blames Billy for his capture (and eventual death), Weary's morbid friend Lazzaro vows to have him killed, as, according to him, revenge is "the sweetest thing in life." Billy, who travels in time, already knows where and how he will be killed: Lazzaro has him shot after a public speaking event in a future where the United States has been balkanized. During Billy's public speech he declares that following his lecture he will be killed, so he uses this fact to convey his message that because time is another dimension all three-dimensional slices as we know them exist simultaneously. Therefore, everyone is always alive and death is not a tragic event.
Characters
★ Kurt Vonnegut — As the author, Vonnegut puts himself as a minor character through the story ("That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book."[1]). He opens the story by describing his connections with the Dresden bombing, and his reasons for writing the book. He then appears as a minor character in the narrative, as well as in the form of Kilgore Trout, a failed science fiction writer Billy Pilgrim meets in a back alley in his hometown of Ilium, New York.
★ Billy Pilgrim — Billy is an optometrist in a dull and safe marriage and residing in 'Ilium', a fictional depiction of Troy, New York. Nearby Troy is the city of Schenectady, New York, where Vonnegut worked as a publicist for General Electric, and where several of his other novels are set. Billy Pilgrim randomly travels through time and is abducted by the "four-dimensional" aliens known as the Tralfamadorians. He is also a prisoner of war in Dresden during World War II, and his later life is greatly influenced by what he saw during the war. He travels between parts of his life repeatedly and randomly, meaning that he's literally lived through the events more than once. He travels back and forth in time so often that he develops a sense of fatalism about his life because he knows how he is going to die and how his life is going to work out. Vonnegut identified the inspiration for this character as fellow infantryman and prisoner-of-war Edward Crone[1] who died in German custody a month before the end of the war in Europe. After the war the Germans helped Crone's parents locate his grave enabling them to rebury him in his hometown of Rochester, NY.
★ Roland Weary — A weak man with dreams of grandeur who weakly "saves" Billy multiple times (despite Billy's protests) in hopes for glory. This leads to their capture as well as the loss of their warm winter clothing and boots. Weary eventually dies of gangrene while on the train to the camp, and blames Billy with his final words.
★ Paul Lazzaro — Another POW. A sickly, ill-tempered car thief from Cicero, Illinois who hears Weary's dying words and eventually has Billy killed in revenge, many years after the war. He has a mental hit list and claims he can have anyone "killed for a thousand dollars plus traveling expenses".
★ Kilgore Trout - An unsuccessful science-fiction writer who manages newspaper delivery boys and has only received one letter from a fan. Billy invites him to his wedding anniversary where Kilgore follows Billy around when he thinks Billy has seen a time window.
★ Edgar Derby — An older man who pulled strings to take part in the war. He is in the German POW camp with Lazarro and Billy. He is sentenced to death for stealing a teapot in the Dresden corpse mines and executed by a firing squad. Vonnegut considers his ignominious death high irony. Derby's son is also a soldier in World War II, in the Pacific.
★ Tralfamadorians — An alien race that look like toilet plungers. They abduct Billy and teach him about time's relation to the world as a fourth dimension, fate, and death's lack of discrimination.
★ Valencia Merble — Billy's heavyset wife and mother of Billy's two children. Billy remains rather distant from her. She dies of carbon monoxide poisoning following a car accident on her way to the hospital where her husband is sent after an airplane crash.
★ Robert Pilgrim — Son of Billy and Valencia. A troubled and disappointing youth who later becomes a Green Beret.
★ Barbara Pilgrim — Daughter of Billy and Valencia. Described as a "bitchy flibbertigibbet" and having "legs like an Edwardian grand piano". She marries an optometrist. She treats her father like a child and an invalid after his accident.
★ Montana Wildhack — A pornographic actress whom the Tralfamadorians kidnap to be Billy's mate under their supervision.
Major themes
Vonnegut most thoroughly explores the ideas of fate, free will, and the illogical nature of humans. The main character is "unstuck in time," meaning that he experiences the events of his life in a seemingly random order, with no idea which part of life he will "visit" next. As a result, his life does not end with death; rather, he experiences his own death jumbled amongst so many of his other experiences. This is followed with confirmation by one of the Tralfamadorians, who says, "I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe... Only on Earth is there any talk of free will". This device is central to Vonnegut's belief that the vast majority of humanity is completely inconsequential; that is, they do what they do because they must.
To the Tralfamadorians, everything always exists at the same time, and for them everyone is therefore always alive. They too have wars and tragic events (they destroy the universe testing spaceship fuels), but when asked by Billy what they do about wars, the Tralfamadorians reply that they simply ignore them. Vonnegut uses the Tralfamadorians to conflict with the theme he actually presents; life, as a human, is only enjoyable with the unknown. Tralfamadorians do not actually make any choices about what they do, but have power only over what they think (this theme is also explored in ''Timequake''). Vonnegut (as the narrator) seems to believe this theory in the way he states in chapter one, "that writing an anti-war book is like writing an anti-glacier book." This concept is difficult for Billy to accept at first.
However, Vonnegut's writings elsewhere (for example, see ''The Sirens of Titan'') suggest that the Tralfamadorians in ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' are intended to satirize the idea of Fatalism. In the main body of the book, the Tralfamadorians represent the belief that war is inevitable. Their hapless destruction of the universe suggests that Vonnegut does not sympathize with their philosophy. To humans, Vonnegut seems to say, ignoring a war is not an acceptable choice when we actually do have free will.
This illogicality of human nature is brought up with the climax of the book. Ironically the climax occurs not with the bombing of Dresden, but with the execution of a man who committed a petty theft. In all of this horror, death, and destruction, so much time is taken on the punishment of one man. Yet, the time is still taken, and Vonnegut seems to take the outside opinion of the bird asking, "Poo-tee-weet?". The same birdsong ends the novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, as the protagonist gives away his entire fortune to the plaintiffs of hundreds of false paternity suits brought against him. It seems to represent a Dadaist comment on the absurdity of humanity.
Literary techniques
Vonnegut used the chorus "So it goes" every time a passage deals with death, dying or mortality, as a transitional phrase to another subject, as a reminder, and as comic relief. It is also used to explain the unexplained. There are 106 "so it goes" anecdotes laced throughout the story.
Two techniques Vonnegut pioneered were the use of choruses and the "plant-connect" analogies. 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 prisoners' camp, and Billy Pilgrim's father's watch in the utter darkness of the Carlsbad Caverns. 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 Billy's 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."
Vonnegut uses metafiction to an even greater degree in his more recent novel ''Timequake''. In it, Vonnegut discusses an old version of the book and how improvements were made on the original.
Form
''Slaughterhouse-Five'' opens with Vonnegut criticizing his own work for a good amount of the beginning of the book, then explaining the beginning and end of the story. This is an unusual but effective technique, as the story is also written from a point of view "unstuck in time," jumping erratically within Billy's life. It encourages flexibility and resourcefulness in the reader, who must fill in many blanks and build a picture of Billy's life out of order, like a jigsaw puzzle. Vonnegut's work commonly contains such disorder.
Billy Pilgrim's life seems like a cyclone, in which his birth, youth, old age, and death are all thrown violently around by the central event, the destruction of Dresden. By giving his novel this structure, Vonnegut centers everything else the reader has learned on this horrible central event, which is the key to the book's theme.
Point of view and setting
He opens the story describing his connections with the Dresden bombing, and his reasons for writing the book. He describes himself, his book, and the fact that he believes it to be a desperate attempt at scholarly work. He then flows this into Billy Pilgrim's story, as he starts Billy's story as, "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time." This serves as a transition from Vonnegut's point of view to the true third person.
As the author, Vonnegut appears as a minor character throughout the story. The character Kilgore Trout, whom Billy Pilgrim meets while the former runs a newspaper line, may also be seen as a persona of the author.
The structure of ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' closely resembles a Tralfamadorian novel, a different kind of literature Pilgrim encounters en route to Tralfamadore.
References to other works
Like many of Vonnegut's books, certain characters from other stories make notable appearances in order to bring his novels together. Kilgore Trout, a major character in many of Vonnegut's novels, appears significantly in ''Slaughterhouse-Five''. He is a friend of Billy Pilgrim, and fulfils odd roles throughout the story. In one case he is the only non-optometrist at a party, and therefore is the odd-man-out. He takes the role of making fun of everything the ideal American family holds true, such as heaven, hell and sin. In his opinion, people do not know if the things they do turn out to be good or bad, and if they turn out to be bad, they go to hell where "the burning never stops hurting."
Other cameo appearances include Eliot Rosewater of ''God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater'' and Howard W. Campbell, Jr. of ''Mother Night''. There is also a character called Rumfoord, a relative of Winston Niles Rumfoord in ''The Sirens of Titan'' (Rumfoord family members are prone to pop up throughout Vonnegut's work). Also mentioned is Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Controversy and debate
Controversial themes
Because of its realistic and frequent depiction of swearing by American soldiers, occasionally blasphemous language (including the sentence "The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty,") and some sexually explicit content, ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' is among the most frequently banned works in American literature, and in some cases is still 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'', . The novel appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000 at number sixty-nine.
References to actual history
The bombing of Dresden in World War II is the most prevalent historical reference in the novel. ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' also mentions in passing that homosexual men were among the people targeted for death in the Nazi Holocaust, which was not widely known at the time.
Not all of the book's historical references have escaped questioning. Vonnegut drew the Dresden casualty statistics from the then-bestselling book ''The Destruction of Dresden'' by David Irving; those figures have since been redacted.
Literary significance and criticism
The March 31, 1969 review of ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' in the ''New York Times'' was glowing, yet at the end conceded that "you'll either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner."[2]
In its year of publication, the book was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel, also collecting a nomination for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1970. However, it was beaten on both occasions by Ursula K. Le Guin's ''The Left Hand of Darkness''.
The book appeared on ''Time'' magazine's list of 100 all-time best English-language novels written since 1923.[3]
Samuel Beckett read the novel in the summer of 1972 and was supposedly 'fascinated' by it.[4]
Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
A film adaptation of the book, also called ''Slaughterhouse-Five'', was made in 1972. Although critically praised, the film was a box office flop. It won the ''Prix du Jury'' at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, as well as a Hugo Award, and Saturn Award. Vonnegut commended the film greatly.
In 2003 a section of the book, read by the author, was set to music in a piece called "Tock Tick."
In January 2008, a theatrical adaptation by Eric Simonson will be presented at 59E59 Theaters as the Off-Broadway premiere by Godlight Theatre Company and directed by Joe Tantalo.
Quotes
~ "And I say to Sam now: 'Sam-here's the book.' It's so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like 'Poo-tee-weet?" (19)
~ "Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren't necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next." (23)
~ "When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes'." (27)
~ "Even though Billy's train wasn't moving, its boxcars were kept locked tight. Nobody was to get off until the final destination. To the guards who walked up and down outside, each car became a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators. It talked or sometimes yelled through its ventilators, too. In went water and loaves of black-bread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language." (70)
~ "Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy one time about a book that wasn't science fiction. He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Fedor Dostoevsky. 'But that isn't enough any more,' said Rosewater." "Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, 'I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living'." (101)
~ "The Tralfamadorians tried to give Billy clues that would help him imagine sex in the invisible dimension. They told him that there could be no Earthling babies without male homosexuals. There could be babies without female homosexuals. There couldn't be babies without women over sixty-five years old. There could be babies without men over sixty-five. There couldn't be babies without other babies who had lived an hour or less after birth. And so on. It was gibberish to Billy." (114)
~ "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt." (122)
~ "There those girls were with all their private parts bare, for anybody to see. And there in the doorway were Gluck and Derby and Pilgrim-the childish soldier and the poor old high school teacher and the clown in his toga and silver shoes-staring. The girls screamed. They covered themselves with their hands and turned their backs and so on, and made themselves utterly beautiful." (159)
~ "Echolalia is a mental disease which makes people immediately repeat things that well people around them say. But Billy didn't really have it. Rumfoord simply insisted, for his own comfort, that Billy had it. Rumsfoord was thinking in a military manner: that an inconvenient person, on whose death he wished for very much, for practical reasons, was suffering from a repulsive disease." (192)
~ "Billy and the rest wandered out onto the shady street. The trees were leafing out. There was nothing going on out there, no traffic of any kind. There was only one vehicle, an abandoned wagon drawn by two horses. The wagon was green and coffin shaped. Birds were talking. One bird said to Billy Pilgrim. 'Poo-tee-weet'?" (215)
~ "Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy's wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this: 'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.' Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future."
Pop culture
★ The character of Clayton reads and briefly discusses the book in the film "The Recruit." Other references to Kurt Vonnegut's work in this movie include the presence of a computer virus named ICE-9 (from Cat's Cradle), and Clayton referring to his father's eggs as the Breakfast of Champions, which might be understood as a reference to the Kurt Vonnegut novel of the same name.
★ The book is mentioned in the 1984 film ''Footloose'' and the subsequent musical of the same name.
★ James Van Der Beek is seen reading the book in the 1999 film ''Varsity Blues''.
★ The book is mentioned in the song "Shut Up & Make Out" by The Hazzards.
★ American rock group Nine Inch Nails uses a passage from ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' in the Year Zero album's coinciding Alternate Reality Game.
★ American rock band Kifkiñata wrote a song entitled "The Ballad of Billy Pilgrim" about the main character.
★ The character of John Crichton makes reference to ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' in the science fiction series Farscape at the beginning of the fourth season which dealt with ''Unrealised Realities''.
★ The Sloppy Meateaters' song "So It Goes" refers to the novel.
★ The janitor in Disturbing Behavior has a copy of the novel in his back pocket, the novel is mentioned in brief dialogue.
★ War Without End, an episode from the third season of Babylon 5, has a main character become "unstuck in time" (a direct quote). Like Billy, Sheridan is suddenly in another period in his own life.
★ The Angel (TV Series) episode ''Time Bomb'' has the character Illyria moving backward and forward in time, which causes Angel to say: "She's come unstuck in time, Wes. She knows what happens." A reference to Billy Pilgrim's becoming unstuck in time.
★ The Manic Street Preachers' song "If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next" uses the phrase 'gutless wonder', which is a reference to the novel.
★ The Buffy (TV Series) episode ''Help'' shows a girl named Cassie Newton reading the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, which mirrors the plot of the episode. In the episode, Cassie knows in advance when she is going to die.
★ In Smuggler's Run you can find buildings named "Slaaughterhaus 1-5" in the Eastern Europe map on Freeridin'.
References
1. Slaughterhouse-Five, , Kurt, Vonnegut, Dial Press Trade Paperback, January 12, 1999 Edition, ISBN 978-0385333849
2. Books of The Times: At Last, Kurt Vonnegut's Famous Dresden Book
3. TIME All-Time 100 Novels
4. Knowlson, James "Damned to fame: The life of Samuel Beckett", p.594-595, ISBN 0-7475-3169-2
External links
★ Vonnegut.com:
★ Kilgore Trout Collection
★ The Vonnegut Web
★ Photos of the first edition of Slaughterhouse-Five
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