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

NOTE: Edgar Derby is important to Slaughterhouse-Five in several ways. Vonnegut gives his age as forty-four (or forty-five) at the time of his capture in 1944, which means that he was born at the close of the nineteenth century. And Derby has the ideals and gentlemanly behavior that we usually associate with an older, more graceful era. We imagine that this elegant and honorable way of life died a horrible death as a result of two monstrous wars. Could it be a coincidence that Billy Pilgrim is himself forty-four in 1967, when he imagines he is kidnapped by aliens? At that age, many men go through an emotional trauma known as "the mid-life crisis," when they have to come to terms with the fact that they're no longer young. Edgar Derby may be fighting to prove that he is still young by keeping in shape and finagling his way into combat. Billy Pilgrim resolves his mid-life crisis by inventing aliens and time-travel.

And then perhaps the author just thinks that forty-four is an important age to be. Kurt Vonnegut was forty-four when he revisited Dresden in 1967.

Paul Lazzaro will turn out to have a personality as disgusting as his body. For the moment all we know is that he promised Weary he would get even with Billy Pilgrim.

Billy comes unstuck in time again in the stinging, impersonal shower. He wakes up in the flying saucer, having returned to where the first part of the chapter left off. Here he has his second lesson in the Tralfamadorian view of time and the universe: the question of free will does not exist beyond the civilization of Earth.

NOTE: FREE WILL The doctrine of free will holds that the choices a human being makes are his own and they have a part in shaping his future. (The opposite of free will is determinism, which says that an individual's choices have already been made for him and he is powerless to change his future.) Philosophers (both theologians and lay people) have debated the existence of free will ever since the beginning of philosophy. But what was a burning question throughout most of human history seems to have little relevance for most people in the second half of the twentieth century. Do you know anyone who is concerned about whether or not free will exists?

The Tralfamadorian view does not accept or deny free will. It simply isn't an issue for them. Their concept of time and the universe is altogether different. Vonnegut may be saying here that the question of free will no longer has meaning.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: CHAPTER 5

STRUCTURE: Chapter 5 is the longest in the book. It contains no less than thirteen time jumps. Billy's story develops significantly on three fronts: he arrives at the zoo on Tralfamadore, where he learns about the aliens' philosophy; as a POW in 1945 he reaches the prison camp and spends a crazy night on morphine, which gives him strange visions; and in a new time period, 1948, he appears in a mental hospital in Lake Placid, New York, where's he's recovering from a nervous breakdown, and later in a honeymoon resort with his new bride. As you read through the chapter, notice how Vonnegut enriches these plot developments by using echoes and analogies. He also introduces new material: an elaborate discussion of the effect fiction has on our understanding of life, a couple of drawings, and Billy's fantasy lover Montana Wildhack.

First, look at a couple of images that echo material from previous chapters. Under morphine in the prison camp, Billy has another of his peaceful hallucinations. It is similar to those he had in the Luxembourg forest just before his capture. This time he's a giraffe in a beautiful garden, and the only violence in the scene is Billy's chewing on a tough pear. Some readers see the giraffe as the perfect image for Billy Pilgrim: tall, gangling, absurdly gentle. For others, the giraffes represent a metaphor for human beings, creatures who are as "preposterously specialized" as giraffes. Remember how bizarre the Tralfamadorians find Earthlings, with their weird view of time and their curious ideas like free will? For Billy the heart of this vision seems to be his finding others like himself and being loved and accepted just as he is.

Another scene full of echoes is Billy's wedding night. After making love, Valencia wants to talk about the war. "It was a simple-minded thing for a female Earthling to do, to associate sex and glamor with war." Vonnegut's comment reminds us of Roland Weary's "sexy, murderous relationship" with his victims and of the German soldiers' mopping up "after the orgasm of victory."

Vonnegut spends most of this chapter examining fiction from many angles. The description he gives of Tralfamadorian literature (see the discussion of Style) sounds pretty familiar to someone who is reading Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut had already announced on the title page that "this is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from," and now he explains what he meant. He also seems to be telling you what you should get from the book and how you can best appreciate and understand it.

On the other hand, you're not a Tralfamadorian. You can't read the brief clumps of symbols "all at once, not one after the other," so you can't appreciate "the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time." What kind of game is Vonnegut playing? It could be that he's harping on the difficulty of his Dresden story again: even if he could write it right, you couldn't read it right.

But there's another way of interpreting this. You can't read Slaughterhouse-Five the way a Tralfamadorian would, but when you think about the novel after you've read it, you can come close to seeing the book from a Tralfamadorian perspective. The entire story is then in your memory. You can focus on a favorite scene or image and move on to another part of the book without having to flip pages or read through the passages in between. You can go backward as well as forward in your memory of the story. And this applies not only to Slaughterhouse-Five but to any other work of fiction--and ultimately to all your past experiences as well.

Back in the prison camp the English officers give a performance of Cinderella, which Vonnegut calls "the most popular story ever told."

NOTE: CINDERELLA In Palm Sunday, Vonnegut says he believes that one of the reasons the Cinderella story is so popular has to do with its design. The structure of its plot is the same as that of the basic story of Christianity. The Old Testament creation myth parallels the gifts from Cinderella's fairy godmother, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is the clock striking twelve, and the prince finding Cinderella is the redemption of the world by Jesus Christ. Both stories are so comforting and hopeful that they're hard to resist. Vonnegut maintains that any story with this structure is bound to be popular because people want so much to believe that life works this way.

Many readers find Vonnegut's clearest statements on fiction in the scenes in the mental ward in 1948. Here Billy discovers a kindred spirit in Eliot Rosewater. Billy and Eliot are "alarmed by the outside world." They have found life meaningless, in part because of their experiences in the war. Both are "trying to re-invent themselves and their universe" by reading science fiction.

NOTE: In his book The Birth of Tragedy the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) puts forth the idea that "only through art is life justified." To him, life in itself is amoral and senseless. But art, he says, gives life meaning and purpose by structuring it--for example, by putting it in the form of a story (myth, legend, fiction) that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Vonnegut seems to like this idea, although he's not sure whether it works any more.

According to Rosewater, Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov contains everything there is to know about life. One of the themes of that Russian masterwork is that the world is indeed terrifying because it has rejected God and tried to set up man in God's place. But the implied solution of that book--a return to faith--is what Rosewater thinks "isn't enough any more."

He finds some consolation in science fiction, particularly in the stories of Kilgore Trout, and he shares this discovery with Billy. Vonnegut summarizes two Kilgore Trout novels. In Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, Trout proposes that certain mental illnesses have their causes in the "fourth dimension." Doctors can't really help because being Earthlings, they can see only in three dimensions.

NOTE: THE FOURTH DIMENSION Both Trout and Vonnegut use the term "fourth dimension" to indicate a vague aspect of the universe that is beyond human perception (which is limited to three dimensions, length, width, and depth). But modern physics, in particular Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, routinely uses a fourth dimension in its equations and calculations. This fourth dimension is called time. Trout's diagnosis seems to be correct in the case of Billy Pilgrim, who has so much trouble with time.

In The Gospel from Outer Space an alien visitor to Earth believes that Christians sometimes behave cruelly (as in the Crusades) because of "slipshod storytelling in the New Testament." So he writes a new Gospel in which Jesus isn't the Son of God until just before his death, when God adopts him. By changing this simple story element, the visitor from outer space "re-invents" Christianity.

These two fictitious novels of Kilgore Trout are clearly intended as satire: Maniacs sends up the "science" of psychology, The Gospel parodies the Scriptures. At the same time, both "fictions" explain mysteries that official theory or storytelling cannot account for. Vonnegut's point seems to be that fiction can be powerful in shaping the way you look at life and in helping you to understand things that otherwise would not make sense. Try to think of other books you've read that have changed the way you look at the world.

Vonnegut also examines two devices that fiction writers use: euphemism and metaphor. Notice Vonnegut's language in the story of Edgar Derby's capture. Shrapnel is turned into ordinary domestic objects, "knives and needles and razorblades," that rain down from "the incredible artificial weather Earthlings sometimes create for other Earthlings when they don't want those other Earthlings to inhabit Earth any more." There are no bullets per se, just "little lumps of lead in copper jackets... zipping along much faster than sound." These images are examples of euphemism, the "nice" way of describing something unpleasant. You may recall the "three inoffensive bangs" when the scouts were killed. The discrepancy between the terrifying reality and the innocent description of it relays the message more effectively than a straightforward description.

Each of these images is also a metaphor, a figure of speech in which a writer uses a word or a phrase to suggest a likeness or an analogy. A hilarious example of the necessity and absurdity of metaphors can be found in the scene in the alien zoo. The Tralfamadorians wonder what it must look like to be able to see in only three dimensions. The zoo guide explains Billy's plight by inventing the metaphor of a horribly complicated contraption that restricts Billy.

There are other new elements in this chapter besides the discussion of fiction. On Billy's wedding night, while Valencia is trying to get him to talk about the war, he suddenly has an idea for his epitaph: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt." What's odd about this is that Vonnegut provides a drawing to go with the words. Then, in the very next scene, there's another drawing, this time of the latrine sign that Billy--in his morphine haze--sees floating in midair: "Please leave this latrine as tidy as you found it!" Vonnegut's drawings of the two messages make them seem pretty important, for these are the first drawings to appear in the book. Perhaps the second drawing is meant as a contrast to the first, which expresses Billy's hopelessly naive idea of what life should be like--the latrine sign is meant to bring you down to earth, as it were. It's also possible that the second drawing is philosophical advice from the author: "Life is enough of a mess, don't make it worse."