Week 4: Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

First published in 1969, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (that's its proper, full title, but we'll just call it Slaughterhouse-Five) is his sixth novel, and his eighth book altogether (counting two short story collections). While 1963's Cat's Cradle (which we'll be reading in a week) is the novel that brought him to national prominence, Slaughterhouse-Five is his magnum-opus, and the work for which he'll best be remembered.

Having started out writing far more conventional science fiction in the early 1950s, Vonnegut's style would evolve throughout the 1960s, reflecting, in no small part, his graduate studies in anthropology at the University of Chicago, to what we now recognize as his own distinctive style. Of course, you'll see a great deal of science fiction devices brought into use throughout both novels, but especially after having honed your analytical skills with two weeks of reading Richard Brautigan, I think you'll see how these tricks of the trade fit within our understanding of serious (and I use that term rather loosely) postmodern literature. Vonnegut resented his being labeled as a science fiction writer and saw it as an excuse for academics to ignore his work — a slight we'll be working to counteract over the next two weeks.

Speaking of literary tricks, however, Vonnegut was not an advocate of them in any form, and one of the things I think you'll notice is how straightforward and clear his writing is. Here's a list of tips Vonnegut gave to writers in the preface to his story collection, Bagombo Snuff Box, which delineate his general authorial ethos:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Vonnegut's own experience as a WWII prisoner of war trapped in Dresden during its 1945 firebombing (read more about this horrific incident in which Alied forces leveled the city and killed between 24,000 and 40,000 people here) shaped the heart of this novel, and having finally allowed himself to write about what he witnessed in the aftermath, he would return to this event often in his later works. Up until his death just short of two years ago, Vonnegut would be an outspoken advocate against war, and the war in which we're still embroiled would inspire him to come out of retirement, so to speak, to pen his final collection of essays, 2005's A Man Without a Country.

Below, I'll paste a few audio and video links, but first, here's the reading schedule:

• Monday, Jan. 26: Chapters 1-4
  
• Wednesday, Jan. 28: Chapters 5-6
  
• Friday, Jan. 30: Chapters 7-10
  

The chapters are big, making it harder to split up the reading the way I'd like to, so if you're inclined to read a little ahead of that schedule (especially over the weekend), feel free to do so.

If you follow this link, you can listen to a BBC Radio interview with Kurt Vonnegut, in which he discusses Slaughterhouse-Five, and responds to readers' questions from around the world.

Here's a ten-minute posthumous tribute to Vonnegut from the PBS series, NOW:




In this brief clip, Vonnegut discusses how he rates his novels with Charlie Rose:




Here's a short speech by Vonnegut marking the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima:




Vonnegut appeared in this Discover Card commercial in the 1980s:




He also appeared as himself in the terrible 1980s comedy, Back to School:




Finally, if you're looking to delve deeper, and have an hour or so to spare, you can use the playlist below to watch an eight-part profile of Vonnegut from the BBC television series Arena: