world literature
Home » fiction » literature and fiction » world literature » slaughterhouse-five or the children s crusade a
|
Aftersleep Books
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Slaughterhouse-Five Or the Children s Crusade AThe following report compares books using the SERCount Rating (base on the result count from the search engine). |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Aftersleep Books - 2005-06-20 07:00:00 | © Copyright 2004 - www.aftersleep.com () | sitemap | top |
Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade - A Duty-Dance with Death By Kurt Vonnegut
A fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod [and smoking too much], who, as an American Infantry Scout Hors De Combat, As a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, "The Florence of the Elbe," a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale. This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from.
Billy Pilgrim's "telegraphic schizophrenic" shifts from one period of his life to another is his own defence mechanism in dealing with (or avoiding dealing with) the traumatic experiences in his life. Vonnegut has acknowledged that the only way in which he could tell his story of surviving the fire-bombing of Dresden was in this fragmented manner and that it refused to come out as a linear story when he attempted to tell it as such.
What is amazing to me about Slaughterhouse Five is that Vonnegut manages to fit so much into one story. While writing a brilliant satire on the absurdity of war on par with Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Vonnegut also manages to put a human face on the tragedy at Dresden and expose one of World War II's darker moments to the general public in an accessible form.
While the fragmented nature of time in the novel is largely a thematic device used by Vonnegut to contrast the different events in Billy Pilgrim's life, Vonnegut also contemplates the nature of time and fate in the book.
After Billy meets with the Tralfamadorian's and they explain the nature of time from their own perception, Billy is able to accept his wanderings in time. Having visited his own death on numerous times he is no longer frightened by it and has come to accept it. With regard to fate, Vonnegut seems to argue that life is easier to live if we, like Billy Pilgrim accept that what will happen has already happened and that we are not in control of our own destiny. This absence of responsibility for our actions could in itself spark an entirely separate philosophical and religious debate that I don't intend to entertain in the space provided here. Suffice it to say that it's an interesting proposition and one that can be seen as a recurring theme in time travel literature.
With regard to time travel and the nature of time my argument of late has been that if the past is immutable and cannot be changed by the time traveller, then it tends to suggest that fate exists. My logic being that assuming time is linear (which it may not be), our present is the future's past so if we can't change our past the future cannot change its own past (our present). Confused yet? Anyhow, its just an aside that I thought I would mention in light of the themes raised in Slaughterhouse Five.