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

Some readers believe that Vonnegut overstates the problem in Slaughterhouse-Five, that the book itself is the solution. just as Billy Pilgrim reinvents his life so he can cope with it, Vonnegut reinvents the novel so that it can cope with the absurd and often monstrous events of the modern world.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: TECHNOLOGY DEHUMANIZES PEOPLE

Machine imagery abounds in Slaughterhouse-Five, and wherever it turns up, it means bad news for human beings. Obviously, without sophisticated technology, the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima would not have been possible. But Vonnegut portrays even peacetime technology as making people into robots whose lives revolve around tending and improving machines. Billy's father-in-law, Lionel Merble, for example, is turned into a machine by the optometry business.

There are several additional themes that Vonnegut only touches on in Slaughterhouse-Five, but which are given fuller treatment in his other books.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: FREE WILL VS. DETERMINISM

At first the heroes of almost all Vonnegut's novels believe in free will. (Free will is the idea that human beings make choices and decide their own destinies, that their actions make a difference in shaping their futures.) But inevitably Vonnegut's heroes discover that their choices were manipulated by outside forces, that their fates were predetermined all along. Billy Pilgrim is Vonnegut's most passive hero. He finds happiness and peace of mind only after adopting the deterministic philosophy of his imaginary masters, the Tralfamadorians.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: DARWIN VS. JESUS

Vonnegut feels that Charles Darwin legitimized cruelty with his theory of natural selection. Although Darwin limited his theorizing to biology, other thinkers like the English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) applied this theory to social matters, and took Darwin's idea that the strong are favored in natural survival one step further, implying that only the strong should survive. It is this version of "social" Darwinism that Vonnegut disapproves of. In contrast, although he has been an atheist all his life, Vonnegut has always admired the Christian virtues of pacifism, tolerance, and love.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: ORGANIZED RELIGION

Vonnegut doesn't have much good will toward organized religion. For him it is no different from any other form of authority, and therefore it is capable of the same or greater evils. How many atrocities have been justified by the claim that "God is on our side"?

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: DEATH

People are dying constantly in Slaughterhouse-Five, and of course the destruction of Dresden brought death on a massive scale. Vonnegut follows every mention of death with that familiar phrase, "So it goes." In this way he attempts to find a saner attitude toward death by emphasizing that death is a common aspect of human existence. Billy Pilgrim finds consolation in the Tralfamadorian notion that people who are dead in the present remain alive in the times of their past. Perhaps the author is saying that we too should be consoled: the dead still live in our memories.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: STYLE

On the second page of Chapter 5, a Tralfamadorian explains the nature of novels on that planet:

"Each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message--describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."

When you come upon this passage in the novel, you may feel a shock of recognition. It sounds a lot like the very book you're reading, and you realize that the author is describing the effect he wants his novel to have.

The most striking aspect of the style of Slaughterhouse-Five is the fact that the text is made up of clumps of paragraphs, each clump set off by extra space before and after it. A few of the clumps are only one sentence long. Some are as long as a page and a half. Each of them makes a simple statement or relates an incident or situation. Thus the novel is said to be written in an anecdotal style: the book is a collection of brief incidents, and the effect of each one depends on how the author tells it.

Vonnegut generally uses short, simple sentences that manage to say a great deal in a few words. "Three inoffensive bangs came from far away." The report seems an innocent one until you find out that the scouts have just been shot. The contrast between the "inoffensive" sound and its deadly meaning provides a startling effect.

There is irony too in that "inoffensive," for what is inoffensive to one person's ears is fatally offensive to another person's life. Irony is a form of humor that occurs when a seemingly straightforward statement or situation actually means its opposite. Irony occurs again and again in the incidents Vonnegut describes. It is ironic that, for all that the Bible represents as a statement of ethics, a soldier carries a bullet-proof Bible sheathed in steel. There is irony in a former hobo's telling Billy--inside a boxcar prison that could be taking them to their death--"I been in worse places than this. This ain't so bad." And because Dresden was an "open city" during most of the war, it was full of refugees who had fled there for safety. Almost all of them died in the bombing. That is ironic.

Another kind of humor that the author relies on heavily is satire, a form of ridicule that uses mockery and exaggeration to expose the foolishness or evil of its subject. Professor Rumfoord is a satirical portrait of the all-American male ideal. And, almost every description of a Kilgore Trout novel satirizes modern life in some way. A killer robot becomes popular only after his bad breath is cleared up (advertising values), or a money tree is fertilized by the dead bodies of those who killed each other to get its "fruit" (material values).

Vonnegut has a powerful gift for tangy imagery. He describes Billy as a filthy flamingo and a broken kite, the Russian prisoner as "a ragbag with a round, flat face that glowed like a radium dial."

Sometimes his images border on the tasteless: an antitank gun makes "a ripping sound like the zipper on the fly of God Almighty." But Vonnegut also creates images of almost heart-breaking tenderness, as in the picture of Edgar Derby bursting into tears when Billy feeds him a spoonful of malt syrup.

Vonnegut layers his storytelling with allusions (references) to historical events. He evokes the Children's Crusade in order to draw a parallel between the "babies" he and O'Hare were in World War II and the thirteenth-century religious expedition in which European children were sent off to conquer the Holy Land. He refers to works of literature: the novels of the French Nazi sympathizer Celine, the medieval heroic epic poem The Song of Roland, and the Bible. He paraphrases the Sodom and Gomorrah story from Genesis and mentions Jesus occasionally. These allusions deepen our understanding and appreciation of Billy's story by suggesting historical and literary parallels to the personal events in his life.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: POINT OF VIEW

In Chapter 1 (and in portions of Chapter 10) the author speaks to you directly in the first person about the difficult time he had writing his book. The rest of the book is Billy Pilgrim's story told by a third-person narrator.