Literatura Inglesa y Discurso Político

This blog is dedicated exclusively to the subject of English literature and political discourse, given by Dr. Vicente Forés López of the University of Valencia. The first task has been the first paper and then the second paper. The first paper deals with the analysis of two major themes of the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, which are censorship and ignorance versus knowledge and the second paper focuses on the tone, structure and style of the book Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.

Subject : #14206 Literatura Anglesa i Discurs Polític –  grup A

Student´s name: Mihaela Tirca

Title of the paper: Tone, structure and style in Slaughterhouse-Five

Author or topic: Kurt Vonnegut

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to concentrate upon relevant aspects in Slaughterhouse-Five, such as tone, structure and style with which the author illustrates his semi-autobiographical novel which is drawn from his war time experiences in World War II. Additionally to these features, the paper also contains an introduction and a brief summary about this novel and lastly ends with a conclusion about Kurt Vonnegut´s Slaughterhouse-Five.

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Academic year 2010/2011

© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López

©Mihaela Tirca

mitir@alumni.uv.es

Slaughterhouse-Five is largely set during World War II. It concentrates on the detention of American soldiers by the Germans in 1945 during the Battle of the Bulge. The arrested men are taken to Dresden to work in tough labor. On February 13, 1945, Dresden is devastated by a similar air attack. All the citizens of the city, except for a few American prisoners and their German guards, are annihilated. The survivors were later used to dig through the rubble for corpses and to begin the clean-up of the city. This factual background information is a key to understanding the book and the core around which the other sub-plots revolve.

Slaughterhouse-Five is a sophisticated novel that mixes surrealism, science fiction, dark comedy, philosophic meditation, and impressionistic imagery. It also contains elements of autobiography, documentary, and fantasy. The documentary and the fantastic often appear in the form of inclusions from other sources – an imaginary story by Kilgore Trout or an actual book on a factual subject. The autobiography comes in the war scenes. Like Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut served in the infantry in World War II, was captured by the Nazis, was imprisoned in Dresden during its bombing and destruction; therefore, most of the tales of war included in the book come out of Vonnegut’s memory.

On the night of February 13, 1945, Vonnegut was sheltered in Dresden in an underground meat locker while the Allies unleashed one of the most relentless air raids of the war. A firestorm was created that essentially annihilated the historic half-timbered city and left some 35,000 people dead. After the raid the prisoners emerged to the blasted landscape that Vonnegut describes so vividly in Slaughterhouse-Five. For him, the experience became a subject about which he felt compelled to write, but with which he still found it hard to come to terms. In Slaughterhouse-Five, he finally confronts his terrible war memories and tries to put them to rest, just as Billy Pilgrim does.

Throughout the book, Vonnegut mixes a tight style and rambling digressions. Much of the narrative is succinct, using clipped phrases and curt sentences; sometimes, however there are looser digressions that seem to ramble on and explanations that seem unnecessary. Vonnegut also mixes his points of view. Although the majority of the novel is told from an omniscient third person narrator, Vonnegut also intrudes upon the novel, especially in the first and last chapters, to tell about himself and why he is writing the book.

Slaughterhouse-Five is described in a tranquil and friendly tone, that it is not difficult for his reader to observe that the world of Billy Pilgrim is actually similar as their own. The novel was issued in a critical time period which was the Vietnam War and he´s not talking only about Vietnam or World War II, but also about war in overall terms as it relates to the human conditions. The novel surveys the falseness surrounding the American style of life and the things that human being founds his life on. With the aid of his readers and characters, the author tries to reach a conclusion as to whether man establishes his life on dishonesties or simply dreams.

The novel is also an absolutely innovative work written in a calming style that blends aspects of science fiction with realism and the author stars writing this novel advising us that “All of this happened, more or less…” This is a “black comedy” which should not be muddled with “film noir,” that is a filmmaking genre in which the wicked fellows may triumph or at least they are made kind. In black comedies the happenings are shocking but the style is light-hearted. What the genres share is actually a non-heroic character.

The most pleasant features of Vonnegut´s writing are carefully related to its shortcomings: he is a very comical writer and ruthlessly clever. The narration is described with dry irony and some of the sentences give the impression as a quick bite that are solely his own. His novel is full of great and daunting topics, such as massacre, death and war, and therefore there is much to admire in Kurt Vonnegut´s application of this writing to Slaughterhouse-Five. For instance, his attitude centers around the resigned and tolerant phrase “So it goes” that appears throughout the text, whenever there´s a death or tragedy stated, as it follows in the next passage when Billy is lying in bed in a mental institution, near to a man named Eliot Rosewater, who is also a World War II veteran.

“Rosewater was twice as smart as Billy, but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways. They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes.” (p.101)

Sometimes, the employment of this phrase is gut-wrenching, other times is light and hilarious.

“There was a still life on Billy’s bedside table — two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So it goes. Air was trying to get out of that dead water. Bubbles were clinging to the walls of the glass, too weak to climb out.” (p.102)

In relation with the interpretation of time in this book is like a stratification of an up cropping of rock: there is a past and present time, but also a future time. What Billy Pilgrim learns from the Tralfamadorians is that the human being is ageless, and can experience the past, the present and the future over and over again. Consequently Billy goes backward and forward to his marriage and to Tralfamadore in recurrent times. He also learns that the Tralfamadorians see the stars not as bright spots of light but as “rarefied, luminous spaghetti” and human beings as “great millipedes with babies’ legs at one end and old people’s legs at the other.” Hence time is not a stream, nor is it a serpent with its train in its mouth. It is all-pervading, however some things happen before and some afterward, but always they happen once more.

It is hard to summarize the plot of Slaughterhouse-Five because everything is going on at the same time. Since the main character, Billy Pilgrim, travels through time, we jump from 1944 to 1967 to Billy´s childhood and back again. Slaughterhouse-Five starts with the narrator. He never officially announces “Hello, I am Kurt Vonnegut,” but he is clearly speaking as Vonnegut. He talks about the difficulty he has trying to find ways to write about his experiences in Dresden during World War II and he makes references both to teaching at the University of lowa´s famous writing program, and studying anthropology at the University of Chicago – both of which Kurt Vonnegut did in real life.

After this autobiographical intro, we get to the book itself, which stars a fairly pathetic young man named Billy Pilgrim. Billy is in optometry school in upstate New York in 1944 when he gets drafted into the army. He isn´t even a fully trained soldier; his job is to be the chaplain´s assistant, leading his regiment in hymns to keep their spirits up. Nevertheless, despite his complete lack of suitability for war, Billy is deployed to Luxembourg in December 1944 to fight the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge.

Once Billy gets to the battlefield, he becomes utterly confused; he isn´t carrying a gun. He is left walking through enemy territory like a lost lamb until he gets picked up by another American recruit, a crazy bully with a love of torture implements named Roland Weary. Weary becomes so angry at Billy´s lack of interest in saving his own life that he threatens to shoot him. Just as Weary is aiming at Billy, a group of German soldiers take both prisoners. Weary winds up dying on the trek from Luxembourg to a prisoner of war (POW) camp in Germany, blaming Billy for his capture all the while.

Billy arrives by train at a prison compound in the middle of a German death camp for Russian soldiers. The compound houses mainly British troops, who have all been prisoners since near the beginning of the war. These soldiers have been eating well and exercising for most of the war, so they are in great spirits – and they are pretty disgusted by the state of the American recruits, especially weak, clownish Billy Pilgrim. It is in the British compound that Billy meets Edgar Derby, a high school teacher who will be shot at the end of the war for looting, and Paul Lazzaro, a total psycho who promises to send an assassin to kill Billy after the war for letting Roland Weary die.

Billy and Edgar Derby are both sent to a POW center in Dresden, Germany, to wait out the war. This POW camp is located in an abandoned slaughterhouse. Soon after they arrive in Dresden, American bomber units attack the city, setting fires that end up consuming pretty much all of Dresden. Thousands of people die. Billy and a small group of his POW comrades have to climb through the ruins of buildings and bodies to find water and shelter. It is Billy´s job, as a prisoner of war, to help dig bodies out of the rubble of the city.

When Billy is finally freed, following the German surrender in May, 1945, he goes back to upstate New York and starts up optometry school again. He gets engaged to Valencia, the daughter of the school´s owner. Then, suddenly, he has a nervous breakdown and checks himself into a veteran´s hospital to recover. Supposedly, he does get better – but after that, Billy will find himself suddenly crying, silently and without apparent reason.

Flash forward about two decades and Billy has two children: a daughter, Barbara and a son, Robert. Robert was kind of a wild kid as a teenager, but now he is a Marine fighting in Vietnam. Billy and Valencia have been happily married for twenty years when everything goes wrong. Billy gets into an airplane with his father-in-law, Lionel. The plane crashed into the side of a mountain in Vermont and everyone except Billy is killed. Billy suffers an intense skull fracture. While Billy recovers in the hospital Valencia dies of carbon monoxide poisoning in her car.

At the hospital, Billy rooms with an extremely energetic 70-year-old named Bertram Copeland Rumfoord, who is recuperating from a broken leg he got on a ski trip with his 23-year-old wife. Rumfoord is a historian who wants to write a book about the Air Force. He wants to include a blurb about Dresden, but he is frustrated because a lot of information about the raid is still classified.

Rumfoord does not see why the Air Force won´t tell the world about such a fantastic, successful raid. He thinks it is because they are worried about the opinions of a bunch of bleeding hearts who might disapprove of the burning deaths of 135,000 non-combatants. Billy tells Rumfoord that he was at Dreden during the firebombing. Rumfoord wants to convince Billy that the raid was absolutely necessary, no matter how terrible it was to experience on the ground.

As Billy regains his ability to move around, he suddenly appears on a talk-radio show in New York talking about his experience not as a POW – but as an alien abducted. He writes to the local paper in his hometown to tell the world about the people of the planet of Tralfamadore. Billy´s aliends are green and shaped like toilet plungers. Billy explains that they took him and a young actress named Montana Wildhack to be part of a zoo exhibition the year before. The Tralfamadorians, Billy tell the public, have a lot to teach us about time.

The Tralfamadorians see everything differently because their vision works in four dimensions, Thanks to this, they know that every moment in time is separate, eternal, and happening at the same time as every other moment, but in all of the moment before then, they are still great. Death itself is an illusion, as is free will. Each point in time has always and will always be exactly the same. There is nothing we can do to change it, which Billy thinks, should be a comfort to all of us.

Barbara, Billy´s daughter, is incredibly embarrassed that he has announced all this in the newspaper, and insists on taking control of his life because he cannot care for himself anymore. It is probably not helping Billy´s case for his own sanity that, during all of his arguments with Barbara and his experiences in the hospital, he keeps skipping in and out of time. His visits to Tralfamadore, his wartime captivity and his life with his family all seem to be happening simultaneously.

See, Billy is really receptive to the Tralfamadorian way of looking at things, because he has been disconnected from time since 1944. He has seen his own birth and death many times, so he is uniquely qualified to believe that each independent moment is its own complete world. After all, this is both how Billy experiences time and how the novel is told – scene by scene in tiny chunks of narrative that only makes sense when you look at them all at once. The novel ends with Billy digging through the ruble of Dresden to find bodies for cremation. After finishing his job, he and his POW pals are sent to a stable to wait out the rest of the war. When the war in Europe ends, the stable door opens. Outside, all is silence except for the sounds of the birds singing, “Poo-tee-weet?”

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut employs an existentialistic tone of pessimism, passivity and disinterest to fictionalize an atrocity in order to produce an effect or a change toward the readers. The relevance of Vonnegut´s tone it is observed from the first chapter. The narrator of this chapter is the author himself, who uses a colloquial and a sort of disclosing tone in order to integrate the readers into the novel and to present to them the fact of the novel and what expectations they should have of it.

In chapter one are presented the contradictions of tone and also the cyclical nature of the novel is created. The story is largely told by a third person omniscient narrator but there is also a first person narrator especially when the presence of the author is made clear. He is a sort of commentator or character and he is clearly present in the first and last (tenth) chapters. Furthermore, he declares himself as someone often present in the action of the book, by stating “That was me” “I was there” or “I said that.” The presence of the author throughout the narration has a crucial impact on the novel´s tone. His authenticity is essential in counting the story and his tone becomes one of compassion and understanding.

The beginning and end of the book are in the same place and are presented to the reader beforehand the real story has started. Another relevant function of the tone in this first chapter is the way it places the characters for the remainder of the book. Even though it is not specified, but it is openly implied that the main character is in fact Vonnegut and not the protagonist Billy Pilgrim, and moreover Pilgrim is closely related to Vonnegut, without being the same person. Vonnegut conveys this through telling the readers the background of the novel with an approachable and friendly tone, appealing the readers to him, as if he were telling the story to his own friends.

After chapter one, Billy Pilgrim is introduced as the protagonist of the story and the other characters are oversimplified, allowing Vonnegut to suggest something of the complexity of human nature through indirection. Concerning Billy is fully developed and the Tralfamadorian structure provides him dimension and substance and leads him to life mysteriously despite his incompetence as a person. He is characterized throughout the novel as a dual-persona.

As we said above, he succeeds to become a sort of mask not only for Kurt Vonnegut as a character but also for the author as well. In Vonnegut´s describing of the novel he is trying to come to terms with his own experiences with human outrage in the firebombing of Dresden. Since Vonnegut narrates this book about his own past, he involves Billy Pilgrim in order to relate the whole story of this young recruit´s awful experiences; and he uses him among other elements because only in this way the author distances in a way from his past. Vonnegut creates a unique tone when talks about Billy, tone that he uses nowhere else in the book. This establishes Billy away from the other characters and circumstances. He talks about Billy with a bright tone, almost one of enjoyment or fondness as if Billy is his plaything.

On the other hand, Kurt Vonnegut gives Billy an approach to the world that is inactive and apart, aspects that disgusts Vonnegut and wants it to disgusts the readers too.

Furthermore, Billy Pilgrim creates an imaginary world, which is Tralfamadore. A central part of the book is focused on the concept of time travel and Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.

“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time…He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between. He says. Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.” (p. 29)

He understands all parts of his life at once, due to his developing to the nature of time on the planet Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians kidnap Billy and oblige him to observe time and his world as they do, where all the moments happen in the same time. This capacity permits Billy to convert into a completely indifferent person to all happenings in the world, because he can always just evade into another more agreeable moment.

At first glance it appears to the reader that Vonnegut is advocating culpable moral indifference as exampled by Billy´s passive happiness and resignation. Kurt Vonnegut feels that to do this would be a moral outrage. He wants his readers to rebel against the idea that if there is any redemption for men, it lays in their innocence or their foolishness and so their incapacity to comprehend how they are a product of circumstances and not free determination. He sarcastically describes a world in which there is no hope, no determination and no redemption for the universe. The books centers on innocents who are victims of other people and of an inability which affect their own lives.

Moreover, Kurt Vonnegut pretends to aggravate the common reader´s anticipations of the way things are treated, in order to oblige them to reconsider whether these ways are the best options. In addition, the statement “so it goes”, which appears in relation to every instance of death, is an effect produced on the reader by the disjunction of tone and subject. Actually the reader believes that death should be treated with more concern.

As we said above, the author´s main goal is to shock the readers into some sort of recalcitrant action; and he achieves doing this by treating death with such casualness and calmness bringing the true definition of a massacre throughout the novel. He pretends the reader to feel confused by the light treatment of something so considerable and relevant. He uses a subtle and a delicate tone to express his outrage that things like the Dresden massacre of Billy´s time and the Vietnam War of the time the novel was published, have been permitted to happen.

Furthermore, the author pretends the reader to share the same sadness and indignation in viewing the damned human race. Alongside he gives a dead pan, counting a story concerning time-travel and alien kidnapping.

The central attention of Kurt Vonnegut´s satirical tone alongside the institution of war comprises also government, love and religion. He employs satire as an attack on satire itself and upon the suggestion of a world with certain responses that satire involves. Though he presents his satire in an ironic and pessimistic tone, in the end of the book is more idealistic about the envisioned changes. The satire in the book goes hand in hand with the humor and this humorous tone highlights the comic silliness of the human condition. Moreover, this tone of humor is obscure and hopeless and it suggests a comic vision of man.

Kurt Vonnegut considers that only with irony and wittiness of comic vision and with the leak into fairy-tales can man tolerate the world and himself throughout the time. He uses his humor as a symbol to deal with the horrors of war and madness. This attitude serves to shock his readers into questioning the strangeness and wrongness of discussing about death with humor.

The final attitude of Kurt Vonnegut is to confront the evil within himself and his society. In his world sentimentality, selfishness, blind patriotism, greediness and unchecked technology are the enemy. The only force left to struggle this is conscience and feeling. In the world of Slaughterhouse Five there is no power of improvement or  changing the human condition, creating meaning, determination, order or beauty, knowing himself or his world, making life livable, or bearing the human condition. If this is true, then it is impossible for human beings to be other than cruel to each other and thus impossible for there to be any change in human suffering. Concerning this, Vonnegut creates Billy to consent everything that occurs as being right in a tranquil and serene passivity. He obliges him to observe the world artistically and therefore every moment is wonderful and catastrophic at the same time.

Slaughterhouse-five, by Kurt Vonnegut

Dial Press Trade Paperback edition / July 2005

Kurt Vonnegut´s Slaughterhouse-Five is a pseudo-autobiographical novel about the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany during World War II. Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden at the time and observed the massacre firsthand and twenty-years after the occurrence, he finally wrote down his “famous book about Dresden” (p.24) The author didn´t wrote a memoir or a manifesto about the happenings, instead of that he chose to describe these event fictitiously by inventing the character of Billy Pilgrim, who becomes “unstuck in time” throughout his life, he is kidnapped by aliens and witnesses the fire-storming of Dresden.

Kurt Vonnegut uses fast and concise passages that do not follow a direct timeline and goes forward and backward that coincide with the Tralfamadorian conviction that one can practice all moments at any given time due to the fact that time itself is not linear. For Billy Pilgrim this means that he never knows when he will be, for he can “[walk] through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941” (p.29)

In the first chapter, Vonnegut reveals about how the end of the novel will be like and then in the course of the narrative, there is continuous movement between future, past and present in changeable ways. Although the war is clearly chronological, it is revealed in bits and pieces through recurrences and time travels. Only at the end of the novel, the reader is able to piece together Billy´s whole life.

Beside the non-direct timeline, there is no unity of place either, since Billy goes to diverse past and future places of his life, and therefore is undistinguishable where he is situated at the moment, past or future. Moreover the novel is cautiously structured around a unity of characters, but the central attention is emphasized on Billy Pilgrim. There are three plots about Billy functioning at the same time and intertwined. The first one focuses on his past war experiences, which are grounded in facts, the second one is his “real” –though fictional life in Ilium as a husband, father and optometrist; and the third one is his science fiction venture of traveling throughout time and being abducted by the Tralfamadorians. None of these aspects are told in a linear order, but instead are scattered throughout the novel. Since he has the capacity to travel into the future, frequently we are told about what will occur to him before it really occurs. For instance, he already knows about the coming of the aliens and his confinement on Tralfamadore before they occur.

The main focus of the novel is also on the dreadfulness of the bombing of Dresden. Even though this incident is described in the beginning of the novel, details are revealed throughout the novel. Billy frequently recalls on the events surrounding the crucial Dresden air attack and on his time journeys he is habitually taken back to the city and to Slaughterhouse-Five to revive the terribleness. Billy Pilgrim may have insane, and the disturbing effects of the Dresden firebombing may have taken a toll on his mentality, but the fact remains that Billy Pilgrim thinks he went to Tralfamadore and learns how to handle with the life from beings there. That is, Vonnegut uses some Tralfamadorian theories in order to deal with Billy´s war experiences and their philosophy about living instantaneously in the past, present, and future is what really helps Billy to better understand his time travels; and it also shows him to center on the pleasant and avoid the unpleasant in life.

The novel presents itself in a Tralfamadorian fashion, jumping in time from one moment to the other, from unlikableness to satisfaction, backward and forward, in a spherical pathway that diverges from linear time, always closing one door in 1962 to consequently open another one in 1950.

Various critics like Wayne D.  McGinnis, T. J. Matheson or Michael E. Bailey agree that the anti-linear structure applies to Billy Pilgrim´s time traveling, Vonnegut´s fight to handle with the Dresden firebombing and its result, and the Tralfamadorian viewpoint on life – specifically, the Tralfamadorians only prefer the cheeriest, sweetest moments to center on, in this manner avoiding death completely, although death is inevitable. Also, in the final chapter of the book, Vonnegut interrupts Billy´s narrative with the Tralfamadorian expression of “so it goes” in order to exemplify his own connection with death. The reader observes Vonnegut borrowing some of Billy´s knowledge when arguing death, since death is inescapable and it is better to focus on the happy moments.

In relation with the end of the world, the Tralfamadorians say that one of their personal pilots unintentionally destroys the universe when he presses a wrong button while testing a new fuel. When Billy asks them about the prevention of pressing the wrong button, they answer him that “he has always pressed it and he always will.  We always let him and we always will let him” for the reason that “the moment is structured that way” (p.149) In this way, they say, preventing the war is stupid due to the fact that there will always be war, since there always has been war and it is better to simply “spend eternity looking at pleasant moments” instead of dwelling on the bad (p.150).

The nonlinear description of Billy also highlights that he is not just a simple established character who experiences a succession of changes, he is also the whole of all the diverse things he is at diverse times. This similar belief rules events as well. Dresden is led up to by events that precede and follow it. It is enclosed by allusions to other disasters and to other events with similar victims. Dresden becomes so large in the minds of Vonnegut and Billy that it governs the book.

At the end of the novel, the reader is able to restructure Billy’s life, which has been described in fragmented segments. Consequently, he can be seen as a whole, and his struggle can be definite. All over the novel, Billy’s antagonist is himself – his inactiveness and approval of destiny. In the end, he is ruined by both resulting a tragic novel.

Slaughterhouse-five, by Kurt Vonnegut

Dial Press Trade Paperback edition / July 2005

The singular moments of the narration and even the style used by the author makes a book different from others. The author’s style is the same across sections of the narrative, but the style of the individual is disposed to individual characteristics. Although the story remains constant, the style of the characters is very different, so the reader does not get bored with the same style of writing attributed to all the characters in the book. For example, Kilgore Trout, the famous science fiction writer is represented here as someone who manages the daily delivery service. He announced that the one who sells more subscriptions will get a trip to «Martha’s Vinyard fucking» for a week, with all costs included but only if they sell something for one.

A girl enchanted by the news, asks Trout if she can bring her sister. At which point he answered “Hell no, you think money Grows on trees?” (p.213) Billy clarifies to the reader the sarcasm of that declaration, as Trout had printed a book about a tree that did actually grow money. Its plants were “twenty dollar bills”, its flowers were “government bonds”, and its fruit was “diamonds”. In the book, Trout dictates that constant fighting occurs at the base of the tree; these results in the deaths of all who attempt to get near the tree. The remains of these attempts in turn rot in order to fertilize the tree. This is where Vonnegut’s true opinion on war can be applied. He makes a parallel between the tree in Trout’s book and the nature of mankind at war.

The use of historical and fictional sources, the novel´s themes of meanness, free determination, renewal, endurance, time and conflict which persist through Vonnegut´s novel create the version of the author in a complex way, from the literacy’s style point of view. Ironically, several of Vonnegut´s novels run with a filmic fluidity.  As defined in Film Comment, “Vonnegut’s literary vocabulary has included the printed page equivalents of jump-cuts, montages, fades, and flashbacks.  And his printed pace even feels filmic, as he packs his scenes tightly together, butting them against each other for maximum, often jarring, effect” (p.42).

Furthermore, the book’s style is simple, frank and unadorned in which the author inclines to write in short, declarative statements. Every small unit is profuse with discourse, action and provides as information like when, what and where takes place events.

“The war was nearly over. The locomotives began to move east in late December. The war would end in May. German prisons everywhere were absolutely full, and there was no longer any food for the prisoners to eat, and no longer any fuel to keep them warm. And yet – here came more prisoners” (p.29).

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.

Books

Vonnegut, Kurt (1999) Slaughterhouse-Five: A Duty-Dance with Death. Dial Press Trade Paperback: New York

McGinnis, Wayne D (1975) The arbitrary Cycle of Slaughterhouse-Five: A relation of Form to Theme. Critique 17

Harold Bloom. (2009) Bloom´s Modern Critical Interpretations. Chelsea House New York

Harold Bloom (2007) Bloom´s Guides: Slaughterhouse-Five. New York Chelsea House

Susan Farrell (2008) Critical companion to Kurt Vonnegut: a literary reference to his life and work. Facts of File New York

William Bly (1985) Kurt Vonnegut´s Slaughterhouse-Five, Barron´s Book Notes. Barron´s Educational Series New York

Websites

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut – Trade Paperback – Random House – Teacher´s Guide

http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385333849&view=tg

Essay sample on: A review of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

http://www.essaysample.com/essay/000321.html

The Slaughterhouse-Five

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4EI8NTVnJLEJ:www.freeessays.cc/db/10/bwa91.shtml+The+most+striking+aspect+of+the+style+of+Slaughterhouse-Five+is+the+fact+that+the+text+is+made+up+of+…&cd=4&hl=es&ct=clnk&gl=es

Mixing Fantasy with Facts: Kurt Vonnegut´s use of structure

http://www.pdfgratis.org/slaughterhouse-5-Kurt-Vonnegut

http://www.pdfgratis.org/viewpdf.php

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.: Themes/Mood/Vonnegut Biography/Literary History

http://thebestnotes.com/booknotes/Slaughterhouse_Five_Vonnegut/Slaughterhouse_5_Study_Guide04.html

Novel reviews by Dennis Littrell: April 2010

http://novelreviewsbydennislittrell.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_archive.html

Slaughterhouse-Five: Shmoop

http://books.google.es/books?id=MwXdq6YgLTkC&pg=PA2&dq=summary-slaughterhouse-five&hl=es&ei=YawATZegAZHGswa5vYDzDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

All these sources have been consulted in the course of 23rd November and 12th December 2010.

Subject : #14206 Literatura Anglesa i Discurs Polític –  grup A

Student´s name: Mihaela Tirca

Title of the paper: Censorship and Knowledge versus Ignorance

Author or topic: Ray Bradbury´s Fahrenheit 451

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the two main themes of Ray Bradbury´s Fahrenheit 451. Throughout the novel, the author stresses to a large extent toward the censorship and knowledge versus ignorance themes which are extremely relevant in our society, which is why I chose to work on this topics. Besides of that, I appended an introduction about Ray Bradbury´s vision about this society, a brief summary about this novel and finally I finished with a final conclusion about Ray Bradbury´s Fahrenheit 451.

Bibliography: click here to consult the books and websites used for the elaboration of this paper.

Auto-evaluation: Notable

Academic year 2010/2011
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
©Mihaela Tirca
mitir@alumni.uv.es