"Cliff Notes - Slaughterhouse Five" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

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.

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 direction again, and stops at the memory of a traumatic experience in his childhood. Then too he almost died because he wouldn't do anything to save himself.

Billy's next three stops in time are definitely in the future--Vonnegut even gives the dates. You're now inside Billy's experience of time, and it's perfectly real to him. You'll need to treat it as real from now on, or you'll miss a lot.

Billy is snapped back to the "present" by Roland Weary, for whom the dreaded moment has come. The scouts have abandoned him. Billy Pilgrim must now fulfill the destiny Weary has been keeping him alive for, that of sacrificial victim to Weary's "tragic wrath." The speech Weary makes while he's beating Billy up echoes speeches in The Song of Roland and other heroic epics. (Notice also the machine imagery Vonnegut uses to describe Billy's body: his spine is a tube containing all of Billy's important wires.)

Before Weary can kill Billy for ruining his "movie," the Germans appear.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: CHAPTER 3

STRUCTURE: Billy Pilgrim's time-travel now begins in earnest. In this chapter Billy jumps back and forth between 1944 and 1967. Each time he travels from one time period to the other, he picks up the new scene where he left off. While we alternate between two stories, then, the story in each period is continuous. Later on Billy's trips to the future will be much less orderly, but the continuity of the Dresden story will remain unbroken, for it is the dominant event of his life. In terms of the structure of the book, everything is anchored (as Billy is) to the Dresden story. You will always return to it, no matter how far away events may take you.

NOTE: To keep track of Billy's travels, you may want to do what Vonnegut did with his crayons and wallpaper: draw a diagram. To do this for each chapter, just skim through it to find out where Billy goes, then plot his time jumps on a graph.

At each location, put in a key word or two to remind you of what happens in that scene. This will not only give you the big picture of each chapter, it may help you to find connections between images or events you hadn't seen before.

You may have noticed in Chapter 2 that each scene Billy visits is related in some way to the one he has just left. He's near death in the forest, then he jumps to another scene in which he nearly dies. His father is in one scene, his mother is in the following one. This process resembles stream-of-consciousness thinking: one idea somehow leads to another. Everyone has experienced this process, if only while daydreaming.

When you're worried or upset, certain images or scenes keep returning to your mind, either to replay themselves over and over or to pick up where you left off. When you're only daydreaming, two thoughts or scenes may be related by analogy (something in one scene is the same as or like something in the next) or by contradiction (something in one scene is the opposite of something in the next).

In the worried variety of stream-of-consciousness thinking, some images exert more pressure than others. They keep recurring even when you've drifted far away. Some of Billy's time jumps have a whimsical quality that indicates that they are of the carefree variety. But many times Billy returns to a moment in his life as if to finish out the scene. In such cases you can be pretty sure that it's psychological pressure that sends Billy there.

The Germans who capture Billy and Roland Weary in the creek bed aren't at all what you'd expect. They're a ragtag handful of ill-clad teenagers and old men with no teeth. Even their dog seems incompetent. But they have the guns, and they strip Weary down until he looks as embarrassing as they do. In the distance other German soldiers take care of the American scouts with "three inoffensive bangs."

Billy seems to find the whole scene comforting, even beautiful, but then he's almost freezing to death and hallucinating wildly. After being marched to a stone cottage where he immediately falls asleep, Billy pays a brief call on the future. It's almost as though he's on reconnaissance, looking for a nice time in his life to visit. The year 1967 is peaceful enough in Ilium: it's business as usual in his office in the shopping center. The only excitement comes when the siren goes off. Billy thinks it's World War III, but it's only noon.

NOTE: The imagery in almost every scene in this chapter is ironic. Every time he wakes up in peaceful Ilium in 1967, he's reminded of war (the siren, the devastated ghetto, the speech about Vietnam by the Marine major, the crippled veterans), yet each time he returns to World War II in 1944, everything looks beautiful, and the togetherness of the POWs is genuinely comforting to him. Vonnegut may be hinting that war has its good aspects, just as peace has its disadvantages.

He returns to 1944 and lets some German soldiers take pictures of him. This is kind of fun, but something about 1967 has snagged him, and he drifts back. Perhaps it's a premonition of the destruction he's about to see in the war, for Billy wakes up in his car in the middle of the Ilium ghetto, surrounded by burned-out buildings and crushed sidewalks. The area looks "like Dresden after it was firebombed--like the surface of the moon."

Billy is on his way to a luncheon at a popular American men's club that has for its symbol the most ferocious beast of the jungle, the lion. There he hears a Marine major talk of "bombing North Vietnam back into the Stone Age, if it refused to see reason." Billy isn't bothered because he has a prayer that keeps him from getting too upset about things:

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.

This "Prayer for Discernment" was composed by Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), a German-American theologian. It is also the motto of Alcoholics Anonymous, whose members say they find it as comforting and useful as Billy's patients do.

NOTE: Vonnegut may be using the prayer here because it reinforces our impression of Billy Pilgrim as a passive character. He may also be making a veiled reference to his own alcoholism, which he hints at in Chapter 1. (Vonnegut no longer drinks, by the way.) The prayer will turn up again near the end of the book.

We learn now that Billy has a troubling problem that belies his outward serenity: he has fits of weeping that he can't explain. Something is bothering Billy Pilgrim that all the riches and respect in his life cannot cure. If you suspect that it has something to do with his war experience, you're probably right.

As if to confirm this suspicion, Billy returns to the war. And now you understand another aspect of Billy's time-travel: when he can't bear to look at something that is happening at one time in his life, he dodges into another. In 1967 Billy is confronted by the disturbing spectacle of two crippled veterans selling phony magazine subscriptions. But back in 1944 he sees the world in a beautiful new way: everything is haloed by Saint Elmo's fire.