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

Because an outside narrator is telling Billy's story, you learn not only what Billy is doing and thinking at any time but what the other characters are up to and what's on their minds. Because Vonnegut explains, in his first-person appearances as the writer-narrator, that his own experiences in Dresden were the inspiration for Slaughterhouse-Five, many readers assume that both the third-person narrator and Billy Pilgrim represent the author. In this view, the author is looking at the events of his own life--past, present, and future--and trying to make some sense out of them the same way that Billy is trying to order the events of his own life.

On several occasions the author actually reminds you directly that, while he's telling Billy's story, he--Kurt Vonnegut--was there, too. You're reading about events that are based on the author's experience as a POW in Dresden. These interruptions also warn you that you're being told a story by a much older man, someone with a quite different outlook on life from that of the "baby" who went to Dresden.

The flexible perspective of the narration allows Vonnegut to comment frequently on the action, on life, and on writing itself.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: FORM AND STRUCTURE

As explained in Chapter 5 of Slaughterhouse-Five, Tralfamadorians read the clumps of symbols, or messages, that make up their books all at once. But human beings must read the clumps of paragraphs that make up Slaughterhouse-Five one by one, and the order in which the author has set them out for you provides the structure of the novel.

Vonnegut starts with a chapter of introduction or prologue in which he tells his own story of writing his "famous book about Dresden."

The rest of the book, Chapters 2 through 10, tells Billy Pilgrim's story. Vonnegut begins this narrative with a short, factual history of Billy's life to the present in 1968. You soon discover why he does this: in the pages that follow, Billy's adventures are not related entirely in chronological order, and that little outline history in the early pages of Chapter 2 lets you read on without having to puzzle over the proper sequence of events.

The portion of Billy Pilgrim's history that is presented chronologically is the six months from December 1944 to May 1945, when Billy was a soldier and then a POW in Europe. This period is by far the most important in Billy's life, and the novel is about how Billy comes to terms with what he saw and heard and did in those six months. When Billy finally works it all out in his mind, he is free, the author has finished his Dresden book, and the novel has ended.

Therefore the basic structure of Slaughterhouse-Five is determined by the sequence of events Billy experienced in the final months of World War II. Into this sequence Billy fits all the other happenings of his life. He even believes that he first "came unstuck in time" in the Luxembourg forest in 1944, though the narrator seems to suggest that this weird phenomenon was actually the result of the brain damage Billy sustained in the plane crash in 1968.

Because Billy is reinventing his life by reorganizing his memories and adding his fantasies, it's important that you keep your bearings as you follow Billy's own rearrangement of his history. For this you may find helpful the following chronological sequence of the important events in Billy's life.

1922 Billy born in Ilium, New York.

1941 America enters World War II.

1944 Billy, now a soldier, captured by Germans in the Battle
of the Bulge. He spends Christmas on a POW train headed
for Czechoslovakia.

1945 Billy arrives in Dresden, is put to work in a factory, is
January housed in Slaughterhouse-Five.

1945 Dresden fire-bombed by the Allies. POWs and guards survive
February in an underground locker and begin to dig bodies out of
the rubble the next day.

1945 War ends in Europe and POWs are released. Billy goes home
May to Ilium.

1948 Billy recovers from a nervous breakdown, marries Valencia
Merble, fathers Robert and Barbara. The optometry
business in Ilium prospers.

1967 Barbara marries. Billy kidnapped the same night and taken
to Tralfamadore, where he is exhibited in a zoo and
mated with Montana Wildhack.

1968 Billy survives plane crash in Vermont. Valencia dies while
Billy is recovering. Billy goes to New York City to tell
about the Tralfamadorians.