Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five (1969), although a target of book burners across the
country, remains a much-taught postmodern novel. It is postmodern in that it uses and
also subverts the conventions both of science fiction and of war fiction, features a
nonlinear plot, with jumps both in space and in time, and confuses the identity of
ostensible author and the "I" of chapter 1. Is the "I" Vonnegut? Another character?
Planting the seeds of uncertainty in the reader regarding the identity of authors and their
relationship to the text is one of the hallmarks of postmodernism. By extension, it
prompts us to ask where "fiction" ends and "reality" begins. So too has postmodernism
made us question the organization of the text itself. In Slaughterhouse Five, we are
uncertain about just where the text begins. The first page of this work includes three titles
in various typefaces as well as information about the author. Later appear illustrations
which we assume are to be "read" as part of the text as well. Furthermore, although
Vonnegut's announced purpose is to write about the Allied firebombing of Dresden, he
devotes lit- tle space to this event itself, resulting in a war novel without combat scenes.
Apparently, like Joseph Conrad's Kurtz, Vonnegut could allude to "the horror" but could
find no words to describe it. Finally, this work is sold at bookstores both in the "classics"
or "literature" sections and in the "science fiction" (or nonliterature?) section, thus illustrating its status as mass cultural artifact.
Postmodernism for High-School Students Author(s): Kathleen M. Puhr Source: The English
Journal, Vol. 81, No. 1 (Jan., 1992), pp. 64-66 Published by: National Council of Teachers of
English Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/818343 Accessed: 18/05/2009 10:28
Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade is a book that hasn't yet been written.
Vonnegut is so obsessed, so horrified by his subject that he quite literally cannot
approach it, can only hint at it, sur- rounding it with semi-comic non sequiturs, a kind of
toned-down Catch-22. The subject is the firebombing of Dresden. But this subject is not
the content of this novel. The novel is about any number of other things, and it is also
about Vonnegut's failure to write the novel, his sense of despair, his conviction that it is a
lousy novel, and so forth. Rarely has the failure of a piece of fiction been so obviously
tied up with the author's intense desire to write about it. Vonnegut says in his
introductory chapter that he has been writing or trying to write the story of the
firebombing of Dresden for years, this is his "famous" unwritten novel, and yet what he
has finally turned out is a highly artificial, glib, picaresque tale of someone named "Billy
Pilgrim." Billy is captured by a flying saucer from the planet Tralfamadore on his
daughter's wedding night and, gifted with a peculiar talent for timelessness, he can see
past, present, and future, and relive or live these various times, but without the power to
alter anything. This gives Vonnegut the chance to jump maniacally back and forth and
ahead in time, creating a jumble of events and non-events, since he is anxious not to write
about his alleged subject, which is apparently the firebombing of Dresden. Of course, a
writer writes about what he wants to write about, and it is quite possible that Vonnegut
has been deluding himself for decades-what he really wants to write about is the nonsense
of Billy Pilgrim, and not the seriousness of Dresden. It would have been kind of someone
to tell him that he couldn't write about it anyway, since fiction is not written about events
but about people: Vonnegut has not created any people here, only bizarre cut-outs
mouthing lines that are sometimes funny and some- times not. His grotesque scenes are
unfelt because they are un- imagined.
Author(s): Joyce Carol Oates Source: The Hudson Review, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Autumn, 1969), pp.
531-539 Published by: The Hudson Review, Inc. Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3849448 Accessed: 18/05/2009 12:59
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1968) also thematizes the writing of history, this
time of the Second World War, particularly the bombing of Dresden. It opens with a
qualified truth claim: 'All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty
much true.'10 This parodies the eighteenth-century novelistic convention, as does the title
page. Time is predictably unpredictable, even for the narrator, who experiences a conflict
between subjective and objective time: 'The time would not pass [ . .] The second hand
on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again'
(p. 20). It is another framed narrative whose end is prefigured in its beginning as the
narrator tells us that the story he is going to tell begins like this: Listen: Billy Pilgrim has
come unstuck in time. It ends like this: Poo-tee-weet? (p. 22) And so it does. The narrator
proceeds to relate the fantastic tale of Billy Pilgrim, war- time chaplain's assistant and
time traveller. Aristotle's scenario, where 'nothing would be before or after anything else',
is dramatized as the hero is abducted by benevolent Aliens, for whom all moments, past,
present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look
at all the different moments [... ]. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and
they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on
Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string. (p. 27) This picture of
time has its origins in Einstein's general theory of relativity (I915), a radical revision of
Newtonian physics, contemporaneous with modernism, which presents the universe in
terms of a four-dimensional space-time continuum although it does not directly challenge
the idea of linear time. Tralfamadorian plot construction is coherent with fourdimensional time; their novels are emphatically anti-Aristotelian and bear a singular
resemblance both to Derrida's idea of writing and Melquiades' fictional technique in One
Hundred rears of Solitude. They are laid out in clumps of symbols which are read 'all at
once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the
messages [...]. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no
causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous
moments seen all at one time' (p. 88). Conventional plot is considered in the initial
framing chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five where the narrator discusses one version of the
story which he has outlined in crayon on a roll of wallpaper: “A Brief Story of Postmodern
Plot I used my daughter's crayons, a different color for each main character. One end of
the wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and then
there was all that middle part, which was the middle. And the blue line met the red line
and then the yellow line, and the yellow line stopped because the character represented
by the yellow line was dead. And so on.” (p. 5) The real plot of Slaughterhouse-Five is
somewhere between the Aristotelian plot and Derrida's 'writing' or the narrator's plot
diagram and a Tralfamad- orian novel. The postmodern plot and reading experience
cannot match Derrida's ideal because the 'earthling' cannot read or write the scenes or
symbols of the novel simultaneously. If we were to attempt to draw a real plot diagram of
Slaughterhouse-Five in crayon, it would resemble coloured spaghetti. But although its
jumps in time are more frequent and abrupt than those in either Midnight's Children or
One Hundred rears ofSolitude, the prolepsis and analepsis is still 'realistically' motivated
by Billy Pilgrim's travel backwards and forwards in time, which is itself naturalized by
his abduction by the Tralfamadorians or, if you cannot stomach that, by his madness,
caused by a bump on the head in an aeroplane crash. The narrator describes himself 'as a
trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and wonderful dialogue and
suspense' (p. 5). Slaughterhouse-Five is another highly 'readable' novel where cause and
effect still operate and even though the conclusion is written in the introduction the writer
cannot dispense with suspense, because the reader does not know for sure whether or
how that conclusion is reached until he reaches it in real time. According to John North,
Stephen Hawking's deconstruction of the boundaries of time can be described in terms of
a circular, self-contained universe which has no beginning or end. Possibly the
replacement of linear time with circular or deconstructed time in postmodern theory and
fiction is a manifestation of the fear of death, and these alternative narratives of time
function to replace the religious narratives of immortality which have been discredited in
a godless world. The Tralfamadorians have no such fear of death precisely because they
can see the fourth dimension: 'When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that
the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person
is just fine in plenty of other moments' (p. 27). Billy Pilgrim tries to spread the
Tralfamad- orian gospel, at one point speaking at a radio conference on the death of the
novel, at another reassuring a little boy he is fitting for glasses that his dead father is
really alive in other moments. Paul Ricoeur suggests in Time and Narrative that it is
through narrative that we humanize time and resolve the disjunction between our
necessarily limited experience and the scientific idea of time. Both Hawking's theory and
the fourth dimension as depicted in Vonnegut's novel are imaginative constructions to the
extent that finity bounds human experience, but they are read in different ways: one as
scientific exposition; the other for its entertainment value.
Clearly, beginnings and endings have a special function in postmodern metafiction, marking the
entrance and exit of the fictional world and its parallel time. There is a structural circularity in
these novels which confounds linear time: the end of Midnight's Children returns to the present of
the telling, a not unconventional plot device, but also foretells the future; the ending of One
Hundred rears of Solitude is more complex as Aureliano reads his future in a historical document.
The narrator of Slaughterhouse-Five is particularly taken with those songs whose last line repeats
the first line 'And so on to infinity', like the story of Billy Pilgrim (p. 3). Derrida turns
deconstruction on narrative time in 'The Law of Genre', an analysis of Blanchot's La Folie dujour,
which includes in its final paragraphs its first line. Derrida reads this as a deconstruction of linear
time: These first words mark a collapse that is [... ] unsuitable within a linear order of succession,
within a spatial or temporal sequentiality, within an objectifiable topology or chronology. One
sees [... .] reads the crumbling of an upper boundary. [... ] Suddenly, this upper or initial
boundary, which is commonly called the first line of a book is forming a pocket inside the corpus.
It is taking the form of an invagination through which the trait of the first line, the borderline,
splits while remaining the same and traverses yet also bounds the corpus. 1 This symbolizes the
deconstruction of narrative chronology. However, this kind of metafiction could just as easily be
read as reinforcing the self- containment of the fictional world together with its particular
chronology in an infinite 'loop'.
A Brief Story of Postmodern Plot Author(s): Catherine Burgass Source: The Yearbook of English
Studies, Vol. 30, Time and Narrative (2000), pp. 177-186 Published by: Maney Publishing on
behalf of Modern Humanities Research Association Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3509251 Accessed: 18/05/2009 13:10
KURT VONNEGUT, JR. Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade. On the night
of February 13, 1945, British and American bombs began to fall on Dresden, theretofore
an open city. In the fire storm and its aftermath more people died than in any other
massacre in European history. Among the survivors was a very young American prisoner
of war who lived because, as he says in the 1966 preface to Mother Night, We were in a
cool meat locker under a slaughterhouse .... If we had gone above to take a look, we
would have been turned into artifacts characteristic of fire storms: seeming pieces of
charred firewood two or three feet long-ridiculously small human beings, or jumbo fried
grasshoppers, if you will. . .. Everything was gone but the cellars where 135,000 Hansels
and Gretels had been baked like gingerbread men. So we were put to work as corpse
miners, breaking into shelters, bringing bodies out. And I got to see many German types
of all ages as death had found them, usually with valuables in their laps. Sometimes
relatives would come to watch us dig. They were interesting too. "Over the years,"
Vonnegut says in the first chapter of Slaughter- house-Five, "people have often asked me
what I'm working on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about
Dresden." The reasons why the book was necessary and why it was so hard to write are
fully evident in the book itself. In it the traumatic ex- periences which he speaks of in the
preface to Mother Night are explored with courage, with great intellectual power and
honesty, with gripping intensity, and with a sure sense of aesthetic form. The result is the
most powerful novel I know of in the American literature of war. Slaughterhouse-Five is
an artistic, as well as a personal, summa. The themes and ideas, even the persons and
places, of the earlier work move through this latest novel into a rich and coherent whole.
We can now see that earlier work in a new perspective. The early science fiction, for
example, can now be seen as an attempt to discover new ways of explaining and
justifying human history and Vonnegut's own experience. How can one justify, or even
explain, what happened in Dresden? In the first chapter we are told that "there is nothing
intelligent to say about a massacre." Yet one must somehow accept the realities of human
history and of one's own experience. To deny them is insane and suicidal. This
acceptance must begin with the acknowledgment of the fact of death. Early in the book
Vonnegut juxtaposes the prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous with Celine's statement that
"no art is possible without a dance with death." Death is one of those things we can't
change, and part of wisdom is in learning that; but the quality of life is some- thing we
can change, and we need to learn that too. Every life is a work of art whose values and
assumptions must be tested constantly. Consider, for example, the theme of time in
Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist, is "spastic in time," moving, without
wishing to do so, throughout his chronological lifetime and even beyond (death is
experienced simply as a purple color). The Tralfamadorians capture him, take him
through a "time warp" to their distant planet, install him in a zoo with a luscious female
Earthling, and watch them for months with fascination-all within an elapsed Earth time of
a microsecond. Vonnegut is not just being clever; he is constantly testing the most basic
assumptions which we all so confidently share. Time for Billy Pilgrim has become almost
purely experiential. Free of his debt to his past and his future, he can build a more
satisfying existence entirely in the present. Knowing he will die (and even when, where,
and how, though not, of course, exactly why), he is free to live. The structure of
Slaughterhouse-Five reflects this existential freedom. Seemingly disjointed or even, at
times, inarticulate, the narrative technique reflects the experience which the book
describes- an odyssey from horror and despair toward love and faith. Eventually,
everything in the book falls into place-not just in a mechanical sense, but in the building
of a rich and radiant vision of human life. In the process we pass through various stages
of Vonnegut's own liberal education: in anthropology, journalism, sociology, public relations, World Federalism, and so on, none of which seems very rele- vant to the holocaust
in Dresden. In anthropology, for instance, At that time, they were teaching that there was
absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still. Another thing
they taught was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father
died, he said to me, "You know-you never wrote a story with a villain in it." I told him
that was one of the things I learned in college after the war. This is the tone of the book
as a whole-not the shrill sarcasm of the revolutionary or the reactionary, but a gentle
irony expressing a puzzled awareness of the contradictions between our experiences and
our received interpretations of them. Most of it is directed against the liberal tradition
which still dominates our culture. But the prose which conveys best Vonnegut's sense of
outrage over Dresden is the "objective" excerpts he quotes from memoirs and history
books. The subtitle fulfills a promise to a woman who had assumed that the great
Dresden novel would be the standard view of war as a supreme test of human character.
The subtitle is appropriate because the book is Vonnegut's own crusade for the children
of the world-- and also because the fire storm in Dresden, like the original Children's
Crusade, was the product of extreme idealism and extreme corruption. Anyone who has
watched a World War II movie on the late show knows the feeling: could anyone ever
have been so innocent? and so guilty? Billy Pilgrim "stared into the patina of the
corporal's boots, saw Adam and Eve in the golden depths. They were naked. They were
so innocent, so vulnerable, so eager to behave decently. Billy Pilgrim loved them." So it
goes. What can Billy Pilgrim do to change the world? Not much really: "Among the
things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future." He can
refuse to kill. He can care about people, and try to comfort them (his "insane" ideas about
Tralfamadore, eternal life, etc. spill out for the first time when he tries to comfort a boy
whose father has died in Viet Nam). Love never dies. It radiates far beyond the finite
bodies in which it finds incarnation, and is experienced again and again, and anywhere.
Truth, charity, affection, openness, compassion: this is the love which Vonnegut writes
about, and which is so convincing because it shines forth from the darkest knowledge of
horror and despair.
Trends in Recent American Fiction Author(s): Howard M. Harper, Jr. Source: Contemporary
Literature, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Spring, 1971), pp. 204-229 Published by: University of Wisconsin
Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207737 Accessed: 18/05/2009 13:15
Thus much of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, for example, centers on the impossibility of
distinguishing between facts and fictions. The tension between Billy Pilgrim's trips to
Tralfamidore as real and as fantasies is a precise expression of the general blurring of the
distinction between fact and fiction or reality and fantasy that Vonnegut is centrally concerned
with in this book, as elsewhere. Given our epistemological situation today, in which the observer
is implicated in what he observes, Vonnegut asks how we can ever see reality in any objective
sense, how we can know anything but a personal or projected vision, a fantasy. The funny
sequence when the American prisoners are greeted by the British in the German prison camp is an
example of Vonnegut's point that we see the world as a fiction we project on it. The British have
a fantasy of what the Americans will be like and they insist on sticking to it. They are
disappointed at the condition, costume, and smell of the Americans. They want to involve them in
playing a fiction, a game of musical comedy, at the most inappropriate time, just when the
Americans have come from the grueling and almost annihilating experience of being transported
to the prison in over-crowded, unsanitary cattle cars. But everybody in the novel is playing games
in one way or another. The Germans like the British because they make war seem sport. The
Americans, on the other hand, are always either living some idyllic fantasy, like Edgar Derby,
who thinks he is a scout master, or some harsh fantasy, as, for example, is Paul Lazarro, who
lives a kind of gangster-movie existence. Billy sees that others take their fictions to be reality. But
because he cannot find any basis for distinguishing between the value of one fantasy and another,
or for communicating that difference, he accepts all views. The best he can do when he sees the
suffering and death resulting from some view is to cry. But Billy, too, is attracted by playing and
fantasizing. The major action of the novel concerns Billy's inability to control his own often
contradictory fantasies. He drifts among making trips to Tralfamidore, being president of the
Local Lion's Club, being a prisoner of war, and trying to convert earthlings to a Tralfamidorian
view of experience. Each of these fantasies is a role for Billy, a game he plays to avoid one of his
other roles. By making game-playing the action of the novel, Vonnegut can present the wildest
inventions as forms of meaningful action. In so doing, he shifts the focus of his action from social
criticism to inventiveness itself. For while Vonnegut's concentration on game-playing satirizes
the inadequate visions of the British prisoners and others who act as if life were a fairy tale or a
Hollywood movie, and parodies formula living and formula writing in general, his primary
concern is with celebrating invention itself, man's ability to play even in the face of a meaningless
universe. His aim is positive rather than negative. We see this, for example, in the prison camp
sequence, where Vonnegut's exuberant imagination, his sheer delight in playing with an
outrageous situation, is evident. The assemblage of images - soldiers singing a comic opera
greeting, a musical version of "Cinderella," the inanity of the British soldier's advice to Billy
about the importance of daily bowel movements while Billy is fainting from hunger and fatigue,
even Billy's ill-fated acquisition of the silver boots - suggests an overflow of playful high spirits
rather than a concentration on social criticism. Many other sequences in the novel also suggest a
dominant element of playfulness, most notably the death of Billy's wife and his affair with
Montana Wildhack. The alternation between Billy's earthly miseries and the Tralfamidorian
paradise of Montana's bosom is also playful, as is Billy's speech to the Lion's Club intercut with
Edgar Derby's speech to the prisoners. In all of these sequences we are attracted not by the social
criticism, for Vonnegut's critical points in each case are obvious, but by the imaginative fun
Vonnegut invents for each episode. Not least is the fun of Vonnegut's style itself; he seems almost
to be daring himself to discover how many disjunctive elements he can put in a single sentence,
each connected by "and," without breaking the sentence itself into fragments. have come from the
grueling and almost annihilating experience of being transported to the prison in over-crowded,
unsanitary cattle cars. But everybody in the novel is playing games in one way or another. The
Germans like the British because they make war seem sport. The Americans, on the other hand,
are always either living some idyllic fantasy, like Edgar Derby, who thinks he is a scout master,
or some harsh fantasy, as, for example, is Paul Lazarro, who lives a kind of gangster-movie
existence. Billy sees that others take their fictions to be reality. But because he cannot find any
basis for distinguishing between the value of one fantasy and another, or for communicating that
difference, he accepts all views. The best he can do when he sees the suffering and death resulting
from some view is to cry. But Billy, too, is attracted by playing and fantasizing. The major action
of the novel concerns Billy's inability to control his own often contradictory fantasies. He drifts
among making trips to Tralfamidore, being president of the Local Lion's Club, being a prisoner of
war, and trying to convert earthlings to a Tralfamidorian view of experience. Each of these
fantasies is a role for Billy, a game he plays to avoid one of his other roles. By making gameplaying the action of the novel, Vonnegut can present the wildest inventions as forms of
meaningful action. In so doing, he shifts the focus of his action from social criticism to
inventiveness itself. For while Vonnegut's concentration on game-playing satirizes the inadequate
visions of the British prisoners and others who act as if life were a fairy tale or a Hollywood
movie, and parodies formula living and formula writing in general, his primary concern is with
celebrating invention itself, man's ability to play even in the face of a meaningless universe. His
aim is positive rather than negative. We see this, for example, in the prison camp sequence, where
Vonnegut's exuberant imagination, his sheer delight in playing with an outrageous situation, is
evident. The assemblage of images - soldiers singing a comic opera greeting, a musical version of
"Cinderella," the inanity of the British soldier's advice to Billy about the importance of daily
bowel movements while Billy is fainting from hunger and fatigue, even Billy's ill-fated
acquisition of the silver boots - suggests an overflow of playful high spirits rather than a
concentration on social criticism. Many other sequences in the novel also suggest a dominant
element of playfulness, most notably the death of Billy's wife and his affair with Montana
Wildhack. The alternation between Billy's earthly miseries and the Tralfamidorian paradise of
Montana's bosom is also playful, as is Billy's speech to the Lion's Club intercut with Edgar
Derby's speech to the prisoners. In all of these sequences we are attracted not by the social
criticism, for Vonnegut's critical points in each case are obvious, but by the imaginative fun
Vonnegut invents for each episode. Not least is the fun of Vonnegut's style itself; he seems almost
to be daring himself to discover how many disjunctive elements he can put in a single sentence,
each connected by "and," without breaking the sentence itself into fragments.
Satire as Rhetorical Play Author(s): Harriet Deer and Irving Deer Source: boundary 2, Vol. 5,
No. 3 (Spring, 1977), pp. 711-722 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/302551 Accessed: 18/05/2009 13:22