By Kurt Vonnegut - Recommended Book.
I had never read Kurt Vonnegut before. To be honest I was a little afraid to start. I was afraid I wouldn't understand it, that he'd be over my head. To be even more honest, it worried me that Vonnegut is one of my brother's favorite authors. Not because we have such different taste, but because I didn't want to disappoint him.
When you find someone who likes the same book, a certain bond is created; it is a very real, literary way of saying, "I get you," or "I'm the same way." When you're kids growing up in the same house you're linked together by shared experiences and having the same parents, but as you get older, when you start to discover who you are separate from your family, threads of what connected you start to fade into the background. Suddenly, your childhood bonds don't seem so relevant, and you start to wonder if you can maintain a meaningful relationship as adults.
As a kid I idolized my brother - even his weird friends (Sorry, Mark, or Kevin, or whichever one of the dudes happens to read this). I always wanted to know what he was up to, what music he liked, what hockey team he was following, and what he believed in. I measured my coolness by his example, and hoped that one day I would climb to a rank above "troll under the stairs." As I got older, I made lasting friendships of my own and had new experiences. I formed my own opinions and beliefs and discovered things that were important to me, independent of my siblings. I guess I always felt just a bit different; we all had different personalities and interests and goals and ideas. Maybe that's what makes things fun, each of us having something new to bring to the table. But still it's reassuring when there's that flicker of recognition, of understanding, of seeing a bit of yourself in someone else. And there's no better means than that of loving the same book.
I realize I haven't talked about the book one bit. I'm not giving this one to you; you'll need to read it for yourself. Seventy years after most of the events in this book took place, Vonnegut's message still holds up. Being in graduate school I thought I'd be oh so clever to relate what I read to the modernist movement I am currently examining. But while Slaughterhouse Five may have carried over some modernist elements, Vonnegut didn't write it to fit into a movement (from what I have read Slaughterhouse Five is typically characterized as post-modernist anyway). He wrote about the subtleties and meaninglessness we all experience. As my brother pointed out, the lesson Pilgrim learned about time from the Tralfamadorians is "just an idea of permanence to sooth the idea of helpless insignificance." Though life is messy and is often painful, we try to find ways as human beings to make sense of it all.
Aside from my appreciation for the straight forward text throughout, my favorite quote comes from the beginning of the book, while reflecting on his own life Vonnegut wrote:
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. (8)
Who we are, what is normal, it's all relative. People are not good or bad; cliche I know, life is not black and white. Vonnegut's experience in Dresden and his education afterward showed him that and shaped his writing; as in life, we see no hero, no bad guy, just people muddling through life the only way they know how.
Admittedly, I put tabs all over the pages of this book, imagining I would discuss each one, either here or in person, but that would be painful and go on for days. And in order to serve those tabs justice I would need to re-read the book right here and now. So instead of preaching and posturing anymore than I already have, I will leave a list of fragments I marked while reading for you to think about if you've read Slaughterhouse Five (or perhaps, to entice you to do so). Enjoy!
Please feel free to comment.
- "So it goes" (2). First occurrence.
- "Sooner or later I go to bed, and my wife asks me what time it is. She always has to know the time. Sometimes I don't know, and I say, 'Search me'" (7).
- "We were connected to the institutions that supported us by means of pneumatic tubes which ran under the streets of Chicago" (8).
What are pneumatic tubes, and is this true? Never knew this about Chicago.
- "History in her solemn page informs us that the crusaders were but ignorant and savage men, that their motives were those of bigotry unmitigated, and that their pathway was one of blood and tears" (15).
- "Through a misunderstanding, some children reported for duty at Genoa, where no slave ships were waiting. They were fed and sheltered and questioned kingly by good people there - then given a little money and a lot of advice and sent back home" (16).
- "I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee" (18).
- "I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go" (quoted in Vonnegut 19).
- "No art is possible without a dance with death, he wrote" (19).
- "It's just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever" (25).
- "...There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects..." (84).
- "They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times" (123).
- "His bare feet were blue and ivory" (140).
Blue and ivory is repeated multiple times; I did not mark the first or all occurrences.
- "Somebody behind him in the box car said, 'Oz.' That was I. That was me. The only other city I'd ever seen was Indianapolis, Indiana" (141).
- "He got a few paragraphs into it, and then he realized he had read it before - years ago, in the veteran's hospital. [The Big Board] was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212" (192).
I found the inclusion of this scene to be meant as a tell, a tip off to the reader that Pilgrim was confusing what he read in the science fiction books with what happened in his real life. He was traumatized by the war and suffered head injuries afterward, causing this break.
- "'I suppose they will all want dignity,' I said" (202).
Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. Slaughterhouse Five or The Children's Crusade. 25th Anniversary ed. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1994. Print.
