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

NOTE: Saint Elmo is the patron saint of sailors, who sometimes see a flamelike radiance surrounding the prominent points of a ship in stormy weather. Another name for this phenomenon is corposant, which comes from the Latin corpus sancti, meaning "body of a saint." Billy is having a kind of religious experience in which everything appears to be glowing with holiness.

The sights fill him with joy and excitement even though nobody else seems to be taking it this way--not Roland Weary, whose feet are literally killing him. The Americans' humiliation at being captured is made worse by the discomfort and boredom of being packed into boxcars with nothing to do for days. When you see prisoners in war movies, they are usually either being tortured or planning escape. (That is Roland Weary's kind of thinking.) Yet the reality of being a prisoner of war is far less glamorous, and the details in this scene are as mundane as they can be.

There are, however, the comforts of human contact. The men sleep together "nestled like spoons." They keep their courage up by yelling at the guards (which is perfectly safe because the guards don't understand English) and by telling each other it's not so bad. One former hobo says he's seen lots worse than this.

But it's dehumanizing to be a prisoner, however peaceful and even domestic this scene may seem. Vonnegut emphasizes this by injecting images that depersonalize the prisoners. Trains talk to each other across the rail yard, and "each car became a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators."

After a while Vonnegut doesn't even refer to the characters as prisoners or Americans; he simply calls them human beings. Then he depersonalizes them further: they are no longer individuals but "a warm, squirming, farting, sighing earth" on the floor of the boxcar.

Christmas passes unnoticed as the train moves slowly east across Germany. And Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck again.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: CHAPTER 4

STRUCTURE: In this chapter we visit two time locations: 1967, when Billy is kidnapped by aliens, and 1945, where we find out more of what it's like to be a prisoner. Two important characters, Edgar Derby and Paul Lazzaro, make their appearance.

NOTE: SCIENCE FICTION Early in the eighteenth century the French philosopher Montesquieu wanted to criticize his society and government. He thought that people would pay more attention to what he wrote if he invented visitors from a distant country who wrote "letters" home describing what they found in France. The Persian Letters was a best seller, and everyone talked about what the "Persians" had said about the French.

By the end of the nineteenth century, writers had found that other human beings, no matter what country they came from, did not provide enough contrast for the studies of human society they had in mind. So they invented creatures from other worlds, who would see the common, everyday behavior of human beings in an entirely different way. Thus, one purpose of science fiction is to encourage you to examine aspects of human activity that you normally take for granted and rarely think about.

The scene that opens Billy's first Tralfamadore story is littered with images that echo earlier scenes. The orange and black stripes on the wedding tent repeat the markings on the POW train. Billy and Valencia are "nestled like spoons in their big double bed," just as the prisoners were in the boxcar. Billy's blue and ivory feet recall the feet of corpses he saw on his way to the train. And the atmosphere of the sleeping house is reminiscent of Vonnegut's late-night vigil in Chapter 1.

There are more parallels, and all of them enhance the spookiness of the scene. Billy knows that in an hour something incredible is going to happen. To pass the time, and perhaps calm his nerves a little, he drinks flat champagne and watches a movie.

The World War II movie seen backward is one of the most famous passages in Slaughterhouse-Five. The idea is so simple--like a child's asking, "Daddy, why do people hurt each other?"--that it's amazing no one thought of it before. Have you ever done something in anger and later wished you could take it back? If life were a movie, Vonnegut is saying, that would be easy. You'd just run the film backward.

Billy doesn't stop going backward when he reaches the beginning of the movie and the soldiers have become high school kids. He wants to go all the way back to the beginning of human life and start over because he feels that human beings have messed things up the first time around.

Billy continues to be haunted by images from earlier experiences. A dog barks, just as one did in the Luxembourg forest before he was captured by the Germans. The ladder let down from the flying saucer looks like the rim of a Ferris wheel from his childhood. And the purple light he is trapped in is like the violet light of death.

Billy gets his first lesson in Tralfamadorian philosophy. When he asks, "Why me?" they answer:

"That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?...

"Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."

The bugs-in-amber comparison reminds us of characters trapped in diagrams in Chapter 1, and we can see that Vonnegut is drawing a parallel between human beings in time and characters in a story. To the Tralfamadorians, all time is fixed like a solid block of amber. Likewise a story is fixed once it is in print.

The saucer's takeoff dislodges Billy in time, and he goes back to the boxcar, which is slowly crossing Germany. As with Vonnegut during the non-night he spent in Boston, time won't pass for Billy Pilgrim. One of the hardest things prisoners have to bear are the long stretches of empty time. Billy can measure time only by the click the wheels make as they go over a seam in the track. And a year passes between clicks, a direct echo of Chapter 1.

NOTE: IMPRISONMENT AND DEPRIVATION A person placed in an environment of sensory deprivation quickly loses all sense of time, and this loss may be followed by more serious psychological disturbances such as hallucination, distortion of body image (parts of your body seem to blow up to giant size or shrink away to nothing, you can't find your arm, etc.), and vertigo (the ground seems to pitch and roll beneath you). This is why solitary confinement in a dark cell is considered such cruel punishment.

If Billy could sleep, he could do something interesting, like dream or travel in time. No one wants to sleep near him because he kicks and makes noise. Meanwhile, things are getting worse: there's no more food and the temperature is dropping. The optimistic former hobo dies, insisting "this ain't so bad." Roland Weary also dies, still blaming Billy for their capture and now for his death as well.

Vonnegut continues to employ dehumanizing images. The mass of prisoners are a liquid that the guards must coax into flowing out of the boxcars when they reach the prison camp.

Edgar Derby and Paul Lazzaro now appear, and Vonnegut introduces them impersonally as the best and worst bodies. Yet he gives each one a history so that you'll have to pay attention to these individual molecules of liquid flowing through the delousing station.

Derby not only has the best body, he seems to have the best reason for being here: he wanted to fight in this war. He is an educated, intelligent, and compassionate person (he cradled the dying Roland Weary). And we know already that Derby will die in Dresden.