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

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: SETTING

There are three main settings in Slaughterhouse-Five.

1. War-ravaged Europe, through which Billy travels as a POW and ends up in Dresden.

2. Peacetime America, where Billy prospers as an optometrist and pillar of society in Ilium, New York.

3. The planet Tralfamadore, where Billy and his fantasy lover Montana Wildhack are exhibited in a zoo.

Each setting corresponds to a different period in Billy Pilgrim's life, and the story jumps from one setting to another as Billy travels back and forth in time.

The physical contrast between the devastation of Europe and the affluence of postwar America is tremendous. It's ironic that Billy, who suffered extreme privations as a prisoner of war, is made to feel no better by the material wealth he later acquires as a successful optometrist in Ilium, N.Y.

Ilium is the classical name for Troy, one of the richest cities in the ancient world. In The Iliad, the Greek poet Homer (ninth century B.C.) tells the story of the Trojan War, in which Troy was eventually destroyed by the besieging Greeks. Some readers believe that Slaughterhouse-Five is Kurt Vonnegut's Iliad, for Troy was reputedly as beautiful as Dresden was before it was bombed.

Billy begins to be happy about life only in an artificial but cozy habitat on another planet. Tralfamadore is an invention of Billy's imagination, a paradise in which he, as Adam, and a new Eve (the former pornographic movie star Montana Wildhack) can start the human race over again. Within the dome that protects them from the poisonous atmosphere of Tralfamadore, Billy and Montana are tended and watched over by a new set of gods, the wise and kindly Tralfamadorians.

But notice that in each of the novel's main settings Billy is confined: first as a POW, then as a prisoner of the meaningless contraptions of modern life, finally as an exhibit in an alien zoo. And throughout the book Vonnegut portrays Billy as a prisoner of time. Billy cannot change the past, the present, or the future, no matter how much he moves around from one to the other. The persistent image of a bug trapped in amber is Vonnegut's clearest expression of this idea.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: THEMES

Slaughterhouse-Five is first and foremost about war and how human beings cope with it. In treating this subject, Vonnegut explores several major themes, but no single one of them explains the whole novel. You'll find that some of the following statements ring more true to you than others, yet you can find evidence in the book to support all of them.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: WAR IS ABSURD

Vonnegut attacks the reasoning that leads people to commit atrocities by drawing character portraits (Roland Weary and Professor Rumfoord) and by quoting from official documents (President Harry Truman's explanation of the reasons for dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima). And he gives you a look at the ruins of Dresden so you can see the "ground zero" consequences of what he calls the military manner of thinking--which rationalizes a massacre by saying it will hasten the end of the war.

But more important than this generalized condemnation, Vonnegut focuses on the enormity of war and its disastrous effect on human lives, even long after it is over. Billy Pilgrim's problems all stem from what he experienced in the war. The hobo freezes to death in the boxcar; Roland Weary dies from gangrene in his feet; Edgar Derby is shot for stealing a teapot; the harmless city of Dresden is bombed into the ground: it shouldn't be possible for such things to happen, Billy feels. And yet he was there and saw them happen with his own eyes. His science fiction fantasies and time-traveling are his attempt to cope with the psychological damage the war inflicted on him. The fact that he succeeds (by going senile) is perhaps the most absurd thing of all.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: AUTHORITY IS TO BLAME FOR ATROCITIES

To Vonnegut, both the boss and the underling escape guilt when an atrocity is committed: the boss's hands are clean because others did the dirty work, and the underling was only following orders. He maintains that this was just as true of the Allies as it was of the Nazis in World War II. The Nazis built the death camps, and the Allies bombed Hiroshima and Dresden.

Vonnegut believes that a great evil of authoritarianism is the assumption of righteousness, the claim that "God is on our side." In other writings he expresses regret that the Nazis were so plainly evil because that just made it easier for the Allied authorities to claim that anything they did to defeat the Nazis was justified.

To Vonnegut this is the same kind of authoritarian arrogance that led the Nazis into evil acts in the first place. There is no moral justification for atrocities, Vonnegut says, even though some defenders of the Dresden bombing maintain that it did accomplish its goal: to end the war sooner by demoralizing the enemy.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: MODERN LIFE IS MEANINGLESS

Billy Pilgrim's indifference to life comes as much from his peacetime experiences as from anything that happened to him in the war. During the war he could at least tell whether he was alive or dead. But his postwar life is empty in spite of his material wealth and the respect of his peers.

Vonnegut highlights this apparent contradiction by having Billy find peace and happiness only through fantasy (or senility). Vonnegut seems to say that in real life, life doesn't work.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: ART VS. REALITY

Vonnegut spends a good deal of time in Slaughterhouse-Five talking about fiction. In Chapter 1 he shows how a writer distorts reality by forcing it to fit into the mold of a "good story." In Chapter 5 he discusses the good and bad effects fiction has on our understanding of life. In Chapter 9 he pokes fun at the pretensions of writers and critics who take fiction too seriously. And the "fragmented style" in which Slaughterhouse-Five is written may be an attempt to reinvent the novel. As Eliot Rosewater says, fiction just "isn't enough any more."

Part of the difficulty lies in the nature of art itself. Art selects and orders its material, and the final product is a coherent whole. But life is messy and redundant: it can't be contained in the neat formula of a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. In the case of such a horrifying event as the Dresden massacre, art has nothing intelligent to say.