Slaughterhouse Fiveby Kurt Vonnegut

The Style of the Novel

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

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.”

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.

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

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

Themes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Dehumanization

• Science, religion, technology, materialism, mass media, authority figures, war, pronography… all dehumanize.

• Billy becomes dispassionate and desensitized.

Anti-American

• Novel is punctuated with sarcastic descriptions of American culture– Suburbs– Overweight people– Corporate culture– Weak American soldiers

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

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

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.