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

Vonnegut allows Billy to back away from reliving Dresden and to become a storyteller himself. Earlier, in the honeymoon scene, Billy was embarrassed by Valencia's questions about the war and ducked into the bathroom the first chance he got. Now, with Montana Wildhack in the zoo on Tralfamadore, he seems to have no such problems. Montana doesn't specify what story she wants to hear, and Billy's choice seems rather grim: the appearance of Dresden on the day after the bombing. Billy isn't running away from his Dresden experience any more. It's the most important story in his life, and he's no longer afraid of it.

Vonnegut closes the chapter with an account of the prisoners' first day in the "new" Dresden. After the initial shock and grief, the guards' survival instinct takes over and they start moving everyone toward the outskirts. American planes appear for the "mopping up," machine-gunning anything that moves. They miss Billy and Vonnegut's group but kill some people in another cluster of survivors by the river. Vonnegut's deadpan remark that "the idea was to hasten the end of the war" prepares us for dealing with this subject in the next chapter.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: CHAPTER 9

STRUCTURE: In Chapter 9 Vonnegut wraps up all of Billy Pilgrim's stories except that of the immediate aftermath of the Dresden bombing. And he starts and finishes two new stories that take place in 1968. The first is Billy's encounter with Professor Rumfoord in the Vermont hospital. The second is his attempt to tell his story to the world by going on a radio talk show in New York City. Vonnegut also addresses the most important question about the bombing of Dresden: why?

He begins by removing Valencia. Because Billy is still delirious from the plane crash he is busy dreaming and traveling in time, and doesn't learn about his wife's death until later. Billy's hospital roommate, Professor Bertram Copeland Rumfoord, is busy with a project of his own: an official history of the army air force in World War II.

Rumfoord embodies in every way the old-fashioned ideal of the American male. Athletic, potent, and fiercely energetic even in his seventies, Rumfoord has worn out four wives and is working on a fifth, his new bride Lily, who was born in the year Dresden was bombed. Poor Lily is just a symbol to Rumfoord, "one more public demonstration that he was a superman." She has been running errands, collecting material for Rumfoord's book, even though she's supposed to be on her honeymoon. The document she brings in now is President Harry S. Truman's announcement that the first atomic bomb has just been dropped on Hiroshima.

NOTE: THE ATOMIC BOMB Vonnegut breaks off the quote just when Truman is about to give what many thought was the best reason for using the bomb--to hasten the end of the war. The rest of the announcement runs as follows:

It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 [1945, calling for unconditional surrender] was issued [by the U.S., Britain and Russia] at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware.

Truman's statement sounds rather boastful today, but it must be remembered that America had been at war for almost four years, and everyone thought and spoke accordingly. In addition, although Japan was clearly losing the war, it still remained capable of fierce resistance, as the fighting in the Pacific had demonstrated. The only alternative to dropping the bomb was a massive invasion, and that could have prolonged the fighting for years, with tremendous loss of life on both sides.

Vonnegut presents contrasting official views of the Dresden bombing. The first, written by a retired Air Force general, sounds a lot like Truman's in its reasoning, but the tone is definitely more belligerent. The second, written by an Englishman of equal rank, is calmer in its language. It designates Dresden as the worst massacre in history.

For readers who share his antiwar sympathies, this section of Chapter 9 provides Vonnegut's most devastating indictment of the military manner of thinking. By having the "warmongers" speak, he cleverly lets them damn themselves. Other readers find Vonnegut's wholesale condemnation of violence under any circumstances simplistic and immature and accuse him of stacking the deck against people who sincerely wanted to end the war. These readers argue that once the fighting was under way, there were only two choices: destroy the enemy or surrender.

Billy Pilgrim is little concerned with these arguments. Neither his children nor Valencia's death seem to have much effect on him. Everyone thinks the brain damage has made him a vegetable, but the truth is quite the opposite. Billy is working on a project that has given purpose to his life: he is "preparing letters and lectures about the flying saucers, the negligibility of death, and the true nature of time." He believes he can save the world.

What brings Billy out of his creative trance is his roommate, Professor Rumfoord, who talks of putting Billy out of his misery. Billy tries to speak to him, but it's not easy to penetrate what Vonnegut calls Rumfoord's "military manner" of perceiving Billy.

Between bouts of "trying to prove to a willfully deaf and blind enemy that he was interesting to hear and see," Billy travels in time to his last adventure in Dresden. It's a warm spring day two days after the end of the war in Europe. Billy is snoozing in the back of a wagon. He has nowhere to go, nothing to do, and he is at peace with the world for the first and almost the last time in his life.

His peace is shattered when two German obstetricians wake him and scold him because he and his thoughtless buddies have badly abused the horses pulling the wagon. Billy bursts into tears. Do you see the connection with the previous scene? Rumfoord is no worse for refusing to listen to Billy than Billy is for being oblivious to the horses' suffering. Thoughtlessness is not restricted to the "military manner" of thinking; human beings seem to be thoughtless by nature.

Billy returns in time to the Vermont hospital to finish dealing with Rumfoord, who offers a new bit of conventional wisdom about the massacre at Dresden: "Pity the men who had to do it"--as if the agents were more to be pitied than the victims.

NOTE: Rumfoord is obviously a caricature (an exaggerated, one-sided portrait) of the all-American male, so this statement sounds absurd coming from him. Vonnegut's own feelings on the subject are more complex. In an interview he relates the following story: "When I went to the University of Chicago after the war the guy who interviewed me for admission had bombed Dresden. He got to that part of my life story and he said, 'Well, we hated to do it.' The comment sticks in my mind... [It] was more humane [than saying 'We were ordered to do it']. I think he felt the bombing was necessary, and it may have been."

Billy is beyond such considerations. He has transcended even the humaneness of the horse pitiers. He has The Answer: "Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on Tralfamadore."

This sounds a lot like determinism, which was discussed in Chapter 4. If you recall the autobiographical elements in Billy Pilgrim's character and the way Vonnegut has previously used the Tralfamadorians to make direct thematic statements, it's tempting to see Vonnegut's answer to Dresden as: it had to be. But remember that the author has a larger perspective than Billy, larger even than the Tralfamadorians. And don't forget how Vonnegut brought Billy to this comforting philosophy: a plane crash scrambled Billy's brains, disturbing his sense of time and making him unable to tell the difference between real life and fantasy. This hardly qualifies Billy as a wise man whose message should be taken seriously.

By thus undermining Billy's credibility, Vonnegut may be attempting to answer those who defend the Dresden bombing: it may have been necessary, as he admits, but there is no way to be sure, unless you're an alien who can see in four dimensions, or a prematurely senile optometrist who thinks he's "come unstuck in time."

In order to deal with his Dresden experience, Billy has literally gone out of his mind. What of the author himself? How is Vonnegut coming to terms with his memories of the war? The answer must wait until both Billy's story and the story of Vonnegut's writing Slaughterhouse-Five are complete, which will happen in the next chapter. For the moment, Billy Pilgrim has a final adventure to go through.

After coming home from the hospital, he sneaks off to New York to proclaim his solution to all of life's problems. He's tremendously excited, not only by his mission but because it's almost the first time in his life that he has been entirely on his own. He goes to Times Square, and in a pornography shop he finds books by Kilgore Trout. The one he remembers having read is The Big Board, whose story is very similar to Billy's interlude with Montana Wildhack on Tralfamadore. Billy had read this book in the mental hospital after the war.

Another Trout novel is new to him: a time-traveler goes back to Biblical days to meet the real Jesus and find out whether or not Jesus died on the cross. Clearly Trout is very much interested in the Jesus story (remember The Gospel from Outer Space?). But then so is Vonnegut. There are allusions to Jesus throughout Slaughterhouse-Five. The horse pitiers were "crooning" to the horses, and their "tones might have been those used by the friends of Jesus when they took His ruined body down from His cross." And Vonnegut thinks the Christmas carol "Away in the Manger" describes Billy Pilgrim as well as Jesus.

Some readers think Vonnegut is mocking Christianity by parodying the myths on which it is based. Although he once attended services in a Unitarian Church more or less regularly, Vonnegut has been an atheist all his life and in general believes that organized religion is as dangerous as any other form of organized authority. Other readers maintain that Vonnegut makes a distinction between the stories and ideals that form the basis of religious faith and the religious institutions whose actions he finds are often atrocious.

Whatever you see as the cause of Vonnegut's ambivalence toward religion, his attitude toward pornography is pretty clear: "It was a ridiculous store, all about love and babies." Of course the so-called sex peddled here has nothing to do with love or babies.