Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) discussion
This topic is about
Slaughterhouse-Five
New School Classics- 1915-2005
>
Slaughterhouse-Five: Background Thread & all that stuff
date
newest »
newest »
message 1:
by
Katy, Quarterly Long Reads
(new)
-
rated it 4 stars
Mar 12, 2014 04:15PM
Mod
reply
|
flag
Vonnegut's quotes on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ (in the quotes engine) are some of the best which the site has to offer. And they're in plentiful quantity.
Mod
Mod
Mod
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ( November 11, 1922 � April 11, 2007) was an American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blend satire, gallows humor, and science fiction.
As a citizen he was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a critical pacifist intellectual. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.
The New York Times headline at the time of Vonnegut's passing called Vonnegut "the counterculture's novelist."
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to third-generation German-American parents Kurt Vonnegut, Sr., and Edith (Lieber) Vonnegut.[6] Both his father and his grandfather Bernard Vonnegut attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and were architects in the Indianapolis firm of Vonnegut & Bohn. His great-grandfather, Clemens Vonnegut, Sr., was the founder of the Vonnegut Hardware Company, an Indianapolis firm. Vonnegut had an older brother, Bernard and a sister, Alice. Vonnegut graduated from Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in May 1940 and went to Cornell University that fall. Though majoring in chemistry, he was Assistant Managing Editor and Associate Editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. He was a member of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, as was his father. While at Cornell, Vonnegut enlisted in the United States Army. The Army transferred him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology and finally the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.
On Mother's Day 1944, while on leave during World War II, he discovered that his mother had committed suicide with sleeping pills.
(Source: )
More:
Mod
The Bombing of Dresden was an attack on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, that took place in the final months of the Second World War in the European Theatre. In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city.
The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed over 1,600 acres (6.5 km2) of the city centre. Between 22,700 and 25,000 people were killed. Three more USAAF air raids followed, two occurring on 2 March and 17 April aimed at the city's Marshalling yard and one small raid on 17 April aimed at industrial areas.
Post-war discussion of whether or not the attacks were justified has led to the bombing becoming one of the moral causes célèbres of the war.
A 1953 United States Air Force report defended the operation as the justified bombing of a military and industrial target, which was a major rail transport and communication centre, housing 110 factories and 50,000 workers in support of the German war effort. Several researchers have claimed that not all of the communications infrastructure, such as the bridges, were targeted, nor were the extensive industrial areas outside the city centre.
Critics of the bombing argue that Dresden—sometimes referred to as "Florence on the Elbe" (Elbflorenz)—was a cultural landmark of little or no military significance, and that the attacks were indiscriminate area bombing and not proportionate to the commensurate military gains.
Large variations in the claimed death toll have fueled the controversy. In March 1945, the Nazi regime ordered its press to publish a falsified casualty figure of 200,000 for the Dresden raids, and death toll estimates as high as 500,000 have been given. The city authorities at the time estimated no more than 25,000 victims, a figure which subsequent investigations, including one commissioned by the city council in 2010, support.
(Source: )
Mod
Mod
Mod
This was an interesting site:
Mod
Kurt Vonnegut Jr., an indescribable writer whose seven previous books are like nothing else on earth, was accorded the dubious pleasure of witnessing a 20th-century apocalypse. During World War II, at the age of 23, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned beneath the city of Dresden, "the Florence of the Elbe." He was there on Feb. 13, 1945, when the Allies firebombed Dresden in a massive air attack that killed 130,000 people and destroyed a landmark of no military significance.
Next to being born, getting married and having children, it is probably the most important thing that ever happened to him. And, as he writes in the introduction to "Slaughterhouse-Five," he's been trying to write a book about Dresden ever since. Now, at last, he's finished the "famous Dresden book."
In the same introduction, which should be read aloud to children, cadets and basic trainees, Mr. Vonnegut pronounces his book a failure "because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." He's wrong and he knows it.
Kurt Vonnegut knows all the tricks of the writing game. So he has not even tried to describe the bombing. Instead he has written around it in a highly imaginative, often funny, nearly psychedelic story. The story is sandwiched between an autobiographical introduction and epilogue.
Fact and Fiction Combined
The odd combination of fact and fiction forces a question upon the reader: how did the youth who lived through the Dresden bombing grow up to be the man who wrote this book? One reads "Slaughterhouse-Five" with that question crouched on the brink of one's awareness. I'm not sure if there's an answer, but the question certainly heightens the book's effects.
Here is the story: Billy Pilgrim, "tall and weak, and shaped like a bottle of Coca-Cola," was born in Ilium, N.Y., the only child of a barber there. After graduating from Ilium High School, he attended night sessions at the Ilium School of Optometry for one semester before being drafted for military service in World War II. He served with the infantry in Europe, and was taken prisoner by the Germans. He was in Dresden when it was firebombed.
After the war, he went back to Ilium and became a wealthy optometrist married to a huge wife named Valencia. They had two children, a daughter named Barbara who married an optometrist, and a son named Robert who became a Green Beret in Vietnam.
In 1968, Billy was the sole survivor of a plane crash on top of Sugarbush Mountain in Vermont. While he was recovering in the hospital, Valencia was killed in a carbon- monoxide accident. On Feb. 13, 1976, Billy was assassinated by a nut with a high- powered laser gun.
As you can see, there is much absurd violence in this story. But it is always scaled down to the size of Billy Pilgrim's world, which makes it more unbearable and more obligatory for the reader to understand the author's explanation for it. As I said, Mr. Vonnegut knows all the tricks.
Now there are two things I haven't yet told you about Billy Pilgrim, and I'm hesitant to do so, because when I tell you what they are you'll want to put Kurt Vonnegut back in the science-fiction category he's been trying to climb out of, and you'll be wrong.
First, Billy is "unstuck in time" and "has no control over where he is going next." "He is in a constant state of stage fright...because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next."
Story Told Fluidly
This problem of Billy's enables Mr. Vonnegut to tell his story fluidly, jumping forward and backward in time, free from the strictures of chronology. And this problem of Billy's is related to the second thing, which is that Billy says that on his daughter's wedding night he was kidnapped by a flying saucer from the planet Tralfamadore, flown there through a time warp, and exhibited with a movie star named Montana Wildhack.
The Tralfamadorians are two feet high, green, and shaped like plumber's friends, with suctions caps on the ground and little green hands with eyes on their palms at the top of their shafts. They are wise, and they teach Billy Pilgrim many things. They teach him that humans cannot see time, which is really like "a stretch of the rocky Mountains, " with all moments in the past, the present and the future, always existing.
"The Tralfamadorians...can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them." They teach Billy that death is just an unpleasant moment. Because Billy can go back and forth in time, he knew this lesson when he was in Dresden. In 1976, when he was assassinated, Billy Pilgrim was trying to bring this message to the world. He knew he would die, but he did not mind. "Farewell, hello, farewell, hello," he said.
I now, I know (as Kurt Vonnegut used to say when people told him that the Germans attacked first). It sounds crazy. It sounds like a fantastic last-ditch effort to make sense of a lunatic universe. But there is so much more to this book. It is very tough and very funny; it is sad and delightful; and it works. But is also very Vonnegut, which mean you'll either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner.
(Source: )
I'm not starting this until next week--must finish "The Quiet American" first. So much war....
There's also this one.Vonnegut talks about his real-life experiences in Dresden and how Billy Pilgrim was sort of based on a man named Edward Chrone (sp?).
I really love Vonnegut. I never discovered him until about 3 or 4 years ago, but he's fantastic. Mother Night has been my favorite so far, but a close second is Bluebeard.
Mod
Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes 'unstuck in time' after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.
Slaughterhouse-Five is not only Vonnegut's most powerful book, it is also as important as any written since 1945. Like Catch-22, it fashions the author's experiences in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of authority. Slaughterhouse-Five boasts the same imagination, humanity, and gleeful appreciation of the absurd found in Vonnegut's other works, but the book's basis in rock-hard, tragic fact gives it unique poignancy—and humor. (From the publisher.)
Mod
I now, I know (as Kurt Vonnegut used to say when people told him that the Germans attacked first). It sounds crazy. It sounds like a fantastic last-ditch effort to make sense of a lunatic universe. But there is so much more to this book. It is very tough and very funny; it is sad and delightful; and it works. But is also very Vonnegut, which mean you'll either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - New York Times
Poignant and hilarious, threaded with compassion and, behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral statement.
Boston Globe
Splendid art.... A funny book at which you are not permitted to laugh, a sad book without tears.
Life
(Audio version.) "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time." So begins Vonnegut's absurdist 1969 classic. Hawke rises to the occasion of performing this sliced-and-diced narrative, which is part sci-fi and partially based on Vonnegut's experience as a American prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany during the firebombing of 1945 that killed thousands of civilians. Billy travels in time and space, stopping here and there throughout his life, including his long visit to the planet Tralfamador, where he is mated with a porn star. Hawke adopts a confidential, whisper-like tone for his reading. Listening to him is like listening to someone tell you a story in the back of a bus—the perfect pitch for this book. After the novel ends, Vonnegut himself speaks for a short while about his survival of the Dresden firestorm and describes and names the man who inspired this story. Tacked on to the very end of this audio smorgasbord is music, a dance single that uses a vintage recording of Vonnegut reading from the book. Though Hawke's reading is excellent, one cannot help but wish Vonnegut himself had read the entire text.
Publishers Weekly
Mod
Autobiography, Postmodern, Science Fiction, War Drama
Slaughterhouse-Five is not a pure autobiography because, while it does have elements of the author's life in it, most of the narrative is focused on a fictional character, Billy Pilgrim. At the same time, many of Vonnegut's own experiences in Dresden, Germany, provide the engine for Slaughterhouse-Five's plot, so we think it deserves to be called a semi-autobiographical novel.
Slaughterhouse-Five is also primarily about various aspects of war: (a) how much it sucks, (b) how much it messes people up after it happens, and (c) how generally unfair life is that we have to go fight in wars and then grow old and die afterwards. So that's why we're also describing Slaughterhouse-Five as a war drama: not only does the plot focus on World War II, but the book also spends a lot of time pondering war as an experience.
As for the science fiction genre, Slaughterhouse-Five uses the elements of science fiction � time travel and aliens � but it is also self-conscious about considering what science fiction is for. Billy and Eliot Rosewater read science fiction because their own realities no longer make sense to them. They need invented realities that work by different rules because their own lives have lost meaning. Slaughterhouse-Five uses science fiction the same way it uses war, both as a plot point and as an object of philosophical examination.
The level of self-consciousness that Slaughterhouse-Five brings to the genres of autobiography, war drama, and science fiction all point to a fourth and final genre: the postmodern novel. The constant confusion about when � or even whether � the different events of the novel happen mean that readers are constantly kept at some distance from Billy Pilgrim and his life story. By using the author as a character in the book and by telling Billy's story out of order, the novel itself keeps reminding us that Billy's story is fiction. This manner of storytelling indicates a degree of skepticism about the idea of a unified self or the possibility of realistic narration that characterizes postmodernism.
(Source: )
Mod
Kathy wrote: "Bombing of Dresden in World War IIThe Bombing of Dresden was an attack on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, that took place in the final months of the Second World..."
I have two chapters left. Just finished reading a section of the book where the trek out of bombed Dresden, by the 'barbershop quartet' and 100 American prisoners was described. I had to stop to google for pictures. It really is devastating. Was devastating.
Mod
The Bombing of Dresden was an attack on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, that took place in the final months of th..."
Yes, and that I believe is the effect it had on Vonnegut and part of what he wanted to portray to the reader. Devastating and unbelievable!
He did a good job portraying it ...
Mod
Take this article with a grain of salt...
Chris wrote: "Take this article with a grain of salt..."
I like the bit about him rating his books.
Mod
This early posting of the No Spoiler thread is to discuss any non-plot issues pertaining to the book.
Appropriate Posts can contain:
1. Information about the author.
2. Compare editions/translations.
3. Any historical or background information
4. Are you familiar with this author’s work? Do you have any expectations going into the book?
5. What made you decide to read this book?
6. Any fan fiction that you have read or would like to read? Just link the books.
7. If you loved the book and want others to share in that experience, use this thread to motivate others, again save plot specifics for the Spoiler thread
8. If you hated the book, it would be best to keep that for the spoiler page
The most important thing to remember is no plot discussion. Any post that contains plot information or spoilers will be deleted.
Catching up on Classics (and lots more!)
Books mentioned in this topic
Slaughterhouse-Five (other topics)Mother Night (other topics)
Bluebeard (other topics)
