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

Chapter 5 also introduces Montana Wildhack, Billy's mate in the zoo on Tralfamadore. As fantasy, Billy's love story with Montana is hard to beat from a male point of view. She is vulnerable, trusting, and above all beautiful. Billy can be her gallant protector. She takes the sexual initiative shyly, of course--with the result that Billy doesn't need to feel any guilt about having "taken advantage of her." But even in this paradise Billy can't entirely forget the war. The shadow of her naked body on the wall reminds him of the skyline of Dresden before it was bombed.

A curious thing occurs near the end of the chapter. The scene in which Billy takes the train to Ilium for his father's funeral ends on the platform, with Billy talking to the porter. In the next paragraph Vonnegut returns to Billy's morphine night in the prison camp. The narrator says nothing about Billy's traveling in time. Before this the jumps Billy made in time were told in the order in which they occurred, but now Vonnegut interrupts the sequence of Billy's time-travels.

It's unlikely that Vonnegut forgot what he was doing. More probably the war story, as the novel approaches Dresden, is exerting more psychological pressure.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: CHAPTER 6

STRUCTURE: With one important exception--Billy's vision of his own assassination in 1976--the war months are the scene of the entire chapter. And at last the American POWs arrive in Dresden, where the most significant event in Billy's life will take place.

The chapter begins with another break in the sequence of Billy's time-travels. Chapter 5 ended in 1968, Chapter 6 begins on the morning after Billy's morphine night in the prison camp. The short opening scene is a little hard to believe, even by Billy Pilgrim's standards. It could be that the lingering effects of the morphine make Billy think that the two lumps in the lining of his new coat are secret treasures that are radiating a message for him. It could also be Vonnegut's whimsical comment on the strange power that hidden treasure sometimes exerts over men.

Billy sleeps for a while, then is awakened by the racket the English officers are making in building a new latrine, the Americans having ruined the old one.

NOTE: The "Golgotha sounds" Billy hears are a reference to the hill in Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified. The name means "place of the skull." The six men carrying the pool table like pallbearers add to this morbid image.

Paul Lazzaro delivers a sermonette on "the sweetest thing there is": revenge. He tells Billy and Derby a gruesome story about how he got back at a dog that bit him (maybe that's where he got the rabies!), and he advises Billy to enjoy life while he can. You learn now of the spiritual kinship between Lazzaro and his one war buddy, the late Roland Weary. Lazzaro has promised the dying Weary to get the man who killed him, and everyone who was in Weary's boxcar knows that it was Billy Pilgrim.

The next section, describing Billy's death, is peppered with the phrase "he says," an indication that this is one of Billy's fantasies. Notice that Billy doesn't travel there. Vonnegut simply holds up the war story to tell us what Billy Pilgrim says his death will be like.

NOTE: VONNEGUT'S ANTI-AMERICANISM Vonnegut's mockery of American values and behavior is pretty blatant throughout the whole prison camp sequence. First there was Billy's "vision of hell"--the Americans being "sick as volcanoes" after the feast and destroying the latrine. Then there was Campbell's so-called study of American POWs, which describes them as "the most self-pitying, least fraternal, and dirtiest of all prisoners of war." And in Billy's fantasy of the future, "The United States of America has been Balkanized, has been divided into twenty petty nations so that it will never again be a threat to world peace." This has led many of Vonnegut's critics to label him anti-American. His supporters argue that Vonnegut mocks America not because he hates it, but because he loves it so much, and wants his countrymen to be better than they are. What do you think?

Returning to the war, Billy is leaving the prison hospital with Lazzaro and Derby. Just as the three prisoners in their outlandish garb form "an unconscious travesty of that famous patriotic oil painting 'The Spirit of '76,'" what follows is a travesty of a free election. Edgar Derby becomes "head American." He gives an absurd acceptance speech, promising "to make damn well sure" everyone gets home safely. You can't miss the irony here or in the pathetic letters to his wife he's been composing in his head. Like Billy Pilgrim, you know already that Edgar Derby won't have anything to do with the safe return of his fellow prisoners. He'll be dead.

The scene has its bright moments. The prisoners learn they're being sent to Dresden, an "open city" that no one expects to be bombed. (In World War II, cities were declared "open" if they were considered to have no military value.) And Billy adds some touches of color to his frumpy outfit: an azure (light blue) toga and silver boots. He may once have looked like a filthy flamingo, but now he's a full-fledged clown.

Once they get to Dresden, Billy becomes the real leader of the Americans for all of Edgar Derby's "patriotism and middle age and imaginary wisdom." When the nervous guards finally see what the "murderous American infantrymen" are really like ("Here were more crippled human beings, more fools like themselves. Here was light opera"), they naturally put Billy at the head of the parade. He's the one best dressed for the part.

Not everybody thinks the Americans are funny. An exhausted surgeon demands to know how Billy has the nerve to look as clownish as he does. Billy makes the only friendly gesture he can think of in his dazed state of mind: he offers to the stranger his "treasures," the diamond and part of a denture that are hidden in his coat lining.

NOTE: APPEARANCE From a "civilized" standpoint, the surgeon is right to be offended. His outrage at how the Americans are dressed is the same as the outrage of the English officers. To these cultured Europeans, appearance is of the utmost importance: it is the flower of civilization. If the flower looks healthy, the whole plant must be sound. The English colonel at the prison camp was correct when he said "If you stop taking pride in your appearance, you will very soon die."

At last the narrative comes to the place that gives the book its name, and Billy arrives at the anchor point of his story. Here, beneath Slaughterhouse-Five (Schlachthof-Funf), Billy will spend the night in which Dresden is destroyed.

It is almost with a sigh of relief that you reach Dresden after hearing about it for so long. Vonnegut has heightened the suspense by announcing the destination far in advance and then delaying (while he told the story) Billy's arrival in Dresden. The real "climax" of the story has yet to come, and you can be sure that Vonnegut will put that off for as long as he can.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: CHAPTER 7

STRUCTURE: The story swings gently between two locations in time: the doomed airplane in 1968 and Dresden just before the bombing in 1945. When Chapter 7 opens, it's twenty-five years later than the close of Chapter 6. The narrator seems to have taken over the storytelling controls from Billy Pilgrim and is deciding on his own the order in which scenes will be presented. This short chapter also offers contrasting views of relations between people of different nationalities.

The plane's takeoff is unremarkable, except for the irony of Valencia's eating a candy bar as she waves goodbye to Billy for the last time. You know they will never see each other again--at least not in Earthling time.

Once in the air, the optometrists begin to party. Billy's father-in-law, Lionel Merble, gets things going by asking the barbershop quartet, The Febs (an anagram of Four-eyed Bastards), to sing his favorite naughty songs. The racist ditties that Lionel Merble finds so hilarious are followed by a scene in which a Polish man is hanged for having sex with a German woman during the war.

NOTE: NAZI RACISM The law the Pole had broken was one of many "race laws" instituted by Adolf Hitler and his minister for propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. Hitler believed that Germans were the "master" race, the "Aryans," and he made any mixing with inferior races a capital crime. The most famous victims of the race laws were the Jews, but anyone not of pure "Aryan" ancestry was in danger of being persecuted by the Nazis. One of Vonnegut's aunts, in order to marry a German German in the 1930s, had to prove that she had no "mixed blood" in her family.

Billy's brief time-travel to the Luxembourg forest just before the plane crashes indicates a parallel between the two incidents: in both cases Billy is the only survivor. The "guys" do indeed "go on" without him! In 1968 Billy is rescued by Austrian ski instructors who look like "golliwogs" in their ski masks.

NOTE: A golliwog was a doll whose face caricatured the features of a black person. Golliwogs first appeared in Florence K. Upton's illustrations for a series of children's books in the late nineteenth century. Here the racist image ties in with Lionel Merble's vulgar songs and the execution of the Pole for interracial sex.