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

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: MONTANA WILDHACK

Billy's lover in this alien zoo is a curious combination of ingredients. On the one hand, she is the compliant sex kitten that bored, middle-aged males dream about in erotic fantasies. She is beautiful (and naked), and makes the first sexual advances--though shyly, of course.

On the other hand, Billy requires more from his dream woman than mere sexuality. His entire Tralfamadore fantasy is his attempt to reinvent the human race, with himself as the new Adam and Montana as the new Eve. And so he makes her loving as well as sexy, understanding as well as seductive, and a good mother to their child as well as a good lover to him. In Billy's ideal Creation, both must be able to behave as decently as he believes Adam and Eve really wanted to behave.

For all of her prodigious virtues, Montana Wildhack comes off as rather bloodless compared to the real-life women in the book, such as the annoying Valencia, the prickly Barbara, or the fiery Mary O'Hare. But then Billy prefers fantasy to real life. It's a lot safer.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: ELIOT ROSEWATER

One of the richest and smartest men in America, Eliot Rosewater is also one of the most disillusioned. His faith in American righteousness in World War II was shattered when he found that he had killed a German fireman who was trying to put out a fire that American bombers had started.

He tried drinking, but that just ruined his health without alleviating what he saw as the alarming unfairness of the modern world. So he committed himself to a mental hospital. There he meets a kindred spirit in Billy Pilgrim, who comes to share with him the one consolation Eliot has found in life: the peculiar wisdom in the science fiction of Kilgore Trout.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: KILGORE TROUT

The science fiction writer Kilgore Trout has great ideas for novels. (The Gutless Wonder is about a robot with bad breath; in The Gospel from Outer Space Jesus is a nobody until God adopts him.) But his prose style is frightful. After thirty years and more than seventy-five novels, Trout has only two fans, Eliot Rosewater and Billy Pilgrim, and even they are appalled by his writing.

Kilgore Trout is a manic version of Kurt Vonnegut, who also wrote science fiction and for years suffered from an indifferent public. Vonnegut uses Trout's books to make fun of many of the values Americans hold dear. At the same time, he gets in a few good swipes at the pretensions of his own profession.

In Slaughterhouse-Five (as in the two other Vonnegut novels in which he appears) Kilgore Trout plays a small but important role. His books offer Billy inspiration for therapeutic fantasies, and he personally gives Billy the courage to face his Dresden experience.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: HOWARD W. CAMPBELL, JR.

Campbell is an American Nazi propagandist who writes a scornful account of the behavior of American POWs in Germany and who shows up at the slaughterhouse in Dresden to recruit candidates for his Free American Corps. He tries to bribe the Americans by promising them a terrific meal, but Edgar Derby puts Campbell in his place by calling him "lower... than a blood-filled tick." Campbell only smiles.

In an earlier book, Mother Night, Vonnegut told Campbell's whole story--he's really an American spy who delivers coded messages to the Allies through his racist radio broadcasts. But in Slaughterhouse we see him only in his "official" role as the Nazi he pretends to be.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: MARY O'HARE

Vonnegut dedicates this book to a real person, Mary O'Hare, the wife of his old war buddy Bernard V. O'Hare. He first meets her when he tries to get Bernard to reminisce with him about their war experiences, with the idea of generating material for his "famous book about Dresden." This makes Mary angry. She cares deeply about life--she's a nurse--and to her, all war does is kill people. She is strong-minded and courageous enough to tell off an almost perfect stranger when she thinks he's wrong.

Vonnegut admires Mary O'Hare and wishes more people were like her. He believes that if enough women like her told off enough "old farts" like him, enough people might see the absurdity of war and we wouldn't have wars any more.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: BERNARD V. O'HARE

When Vonnegut visits Bernard O'Hare after the war, O'Hare appears to be little more than a henpecked husband, and acts embarrassed when Vonnegut tries to get him reminiscing about the war.

But O'Hare had refused to pick up souvenirs in Dresden, so even then he must have hated the war and the "profit" some people made from it (his buddies with their "trophies," Vonnegut with his book). He's a gentle man who reproaches no one: when Vonnegut asks why Mary is mad, O'Hare lies to spare Vonnegut's feelings. And even though he disapproves of Vonnegut's project, he is kind enough to leave a book about Dresden on the nightstand for him.

O'Hare is a great friend, and Vonnegut obviously likes him a lot. He's the only war buddy Vonnegut has kept in touch with, and together they return to Dresden in 1967.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: KURT VONNEGUT

The author himself appears in Slaughterhouse-Five, mainly in the first chapter, where he struggles vainly to get a handle on writing his Dresden book. His breakthrough comes when Mary O'Hare reminds him that it's really babies who fight wars, not grown men. From that moment on everything goes right for the author.

Vonnegut also pops up here and there in Billy Pilgrim's POW story, but he's really just reminding you that what those American prisoners of war saw and did really happened--and that he was there at the time. In the last chapter he tells about his return to Dresden as a tourist in 1967 with Bernard O'Hare.