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

Then, as always seems to happen, Billy wakes up back in the war. The train arrives at a prison camp, and there a group of British officers throw a banquet for the American POWs.

Before long he is traveling in time again, to a mental hospital in 1948, where he's visited by his fiance, Valencia Merble. As soon as he recovers from his nervous breakdown, Billy will be set up in business as an optometrist by Valencia's father. Billy is introduced to science fiction by his hospital roommate, Eliot Rosewater, whose favorite author is Kilgore Trout. Trout's writing is terrible, but Billy comes to admire his ideas.

Billy travels in time again to Tralfamadore, where he is the most popular exhibit in the zoo. His keepers love talking to Billy because his ideas are so strange to them. He thinks, for example, that wars could be prevented if people could see into the future as he can.

Next Billy wakes up on the first night of his honeymoon. After making love, Valencia wants to talk about the war. Before Billy can say much about it, he's back there himself.

The American POWs are being moved to Dresden, which as an "open city" (of no military value) has come through the war unscathed, while almost every other German city has been heavily bombed. Billy knows that Dresden will soon be totally destroyed, even though there's nothing worth bombing there--no troops, no weapons factories, nothing but people and beautiful buildings. The Americans are housed in building number five of the Dresden slaughterhouse.

Billy continues his time-travels. He survives a plane crash in 1968. A few years before that, he meets Kilgore Trout. And on Tralfamadore he tells his zoo-mate, Montana Wildhack, about the bombing of Dresden.

Billy Pilgrim and the other American POWs take shelter in a meat locker beneath the slaughterhouse. When they go out the next day, Dresden looks like the surface of the moon. Everything has been reduced to ash and minerals, and everything is still hot. Nothing is moving anywhere.

After months of digging corpses out of the ruins, Billy and the others wake up one morning to discover that their guards have disappeared. The war is over and they are free.


One way to keep straight the many characters in Slaughterhouse-Five is to group them according to when they appear in Billy Pilgrim's life.

There are the soldiers he meets during the war (Roland Weary, Paul Lazzaro, Edgar Derby, and Howard W. Campbell, Jr.), the people from his postwar years in Ilium, New York (his wife Valencia, his daughter Barbara, Eliot Rosewater, Kilgore Trout, and Professor Rumfoord), and the characters in his adventure in outer space (the Tralfamadorians and Montana Wildhack).

A fourth group of characters might include the author himself and actual persons in his life, such as Bernard and Mary O'Hare. Some of the characters in this novel had already appeared in earlier novels by Vonnegut: Eliot Rosewater and Kilgore Trout in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Howard W. Campbell, Jr., in Mother Night, and the Tralfamadorians in The Sirens of Titan. Except for the O'Hares, you meet all of these characters only when they interact with Billy Pilgrim.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: BILLY PILGRIM

Kurt Vonnegut has chosen the names of his characters with care. When you first see a character's name, you usually know something about that character even before you read about what he or she has done. Billy Pilgrim's last name tells you that he is someone who travels in foreign lands and that his journeys may have a religious or spiritual aspect.

Otherwise Billy doesn't appear very promising as the hero of a novel. Physically, he's a classic wimp. He's tall, weak, and clumsy, with "a chest and shoulders like a box of kitchen matches" and the overall appearance of "a filthy flamingo."

He has a very passive personality as well. When Billy was a child and his father threw him into a swimming pool, he just went to the bottom and waited to drown. While he is trying to avoid capture by the Germans, three other American soldiers offer him protection and companionship, yet he keeps saying, "You guys go on without me." After the war, he allows himself to be pressured into marrying a stupid and unattractive woman no one else will marry. And he lets his daughter bully him constantly.

In the world of Slaughterhouse-Five Billy is a sheep among wolves. Some readers regard him as a kind of Christ figure who sojourns in the wilderness of his past and returns with a message of hope and peace for humanity. They also see a parallel between Billy's assassination by Paul Lazzaro and Jesus' martyrdom on the cross.

But none of the other characters see Billy this way. In the army his "meek faith in a loving Jesus" makes everybody else sick. His pacifism, together with his pathetic attempts to keep warm, make Billy look like a clown in his blue toga and silver shoes.

Although many of the people he meets are thoughtless or cruel to him, the thing that does the most damage to his already fragile personality is the fire-bombing of Dresden. In what kind of world is such a thing possible? Billy is tormented by this question to which he has no answer.

Life seems to victimize Billy at every turn, yet he prefers to turn the other cheek rather than put up a fight. This may be his weakling attempt at "the imitation of Christ," but to many readers it looks a lot like a death wish. But Billy has two things that enable him to survive: a powerful imagination and a belief that at heart people are eager to behave decently. His own belief in goodness never lets him despair, though he comes close to it. Ultimately it's his imagination that saves him.

Before Eliot Rosewater (another disillusioned man) introduces him to science fiction, Billy's fantasies are aimless and childish. Then, in the writings of Kilgore Trout, Billy discovers a kindred spirit who not only agrees that life is crazy but offers alternative versions of reality. This gives Billy the idea of inventing a whole new fantasy world.

In this created world, Billy sees himself as Adam and Montana Wildhack as Eve. In order for this brave new world to work, Billy must become "innocent" again, and to do this he has to discharge the guilt and despair associated with his past. He does this by reorganizing his life through time-travel, gradually putting everything--but especially Dresden--in perspective. When this is accomplished, his pilgrimage is over and Billy is free.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: ROLAND WEARY

A soldier in combat is always on duty, his life constantly at risk, the tension sometimes unbearable. You know when you first see his name that Billy's fellow soldier Roland Weary is exhausted after many months of fighting. What he needs is some rest.

Weary is a hard person to like: he's stupid, fat, and mean, and he smells bad. It's no surprise that his companions want to "ditch" him most of the time. So Weary has had to learn to deal with rejection, and one way he does this is by fantasizing a glorious and exciting war movie in which he is the hero. Because Weary fears that his real-life companions, the army scouts, will abandon him, his war movie concentrates on the deep, manly friendships he wishes he had in real life.

Weary knows that the scouts will try to get rid of him sooner or later. His "Three Musketeers" story is only a fantasy. He will want revenge when he is ditched, and he usually gets his revenge by ditching someone else. So he picks up a poor misfit who is even less popular than himself, suckers him into a friendship, then ditches him first. This time his would-be victim is Billy Pilgrim.