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

Before you leave this charming establishment, notice the references to Montana Wildhack. The blue movie in the peepshow machine was made when she was a teenager. The article about her disappearance is in an old magazine. Here's more evidence that Billy's time-travel and the Tralfamadore fantasy began after the plane crash. He had known about Montana Wildhack's disappearance from reading this magazine when it first appeared, and in his delirium in the Vermont hospital he put it together with the premise of The Big Board. And remember, that the alien visitor in The Gospel from Outer Space was "shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian." The evidence is circumstantial, but it all fits.

Billy finally gets on a radio talk show. In this scene, Vonnegut concludes his discussion of fiction. He began it in Chapter 1 by considering the difficulty of writing fiction in the first place. In Chapter 5 he examined the not always positive effect fiction has on one's ability to understand and cope with life. Here he mocks the pronouncements of the "experts" on literature.

NOTE: The Virginian Vonnegut refers to is William Styron, whose novel The Confessions of Nat Turner had recently been published. That book portrayed sympathetically the trials and tribulations of a black slave in the Old South, as had Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, a Northerner, over a hundred years before.

"The death of the novel" was a fashionable topic at the time Slaughterhouse-Five was written, and Vonnegut spares little of his wit in deflating the pretentious attitudes of much literary criticism of the day.

For all his mocking tone in this section, Vonnegut has elsewhere voiced considerable doubt about the worth of fiction and its ability to say anything intelligent about the modern world. Billy's personal answer to the absurdity of contemporary life--he reinvents his life through fantasy--so embarrasses the panel of experts that they throw him out of the studio. Are they themselves any less embarrassing in their pompous seriousness, in Vonnegut's view? No, he seems to say, but they have a point, however absurdly they express it. Even if the novel isn't dead, it's not very healthy.

Little disturbed having his message rejected, Billy returns to his room and goes to bed so that he can visit Montana Wildhack one last time. By now they have a baby and Billy's wonderful fantasy is complete. He tells her about seeing her pictures in the Times Square porn shop, but she dismisses her past life as being as meaningless as his Dresden story. They have started the human race over again; the slate of the past is clean.

NOTE: THE DRAWINGS Vonnegut's drawing of the prayer inscribed on a locket hanging between Montana's breasts completes the trio of drawings in Slaughterhouse-Five. They are not just pictures, for each contains a message. The pattern of these messages is similar to a common formula in philosophical argument. First a thesis or idea is put forth: Life is nice ("Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt"). Then the antithesis or opposing idea is laid out against it: Life is a mess ("Please leave this latrine as tidy as you found it!"). Finally a synthesis is achieved by combining the two into a meaningful whole: Life is both good and bad (the prayer). The prayer itself demonstrates this kind of structure: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change (thesis), courage to change the things I can (antithesis), and wisdom always to know the difference (synthesis).

Just as the tombstone in the first drawing is a symbol of death, the breasts in this last drawing are a symbol of life. They may also imply that the serenity, courage and wisdom asked for in the prayer can only be found in a nurturing, loving relationship with another person. The symbolism in this drawing is particularly rich, and you can probably find other meanings in it as well.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: CHAPTER 10

STRUCTURE: This brief closing chapter falls roughly into two equal parts, the first part describing Vonnegut's return to Dresden with O'Hare in 1967, the second part closing out Billy Pilgrim's story with his last days as a POW in 1945, which he spends digging for bodies in the rubble.

Vonnegut begins by musing about recent violent deaths. As a conclusion to his musings, he remarks casually that the Tralfamadorians are more interested in Darwin than in Jesus. This is because the version of Darwin's theory of natural selection, commonly known as "survival of the fittest," accords with their determinism. Jesus was a crusader who tried to change things, which to the Tralfamadorians is impossible.

Vonnegut turns from talk of death to the subject of pleasant memories. One of his favorites is going to Dresden with O'Hare, this time for fun. And, in Vonnegut's case, for profit--but the irony is chilling. In a new introduction for Slaughterhouse-Five, written in 1976, he says:

The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is.

One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in.

Flying over the rebuilt cities of Germany, Vonnegut can't help imagining what it would look like if he dropped bombs on them.

The final sequence of scenes in the aftermath of the Dresden bombing is grim. The imagery is overwhelmingly dehumanized: the moonscape, the membrane of timbers, the corpse mines. Civilization has been so thoroughly wiped out that not even domestic animals can be used to help clean up the mess. Only human beings are adaptable and clever enough to deal with it.

Eventually the corpse mines are closed down. The job is simply too huge, and the soldiers have other things to do. Dresden is abandoned and all the weapons are buried.

As spring stubbornly appears, the Americans walk out into sudden freedom. The birds say the only intelligent thing there is to say about a massacre, "Poo-tee-weet"--that is, nothing!

One question that is left unanswered at the end of the book is what happens to Billy Pilgrim? Will he really be assassinated by Paul Lazzaro in 1976? Or does he escape permanently to Tralfamadore, to spend the rest of his days with his new family in a new Garden of Eden? (Notice that Vonnegut doesn't bring Billy back to Earth after his last scene with Montana.) Or are these just the fantasies of a deranged mind, and what really happens is that Barbara has her father locked up in an asylum? This seems the most likely answer to her question, "Father, Father, Father--What are we going to do with you?" You can find support for every one of these answers in different places in the novel, and Vonnegut never says which one he prefers.

This ambiguity is probably intentional. If Vonnegut could decide what to do with Billy Pilgrim, maybe he could tie up his own war experience into a neat little story as well, and he obviously can't--or won't--do that. Remember what he said in Chapter 1:

[This book) is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

Some readers believe that writing Slaughterhouse-Five was a form of therapy for Vonnegut. By the very act of putting his war experience into the structure of a story (no matter how unorthodox that structure may be), Vonnegut gives meaning to that otherwise absurd experience. This is similar to the idea that only through art is life justified. According to this view, Vonnegut is doing the same sort of thing in writing Slaughterhouse-Five that he has Billy Pilgrim do to cope with his war experience: Billy re-invents his life through fantasy and time-travel, Vonnegut by writing a novel.

Other readers find this interpretation too simplistic. True, they say, Vonnegut does re-invent his life in a way, by assuming the character of Billy Pilgrim, and then having Billy find a solution to all of his problems. But what kind of a solution is this--a retreat from reality into premature senility, and that is only possible after he's cracked his skull in a plane crash? Is Vonnegut really recommending such a course of action? To these readers, Vonnegut's "answer" to the meaningless horror of his war experience is just as meaningless as the experience itself.

Vonnegut may be saying that there is no way to completely lay an experience like Dresden to rest. And maybe he feels that it would be wrong to forget that horror, or to "re-invent" the memory of it so that it becomes just another "tale of great destruction." By combining the innocence of the "baby" who experienced it and the embarrassed perspective of the "old fart" who is trying to make sense of it, Vonnegut is keeping the memory of the Dresden massacre alive, perhaps in the hope that this may help to keep it from happening again.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: GLOSSARY