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Slaughterhouse-Five
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Slaughterhouse Five - Finished! (Spoilers herein)
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Glad to see people are still participating.I have a hard time saying why I love this book. I think it is Vonnegut's style I enjoy. The first time I read SH-5, I had a smile on my face the entire time, even though the material is quite depressing. I laughed out loud a few times (I loved the "wang" sentence), which is something I never do.
I think his style is summed up pretty well in his rules of creative writing, found here:
http://melanconent.com/lib/rev/bagomb...
It is a very unique book, and though he has other great stuff, nothing is quite like SH-5.
Naturally this is purely subjective. He didn't grab me from the beginning, and even though there were moments of humour - moments I saw were meant to be funny in whatever way - I had this stubborn urge not to grant him any laughs.Sounds silly I know. Tom Robbins does this to me too. The things that annoy you annoy you so much that you don't like to give them any credit for the bits that you admire. Do you ever find that?
Ok, things I liked. Hmm. I liked the excerpts from Campbell's book on the American POW - but aside from getting a chuckle from the truisms they were pretty obvious.
One thing that bugged me was the time-travelling. I don't think I'm a particularly dense person, but where the hell is Bill? Which Bill is he? It did my head in, trying to pin him down, and maybe you're not supposed to, but come on, is it is consciousness that's time-travelling? And when he finds himself in the future, with a patient, how does he know what to do? Where is the BEGINNING?
As for the alien sub-plot - how necessary is it? Really? For that matter, how necessary is the time-travelling? How necessary is Billy??
"Sounds silly I know. Tom Robbins does this to me too. The things that annoy you annoy you so much that you don't like to give them any credit for the bits that you admire. Do you ever find that?"Sure, I've experienced that. I guess I had a similar experience with Something Wicked This Way Comes.
I think the point of Billy jumping randomly was to show that time exists as another dimension. He was just traveling along that dimension just like you travel in three dimensional space.
The Tralfamadores conveyed the message about their "philosophy" of time (which Billy later starts to teach himself), that everyone is always alive and death is not to be feared. Billy, having learned from experience and from the Tralfamadores, accepted his fate unquestioningly.
About Campbell, Vonnegut devotes a whole book to him in Mother Night. It is written as a memoir by Campbell and is a more "traditional" book.
I do get the time-travel thing, and I'm not saying that the way the book was written isn't clever. I just didn't like it. It's a gut thing. I suppose, at the end of the day, I didn't think it very successful, but I can't quite put my finger on why I feel this way. Yet.Are we the only two who've finished this?
I'm not sure. I wish we had a few more people participating, though. I was excited about this group, so hopefully things pick up.
Discussion: Slaughterhouse FiveI finished the book fairly quickly (in one sitting); As much as I didn't care for the style, I think the way it was written actually helps pull you through the book. The book is also packed with a lot of concepts that are difficult to tease out with just one casual read. Going back through it a few times, I have found some things that are interesting and a few that I just can’t accept.
I thought that the time travel was actually done quite well. It jumps back and forth to help give the reader an impression that Billy exists simultaneously across the time continuum or dimension. You ask ‘Where the hell is Bill?’ ... I think the answer was meant to be everywhere and every-time, within the confines of his total existence; and, as Ben indicated, Billy’s existence is defined in 4 dimensions. This also further emphasizes a certain fatalism or determinism within the storyline that I think Vonnegut was trying to explore by making Billy powerless to actually control the when and where of his time traveling.
The alien encounter is simply so bizarre that I doubt is was spurious. I wouldn’t call it very entertaining, so that was not the reason to include it. Perhaps it is meant to highlight the difficulty humans have with alien concepts ... things that don’t fit what we have come to perceive is real or factual. Nobody believes Billy about the aliens ... then again ... when Billy is in the hospital and tells a historian that he was actually at Dresden, the historian doesn’t believe that either. Which is fact and which is fiction? Is there really a difference? Can the people in charge of actually recording the facts (history) tell the difference and should we trust them to do so?
*Sigh* You are too good Kristjan! I can't seem to get past my dislike of this book to be sensible about it. I agree with what you say, and I know that the way it was written effectively portrayed Billy's time-travelling etc. I just couldn't be made to care. Do you think that the characters, or the story even, was sacrificed for the concepts of the book? I didn't think it achieved a balance.Poor Billy. I don't think we're meant to know where he is exactly - perhaps Billy doesn't know either? - but it's like a puzzle I keep worrying at. I'm trying to unravel the conundrum of time in order to make sense of it - a very human thing to do!
Can the people in charge of actually recording the facts (history) tell the difference and should we trust them to do so? Wonderful question, though like the book in general, it's a bit obvious isn't it? I mean, the concepts in the book are interesting, definitely, but he lacks subtlety in how he handles them. I found Vonnegut to be quite heavy-handed and obvious. He didn't really leave me anything to do - which is probably why I wanted to figure out which Billy is the "real" Billy, so to speak.
(It's usually so much easier to do this when you dislike a book than when you like it, but I'm struggling to clarify myself for some reason, and just keep repeating myself. Very frustrating!)
Full disclosure here from a first-time poster: I haven't read SH5 in about a year, so my comments will be distinctly lacking in specifics at times. Re: time travel and aliens. When I first read this, back in college I think it was, I read this as science fiction. Re-reading it, I don't think it's science fiction at all. He doesn't travel through time, there are no aliens. Billy Pilgrim is so overwhelmed by his experiences in the war that he creates a fantasy world and finally breaks from reality. Notice how the aliens owe so much to pulp sf, to the Kilgore Trout type of sf Billy reads. Notice how the Trafalmadorian view of time is very useful to Billy in dealing with the horrors of war: don't worry about death, it's not real anyway. That, at any rate, is my take on it.
Right, I think you can certainly conclude that poor Billy was just crazy, maybe from bumping his head a bit too hard in the plane crash. I thought about this a lot through both of my readings, but I'm not sure which way I lean, or even if it matters.
Discussion: Slaughterhouse Five Shannon said: I just couldn't be made to care. Do you think that the characters or the story even, was sacrificed for the concepts of the book? I didn't think it achieved a balance.
Absolutely ... I freely admit that I really need to like the protagonist to enjoy a story; I frequently abandon a book where I despise the main character. SH5 had two things going for it - it was a fast read and it was very short. That is the only reason I was able to get through it the first time; after that I was able to go back a re-read small parts of it trying to figure out what the heck Vonnegut was trying to do.
A lot of it was obvious ... some of it I was slower to pick up on ... like my initial impression that we are supposed to care about Billy, who is quite frankly rather pathetic. Billy is supposed to be a stand-in for humanity in general (seems like a shoe-in for somebody we should identify with) ... a generic person who wanders through life doing what he has to do because it is inevitable; he believes it is all fate, so it doesn’t really matter. Whether or not Billy has free-will is pointless in this case precisely because he does not use it; he does not rebel and do what should be done. Vonnegut is making fun of the vast majority of mindless human clones that allow bad things to happen because they refuse to act any other way. We are supposed to be repulsed by many of the story elements because Vonnegut wants us to NOT be that person ... to not be Billy, so he makes it very hard to empathize with him. Of course, this also makes it hard for me to actually finish the story :)
It must be a rather awkward dance ... trying to simultaneously repulse and engage the reader with a storyline. The perfect balance would be different for each reader, making the target audience much smaller.
(another John, that is.)I agree that Vonnegut has made Billy a figure to be mocked, but is he doing it to encourage the reader to be otherwise? Or is it to point out the futility of trying to control one's (or others') destiny? I lean towards the latter interpretation, though over the years I've come to disagree with it. I did enjoy Vonnegut's lampooning of the status quo, however. I just wish he had offered a better alternative.
As for whether Billy was actually travelling in time and space or if it was just his own delusion, well,I think that's delightfully ambiguous. I prefer to think that it's reality myself, just like I like to pretend that Calvin's and Hobbes' adventures are real. ;-)
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I too had problems with this book until I got about 70 pages into it and read this: There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.Then it all started to make sense to me and I started really liking the book.
I still believe that you can use it in the Free Will discussion even though the universe is deterministic since everything has already happened and is happening at this very moment so you can't change anything. However, the aliens do point out that you can choose where you want to be in your life, choose the pleasent moments and if you have free choice to do that, you do have some kind of free will.
Overall, I liked the book - and it made me think and I like books that do that.
Vonnegut has such amazing descriptions, how can you not fall in love with him?
"It was a random, bristly beard, and some of the bristles were white, even though Billy was only twenty-one years old. He was also going bald. Wind and cold and violent exercise had turned his face crimson.
He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo."
"Rosewater was a big man, but not very powerful. He looked as though he might be made out of nose putty."
"The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty."
"Out he went, his blue and ivory feet crushing the wet salad of the lawn."
To name a few that I really loved.
SH5 was the first Vonnegut book I had ever read (January 2008) and since then I have read Cat's Cradle, A Man Without a Country and God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian. SH5 is my favorite so far. I have Welcome to the Monkey House and Breakfast of Champions waiting on the shelf...so many books, so little time!
"It was a random, bristly beard, and some of the bristles were white, even though Billy was only twenty-one years old. He was also going bald. Wind and cold and violent exercise had turned his face crimson.
He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo."
"Rosewater was a big man, but not very powerful. He looked as though he might be made out of nose putty."
"The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty."
"Out he went, his blue and ivory feet crushing the wet salad of the lawn."
To name a few that I really loved.
SH5 was the first Vonnegut book I had ever read (January 2008) and since then I have read Cat's Cradle, A Man Without a Country and God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian. SH5 is my favorite so far. I have Welcome to the Monkey House and Breakfast of Champions waiting on the shelf...so many books, so little time!
Well, I wouldn't classify this as a sci-fi book. To me the aliens and "time-traveling" were just tools to make pronouncements on war and humanity (or lack thereof).After Chapter 1, I was fully engaged in the story. I liked that Billy was wimpy and weak and nothing like what a soldier "should be". Of all the strong and tough soldiers in the war, he outlived many of them (with a diamond to boot). He didn't want to marry his wife, but in the end, she gave him a good life and one of ease and luxury (what many of his fellow soldiers sadly could not say after coming home). It kind of bothered me that life sort of just "happened" to him but it went along with the Trafamadore's theory that what always happens and what always will happen happens.
I also liked that he left it ambiguous as to whether or not the aliens were real. For the whole story I was like "well, I'll buy it for the story's sake". But when he introduced Trout's books, I started having my doubts. And then his trip to NYC and Time Square's XXX store made me realize that he was completely influenced by the stories by Trout, coupled with his recent head injury and never really being able to get over the war (his crying for no reason), made you realize his brain was asorbing it all and trying to create a new life for himself.
Like he said "They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war....So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help." (p. 128)
But overall, I thought this was a great choice.
I'm a bit late (too many other things to do/read), but I plan on starting this tonight.
Woohoo! I actually forgot to comment but I completely loved it :D
I felt distant and somehow this is such a sad book...
I thought it was hilarious XD It’s very meta and satirical, I do love this style a lot.
Dawn wrote: "I thought it was hilarious XD It’s very meta and satirical, I do love this style a lot."I don’t know I felt the whole thing like a grandpa, ah, I don’t know what I am talking about… :)
Wen wrote: "I felt distant and somehow this is such a sad book..."I thought it was fairly neutral. I mean, sure, a lot of sad things are in it, including the MC's death. But there are positive things in it too, like the MC's death isn't "the end."
So it goes.
BTW, the film is actually a very good interpretation of the book. Funnier, I think. It had a kind of John Waters feel to it that the book didn't quite bring out.
Dawn wrote: "I thought it was hilarious XD It’s very meta and satirical, I do love this style a lot."I'm still in the first chapter, but I'm already enjoying it a lot. I'm always down for books that are meta.
Recently finished reading this. I took some time to get accustomed to this probably because the writing isn’t orderly or has a different structure. Perhaps the best way to enjoy this is to focus on individual lines/descriptions and slowly it draws you in. Almost every line I read, it made me laugh, almost immediately guilty for laughing following which I was sad and sometimes devastated (especially during the description of the cars in which they arrived to camp)Regarding the Tralfamadore storyline, perhaps it was written to show Billy’s coping mechanism - he had to conjure up (special thanks to Kilgore Trout) to endure what he did during the war ;
was also the only way to grieve the death and destruction perhaps.
Sidebar: Kilgore Trout, the unsuccessful science fiction writer whose books ended up as porn magazines (in "paper-and-celluloid whorehouse”) seems like Vonnegut’s alter ego.
Pandora wrote: "Regarding the Tralfamadore storyline, perhaps it was written to show Billy’s coping mechanism"I agree. Given that the Tralfamodrians are the only sf element, I consider the book to be outside the genre.
I read this one over 20 years ago so my memories are hazy, but I remember loving it at the time (it had been assigned reading from school). The scene that stuck with me was the concept of humans experiencing time as though they were on a roller coaster facing sideways with blinders on, only ever able to see the present moment right in front of them whereas the aliens could see the entirety of the ride (i.e. their lifespan) in a nonlinear fashion.
I read it a month? two? ago. and I loved it, but I agree it doesn't seem to fit the genre.I assumed the time-travel was Billy disasociating and dealing with PTSD in his own way. I really enjoyed the interview with Vonnegut at the end.
Well, Vonnegut never himself considered this, or any of his books, to be SciFi. He used the "unstuck in time" trope to allow himself to break free of the linear narrative common to war memoirs. It was a way of divorcing himself from the biographical elements of the story, a way of fictionalizing them, and, perhaps, a way of softening the deadly seriousness of his actual experiences. If you ever get the chance to see the film, it's one of the best translations of a book to film that I can think of.
Necroposting to say I just reread this book and was once again knocked out by it. And the edition I read — the 50th anniversary edition — featured a gorgeously composed foreword by an author who, like Vonnegut, is a war veteran. Simply essential reading, if you ask me.
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I acquired the graphic novel while I was in the US. Looking forward to it.
One of my favourite ever books - an absolute masterpiece.I wonder if some of the subtext is a bit beyond younger posters who didn't grow up during the Cold War - deeply nihilistic times which made the story so piquant.
I haven't read the book, but I've seen the film.
I finally got around to reading the graphic novel adaptation in anticipation of our Virtual Bookclub discussion of it. I had read the book previously, so I knew what it was about. The graphic novel was great. A quick read and included all the salient points. The artwork was excellent and not too graphic. Ha. No pun intended.
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