Custom essays on ISU: Slaughterhouse Five

Vonnegut wrote funny, saying in such a way about serious things, said the American writer Christopher Buckley. In his life he had experienced terrible tragedy: during the war, committed suicide took his mother’s life, then her sister died from cancer, two days before it a train accident killed her husband, her son suffered a nervous breakdown… Moreover, in 1984, prone to depression Vonnegut himself attempted to commit suicide. Yet he found the strength and courage to look at life with humor and irony, write in funny way about serious things that, according to some critics, brought Vonnegut and Mark Twain to one line, because Mark Twain also suffered from many tragedies, but had not lost the love to life.
I would like to think in this part of my paper why Slaughterhouse Five has succeeded in sphere where others have failed. First of all, success has a place thanks to both the source material been transferred to the screen. Although there are some discrepancies with the text, which lead to different results, but in general, the film is fine, it reproduced the content in a full degree, and literary images successfully converted into visual and audio elements, convincingly conveying the basic motifs of the novel.
Arguing to the thesis of this paper, it is necessary to pay attention on people’s characters and their internal emotional experience that sometimes exists in balance with “white” and “black” sides of their personality. It is really hard to experience reality depicted in the book when military’s code of amorality strips away natural compassion. We see that while the literary style of Vonnegut’s very clearly is presented in Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel as a whole differs from the majority of his works, because it gives an interesting interpretation of personal experiences of the Vonnegut during the World War II and, in particular, during the bombing of Dresden. The reader will notice that many of Vonnegut’s stories are written in the first person singular and Slaughterhouse-Five is not an exception, because the narrative in it is written in the first and the second person at the same time. Therefore, the novel tells not only about Dresden, but also about the process of writing a novel – we make it clear that the novel describes the events that have had a profound impact on formation of the personality of the author. The motives of cruelty, innocence, freedom of will, rebirth, survival time of war are raised in the novel, they periodically appear in other Vonnegut novels, as well as some of his heroes, who tend to symbolize certain ideas and have a great inner depth. Another striking feature is its predilection for the use of historical and literary sources, in addition, it was noted that the Vonnegut prefers to describe the dialogues.

According to Bianculli “the form and narrative structure of Slaughterhouse-Five is as important in developing its themes as the novel’s substance. The writer is acutely aware of his own limitations and motivations writing the novel, as indicated by the first words of the novel. Vonnegut, in writing the story of a firebombed Dresden, is trying to convey both what happened and what really happened. Clearly this author does not believe in a formulaic approach to plot (beginning, middle, and end). He rejects this idea and many other standards of storytelling to create a new form of the novel, which fits his themes and unique humanistic perfectly.” (Bianculli, 1985)
These features of the literary style of Vonnegut are even more difficult in adaptation of his works. However, it is enough strangely, many of Vonnegut’s novels are full of cinematic plasticity. As the Film Comment: “Literary Dictionary of Vonnegut includes printed analogy to jump-cuts, mounting, fades and flashbacks. He was writing a series in itself creates a cinematic experience, he is setting the scene closely, comparing them with each other for maximum effect, and sometimes it even works on the nerves”. (Bianculli, 1985)
We understand that front page of Slaughterhouse Five tells us that this novel is written by American in the fourth generation, who during the war served as an American intelligence field, and that hitting a prisoner, has witnessed the bombing of Dresden… and could tell that story, because they survived. This novel is written in a telegraphic and schizophrenic style of the Trafamaldore planet, where the book has no beginning and no end, no tension of the plot, no moral, any causes or consequences – and it has only the points plotted in a charming casual order, which together give an unexpected and profound understanding of life. This is an unusual story about a man named Billy Pilgrim, who, like the author, survived the Dresden bombing, but he has also an uncontrollable ability to move in time. Billy is remarkable by the fact that part of his life he lived at the zoo on a distant planet Trafamaldore, which is populated by little green men, who can see in four dimensions. The novel is written without following the chronological order – in line with the philosophy of Trafamaldore’s habitants and the fact that “Billy hung up from time to time”. The focus of Slaughterhouse-Five is on the deep impact that it is time for Billy growing up, different events and interaction with others.
In acknowledgement of these facts I want to quote Merrill who said that “Time, incidentally, plays an important role in Slaughterhouse-Five. Its protagonist, Vonnegut’s alter-ego Billy Pilgrim, makes his own unheroic pilgrimage through time. At certain intervals, he becomes “unstuck” in time. He travels back and forth randomly through his own life and cavorts with the Tralfalmadorians, his new traveling companions. Tralfalmadore is a distant planet whose occupants hold much different ideas about time, life, and death than Earthlings. When Vonnegut juxtaposes realistic events and fictional space traveling aliens, though, it isn’t simple digression. Vonnegut uses the Trafalmadorian view of life to point out certain things in our own notions of it. When a Trafalmadorian sees a dead being, and says “So it goes”, it makes us question our own ideas about life and death. In that respect, Vonnegut’s work questions our own preconceived notions of war and death more closely than a closely realistic book like Red Badge of Courage, which incidentally is mentioned in Slaughterhouse-Five.” (Merrill, 1990) Monica Loeb writes that the novel illustrates how the human soul responds to cruelty and seeks the way to recover after a collision with it. This occurs as a literary as well as on a personal level, the author, we can say that as Vonnegut’s and Billy’s first “retreat into the personal realm [the war], and then gradually take on a prophetic mission.”