Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

1. Slaughterhouse Fiveby Kurt Vonnegut The Style of the Novel

2. Elements of the Novel • Science fiction • Clipped sentences and dialogue • Motifs of time travel • Aliens and space ships • Cinematic Techniques • Hard cuts • Associative fades • Artful montage to create associations between scenes

3. Literary Techniques • Short sentences • Truncated dialogue • Both used to create the jumpy feel of the book, break up the flow, create the spastic effect • Uses “clumps of images” or scenes as its structure • Few paragraphs to a few pages • Random at first • Subtle associations with other scenes • Themes are developed but not clear cut • Vonnegut wants “readers to co-author the book.”

4. Literary Techniques • Modernist • Lacks conventional structural elements • No set exposition, rising action, climax, resolution • Novel gives away climax at the beginning : the bombing of Dresden • First and last chapters are autobiographical frames to the middle chapters of fiction • First person perspective in first chapter, third person in the middle chapters (with some first person interruptions), returning to first person in the last chapter.

5. Elements of the Novel • Satire • Ridicules modern society • Author satirizes himself • It’s an example of “indirect” satire; readers must draw their own conclusions from the actions of the characters • Comic Relief • Used to provide a contrast to the seriousness of the themes • Tone is ironic, dark, comic, absurd, satiric • Uses both verbal and structural irony

6. Character Development • Character development is minimal, with the exception of Billy • Vonnegut tells us in Chapter 8, “There are almost no characters in this story.” • Characters are flat, one-dimensional caricatures

7. Themes

8. Human Reinvention • Billy transforms from soldier to optometrist to evangelist for the Tralfamadorian philosophy • Vonnegut reinvents himself: from soldier to scientist to public relations flak to popular writer • Fact and fiction intermingle • Billy’s experiences are fantasy; Roland’s one of the Three Musketeers, and Vonnegut is suggesting man creates his own picture of reality – often based on fantasy to help survive life

9. Relativity • We make our own Truth. • Nothing that happens can be judged as right or wrong. • Perspective changes truth. • Human perspective – death is feared… Tralfamadorian perspective death is a “hum”. • “So it goes.” • Vonnegut is undercutting the cynical, everything is relative attitude. After all, the Tralfamadorians destroy the universe.

10. Free Will is an Illusion • Billy is not in control of his life. • No control of time travel; when or where he will go. • Sometimes good things happen, sometimes bad. • Tralfamadorians teach Billy that only earthlings believe in free will. In reality, everything has happened before and will keep happening. • Philosophy of life is called determinism or quietism.

11. Chronological Time is an Illusion. • Like life, the structure of the novel is spastic, not linear. • No traditional beginning, middle, or end. • Satirizes traditional notions of time (Valencia “always has to know the time”). • Time, “is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one,” Billy says.

12. Billy Pilgrim as Christ Figure • Sleeps on the box car hanging from a sort of hook and is described as “self-crucified” • He is an evangelist for Tralfamadorian philosophy • Meek and persecuted, betrayed • Compliments the theme of the apocalypse • Billy shows little compassion or strength, but is at least fully human in his suffering and imagination.

13. Anti-War • Dark humor throughout • Billy recounts the bombing of Dresden in reverse, complete with munitions factories apparently dismantling bombs • Shows the callousness and brutality of war

14. Victimizer and Victim; Apathy and Violence • Soldiers deliver and receive violence. • Germans do the same. • All men promote war when they ignore or forget its terror, or resign themselves to it with a “so it goes” attitude, yet war makes victims of these same people. • Apathetic optometrists killed in a plane crash except for Billy • Complacent living is both dangerous and precarious

15. Dehumanization • Science, religion, technology, materialism, mass media, authority figures, war, pronography… all dehumanize. • Billy becomes dispassionate and desensitized.

16. Anti-American • Novel is punctuated with sarcastic descriptions of American culture • Suburbs • Overweight people • Corporate culture • Weak American soldiers

17. Paradise and Innocence • Billy and many characters are trying to return to a womb-like environment… a garden of Eden • Billy likes to retreat to his room/bed • He and Montana are Adam and Eve in a simulated Eden

18. Anti-Hero • Billy is opposite of a typical hero protagonist. • Weak, ineffectual, fatalistic • Rare moments of courage and when he does, they are pathetic • Vonnegut is ridiculing such conventional notions of heroism, suggesting they are fictions

19. Renewal • Death is not the end • Billy, after hearing the barbershop music, comes out of his deathlike apathy • Billy’s survival of the bombing, thanks to the slaughterhouse, is metaphor for renewal after deep, subconscious experiences.