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

Before concluding his account of the writing of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut takes us back to Dresden in 1967. (You remember he mentioned this trip at the beginning of the chapter.) Underneath the rebuilt Dresden, where Vonnegut and O'Hare are having so much fun, "there must be tons of human bone meal in the ground." Bone meal is a fertilizer made from grinding up the bones of slaughterhouse animals. The present Dresden sprang up like a flower from the sterile ground of "the moon" (what Dresden looked like after it was bombed), aided by the fertilizer of crushed human bones.

NOTE: RESONANCE This image, like so many others in Slaughterhouse-Five, has an extraordinary resonance. In music, resonance is the enrichment of sound by means of echoes. If you've ever been in a large church when the choir is singing, you know how rich that sound can be: the voices bounce off the walls and increase the vibration in the air. In literature, an image is resonant when it reminds us of other images and enriches our understanding by connecting things that didn't seem related before.

The final anecdote in Chapter 1, Vonnegut's "non-night" in Boston, shows him "locking in" on the main ideas that Slaughterhouse-Five will embody. The first idea he presents has to do with the difference between time as we think of it and time as we experience it. Remember the scene where Vonnegut and the two girls stood looking at the Hudson River? This is our image of external time: it flows at a steady rate in one direction, from the past through the present toward the future. But in our minds we can jump from the past (memory) to the future (fantasy or planning) without having to go through the "time" in between. We can also go backward as well as forward in time. And not only can it feel as though it takes a year for a second to pass, but a lifetime can seem as though it's over in a second. Vonnegut may be suggesting that this internal time is more real to us than the external time of clocks and calendars.

Vonnegut explores this idea in the quotations from the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which say that the passage of time leads inevitably to death, and if time could be stopped, no one would die. We know that the flow of external time cannot be stopped. But internal time is a different matter. Don't we do exactly what Celine wants to do--stop people from disappearing--in our memories? And isn't that what Vonnegut does with Dresden in writing Slaughterhouse-Five?

NOTE: The novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1894-1961) had a reputation in France equal to that of Ernest Hemingway in America. But in the late 1930s Celine declared himself to be an antisemite and a Nazi sympathizer, and after World War II was tried and imprisoned as a war criminal. It seems amazing, but Vonnegut claims that Celine had a great influence on him. In an essay published in 1974, he explains what Celine meant to him and why he admires him so much. He is willing to forgive what he calls Celine's "racism and cracked politics" because he was a great and inspiring writer: "...in my opinion, Celine gave us in his novels the finest history we have of the total collapse of Western civilization in two world wars, as witnessed by hideously vulnerable common women and men."

Another idea that Vonnegut is fond of can be found in the American poet Theodore Roethke's poem, which implies that we are not masters of our destinies, as we like to imagine, but that we get the hang of life by doing what circumstances force us to do.

NOTE: MAN VICTIM/AGENT Howard W. Campbell, Jr., the American Nazi whom we will meet later, is a perfect example of this theme. In Mother Night he's an American spy whose radio broadcasts contain coded messages about Nazi troop movements and battle plans. After the war he is tried as a war criminal because of the obvious damage he did as a Nazi propagandist. Whether he was a real Nazi or just pretending to be one makes no difference.

Another idea presented in this anecdote comes from the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah story, an example of the kind of "good story" Vonnegut doesn't want his Dresden book to be. Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed because they are evil. Lot and his family are spared because they are good. But there's a wrinkle in this otherwise typical "tale of great destruction": Lot's wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt.

This is a particularly rich image. In the first place, she might never have thought of looking back until she was told not to. (You know the feeling of wanting something only after you've been told you can't have it.) But Vonnegut hints at another reason she might have had: "Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because she was so human."

Does this remind you of Mary O'Hare? Vonnegut often gives the values he admires most to the women characters in his books, implying that women are more humane than men. Some see Vonnegut's preference for women's values as a subtle form of male chauvinism. According to this interpretation, the tough reporter Nancy lost her humanity by taking a man's job, while Mary O'Hare retained hers by staying home with the babies. Vonnegut seems to support this argument when he says, "The very toughest reporters and writers were women who had taken over the jobs of men who'd gone to war." On the other hand, the war made it necessary for women to leave home and go to work--and men started the war.

NOTE: LYSISTRATA In the literature of ancient Greece a very funny play by Aristophanes, Lysistrata, offers an ingenious solution to the problem of war. In the play, Athens and Sparta have been at war for twenty years, and the women are fed up. So they go on a "sex strike," demanding that the men sign a peace treaty. After a while the men become so desperate they have to agree. (In real life the war dragged on for seven more years and ended only when Athens was destroyed.)

Even if you think that Vonnegut is a "closet male chauvinist," others say that his main point is not that a woman's place is in the home but that a human being's place is not in a war.

^^^^^^^^^^SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: CHAPTER 2

STRUCTURE: In this chapter you meet Billy Pilgrim and get a taste of his peculiar experience of time. Vonnegut summarizes Billy's life from his birth (1922) to the present (1968). Then he opens up two important plot lines. The first involves Billy's attempt to tell his story to the world in 1968. The second is the beginning of Billy's adventures in the war.

Vonnegut begins with the premise that Billy Pilgrim is "unstuck in time," that he lives his life out of sequence, paying random visits to all the events of his life, in no apparent order, and often more than once. But notice the two words "he says." Vonnegut uses them three times in this section, and they warn you that what Billy says may not always be fact.

Billy's "official biography" condenses Billy's life into the space of a couple of pages. It resembles the diagram Vonnegut drew for his Dresden story, which reduced Dresden to a few colored lines on the back of a length of wallpaper. And the biography serves the same purpose as the diagram: it allows you to see the whole story at a glance.

NOTE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY There are parallels here to Vonnegut's own life. He too was born in 1922, married and went to college after the war, and worked in Schenectady, an upstate New York city much like Ilium. We already know that he was captured by the Germans in World War II and lived through the bombing of Dresden. He is also over six feet tall.

The thumbnail sketch of Billy's life provides a framework into which you can fit the out-of-sequence events of the novel. Clearly Slaughterhouse-Five is not going to be just another "good story." For Vonnegut there is more than one aspect to any event: there is the event itself, how it is experienced, how it is remembered afterward, and, perhaps most important, how it is told.

NOTE: MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVE It can be maddening to have to be aware of all these levels at once. But Vonnegut's point is that you can't fully understand the story until you realize that all these levels exist simultaneously in any story. In effect you are being encouraged to look at Slaughterhouse-Five in the way a Tralfamadorian would--from every point of view, all at the same time.

Billy's biography ends in 1968, the "present," and Billy is writing to his local newspaper about the aliens who kidnapped him the year before.

Are the Tralfamadorians "real"? Vonnegut speaks of them as though Billy's account is to be taken seriously. But he's already cast doubt on Billy's credibility with those repeated "he says." Notice, too, that Billy never mentions the Tralfamadorians until after the plane crash. This makes it possible, even likely, that he imagined them in his delirium. The trauma to his brain, as often happens, has released vivid memories as well as hallucinations. This could mean that Billy's "coming unstuck in time" didn't happen in 1944, as it seems to him, but in 1968, when his skull was cracked. Certainly this is his daughter's interpretation of her father's stories. And not only has he gone soft in the head, he's determined to disgrace both himself and her by proclaiming his lunacy to the world!

In the middle of their argument Vonnegut stops the action to provide exposition--background information to help you understand what's going on--and to remind his readers that this is a story, not real life. Every chapter is studded with similar moments in which Vonnegut holds up the development of the story to indicate what he's doing as a writer.

NOTE: EXPOSITION In a conventional story the author tries to weave the exposition into the action. Usually this is done by making what happens in the scene so engrossing that you're not aware you're being given bits of necessary information. But Vonnegut believes that a writer can't separate his telling of the story from the story itself. In Chapter 1 he went to a lot of trouble to demonstrate this problem. And one way to deal with the problem is to acknowledge it. Vonnegut is saying, We need exposition here, so here's the exposition.

The second plot line opens in the Luxembourg forest, where Billy and his companions--two infantry scouts and the antitank gunner Roland Weary--are lost behind enemy lines. It is here that Billy will first "come unstuck in time."

It's hard to imagine anyone more different from Billy Pilgrim than Roland Weary. In different circumstances these two might remind you of an incongruous comedy team. To the scouts, who are "clever, graceful, quiet" (perfectly adapted to their predicament), they aren't funny, they're dangerous: Weary because he makes so much noise, Billy because he just stands there when somebody shoots at him. If this were an ordinary war story, the scouts--who are expert soldiers--would probably be the main characters, Billy and Weary the comic relief. But Vonnegut is more interested in the clowns than in the good soldiers, perhaps because to him the clowns behave more like real people would. He is also preparing us for the irony in the next chapter, when the good soldiers will be killed and the clowns spared.