Slaughterhouse- Five Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

About the author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to third-generation German-American parents, Edith Vonnegut and Kurt Vonnegut, Sr..  Vonnegut graduated from Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in May 1940 and went to Cornell University later that year. He majored in chemistry, and was assistant managing editor and associate editor of The Cornell Daily Sun.  While at Cornell, Vonnegut enlisted in the United States Army during World War II.  While in WWII, his division was captured, and Vonnegut was held as a prisoner of war during the allied fire bombing of Dresden. After the war, Vonnegut attended the University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology. In 1947 Vonnegut left Chicago to work in New York, in public relations for General Electric. Vonnegut was a technical writer, but he was also known for writing well past his typical work hours. In the mid-1950s, Vonnegut worked very briefly for Sports Illustrated magazine, where he was assigned to write a piece on a racehorse who had jumped a fence and attempted to run away. On the verge of abandoning writing, Vonnegut was offered a teaching job at the University of Iowa  Writers' Workshop. While he was there in the early 1960s, his novel Cat's Cradle became a bestseller, and he began Slaughterhouse-Five. The latter novel is considered one of the best American novels of the twentieth century, appearing on the 100 best lists of Time magazine, and the Modern Library.

Vonnegut and WWII His experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a profound influence on his later work. Reassigned to a combat unit due to the manpower needs of the Allied invasion of France, Vonnegut was captured while a private with the 423rd Infantry Regiment, 106th Infantry Division during the Battle of the Bulge. Imprisoned in Dresden, he was chosen as a leader of the prisoners of war because he spoke some German, but After telling some German guards "what [he] was going to do to them when the Russians came," he was beaten and had his position as leader revoked.  Vonnegut was part of a group of American prisoners of war who survived the bombing in an underground slaughterhouse meat locker used as an ad hoc detention facility. The German guards called the building Schlachthof Fünf ("Slaughterhouse Five"), and the POWs adopted that name. Vonnegut said that the aftermath of the attack on the defenseless city was "utter destruction" and "carnage unfathomable." The experience was the inspiration for his famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, and is a central theme in at least six of his other books. In Slaughterhouse-Five—which is nominally a fictional work—he described the ruined city as resembling the surface of the moon. He said the German guards put the surviving POWs to work, breaking into basements and bomb shelters to gather bodies for mass burial, while German civilians cursed and threw rocks at them.  Vonnegut remarked, "There were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Germans sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes.”

Dresden Who: Allied Forces Where: Dresden, Germany When: World War II United States Britain Soviet Union Where: Dresden, Germany Cultural center Civilians Not a viable military target When: World War II February 14-15, 1945

Dresden Aftermath More than 130,000 civilians died in Dresden, roughly the same number of deaths that resulted from the Allied bombing raids on Tokyo and from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, both of which also occurred in 1945. Some consider the bombing a war crime because it was mass assault against civilians Inhabitants of Dresden were incinerated or suffocated in a matter of hours as a firestorm sucked up and consumed available oxygen. The scene on the ground was one of unimaginable destruction.

Dresden Before and After

Scenes of Destruction

Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five Slaughterhouse-Five treats one of the most horrific massacres in European history with mock-serious humor and clear antiwar sentiment…and aliens The novel is based on Kurt Vonnegut’s own experience in World War II. In the novel, a prisoner of war witnesses and survives the Allied forces’ firebombing of Dresden. Vonnegut, like his protagonist Billy Pilgrim, emerged from a meat locker beneath a slaughter-house into the moonscape of burned-out Dresden. His surviving captors put him to work finding, burying, and burning bodies; This task continued until the Russians came and the war ended. Vonnegut survived by chance, confined as a prisoner of war (POW) in a well-insulated meat locker, and so missed the cataclysmic moment of attack, emerging the day after into the charred ruins of a once-beautiful cityscape. Vonnegut has said that he always intended to write about the experience but found himself incapable of doing so for more than twenty years. 

Science fiction and metafiction Science fiction – Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginative content such as futuristic settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, faster than light travel, parallel universes and extraterrestrial life. Metafiction – fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions (especially naturalism) and traditional narrative techniques. In metafiction, an author will oftentimes break from the story and talk directly to the audience. They may discuss the writing process, or put themselves in the story as a way to communicate with the audience.

Vonnegut’s Writing Style Vonnegut has typically used science fiction (and metafiction) to characterize the world and the nature of existence as he experiences them. His chaotic fictional universe abounds in wonder, coincidence, randomness and irrationality. Science fiction helps lend form to the presentation of this world view without imposing a falsifying causality upon it. In his vision, the fantastic offers perception into the mysteries of the world, rather than escape from it. Science fiction is also technically useful, he has said, in providing a distance perspective, "moving the camera out into space," as it were. And unusually for this form, Vonnegut's science fiction is frequently comic, not just in the "black humor" mode with which he has been tagged so often, but in being simply funny.

Billy Pilgrim A World War II veteran, POW survivor of the firebombing of Dresden, prospering optometrist, husband, and father. Billy Pilgrim is the protagonist of the novel who believes he has “come unstuck in time.” He walks through a door at one moment in his life and suddenly finds himself in another time and place. His fragmented experience of time structures the novel as short episodic vignettes and shows how the difficulty of recounting traumatic experiences can require unusual literary techniques.

Billy Pilgrim Cont. Billy Pilgrim is the unlikeliest of antiwar heroes. An unpopular and complacent weakling even before the war (he prefers sinking to swimming), he becomes a joke as a soldier. He trains as a chaplain’s assistant, a duty that earns him disgust from his peers. With scant preparation for armed conflict, no weapons, and even an improper uniform, he is thrust abruptly into duty at the Battle of the Bulge. The farcical spectacle created by Billy’s inappropriate clothing accentuates the absurdity of such a scrawny, mild-mannered soldier. “His azure toga, a leftover scrap of stage curtain, and his fur-lined overcoat, several sizes too small,” throw his incongruity into relief. They underscore a central irony: such a creature could walk through war, oblivious yet unscathed, while so many others with more appropriate attire and provisions perish. It is in this shocked and physically exhausted state that Billy first comes “unstuck in time” and begins swinging to and fro through the events of his life, past and future.

Tralfamadore Slaughterhouse-Five is a true post-modernist work. It does not simply happen in one place or time. The novel has two basic setting places: Earth and the alien planet Tralfamadore The novel has three basic setting times: Billy’s past, present, and future Billy Pilgrim is “un-stuck in time” – he never stays in one place for very long before he is transported to a past, present, or future on either earth or Tralfamadore Billy’s time travel can be a manifestation of ptsd (which would have not been diagnosed back then) or something more serious. It is ultimately left up to the reader to decide.

Sources http://www.vonnegut.com/artist.asp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut