As I hurriedly raced through Slate's article on Kurt Vonnegut telling of his assignment on how to critique fiction I suddenly found myself thinking about timequakes, fourth dimensional space, intersteller transport, issues of fate and free will, and whether life is most enjoyed because of its unknowingness, as I meandered from one Vonnegut epiphany to another. However, the topic at hand was one of listening and crafting appropriate responses to drafted public statements much as I have attempted to do these past 18 months here at Relevancy22 within the temperamental area of Christian theology.
I suppose the similarities to writing and reading good theology has a similar appeal to that of writing or reading a good novel or good fiction, because it causes me to think about things I'm not normally noticing if I were not to undertake this task. In essence, it lifts me beyond my frame of reference and causes me to apprehend life from another's viewpoint rather than from my own self-limiting definition that I would too comfortably prefer to wear like the old collection of clothes hanging in my closet.
Jesus was about looking at things from beyond the norm. Through glass prism's if you will bourne along by the many spectrum hue of diversity within the integrated light of profound revelation and dissettling public opinion. And if not, than through the eyeballs and mindsets of fellow human beings neglected, abused and forgotten by the religious and civil systems of their day. Nor was Jesus content to simply talk about changing the world. No, He went out and did that very thing without hesitation (but I trust with plenty of wisdom!). And so, we are today tasked by God to think through what it means to love one another. To live lives full of grace and truth. To willingly bear burdens and behold fuller visions of a better tomorrow (spiritually) than we have today. To do all things human in uncommonly human ways of doing things.
Accordingly, I might suggest the majestic themes of love, joy, and peace as our Christian banner for all things doctrinal or dogmatic. Or perhaps, seek to disciple future citizenry towards wisely bearing the laudable epithets of good humor and good will amid the sacred sacraments of conscientious solidarity, just governance, and equality of being, for all men everywhere present. Beginning with those downtrodden and neglected masses requiring assistance of education, transportation, food, shelter. Who bear the all-too-frail cloth of humanity upon their weary shoulders. For certainly we must begin today wherever life may find us. And for that fact, wherever God may find us in the spirit and advocated passion of His Son Jesus who came to redeem humanity from the oppression and cruelty of our sin and selfishness, our fears and timidity, to the tasks at hand.
Where Jesus wept so do we. We He has trod so must we. Where He beheld the glory of God then let us fall upon our knees and plead His God-filled vision. Let us weep no longer but pick up the Spirit's tools of patience, kindness, longsuffering, grace and peace. And learn to serve as our Savior did binding both the spiritual and physical wounds of our foes and enemies. Our neighbors and brothers. The Gospel of Jesus is a harsh burden to bear but when bourne along in tandem yoke with our Savior and Lord is made light to the tasks at hand. Go then and make disciples into all the world.
R.E. Slater
December 3, 2012
Postscript -
Kurt Vonnegut’s Rules for Reading Fiction
A term paper assignment from the author of Slaughterhouse-Five.
Posted Friday, Nov. 30, 2012, at 11:21 PM ET
Suzanne McConnell, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s students in his “Form of Fiction” course at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, saved this assignment, explaining that Vonnegut “wrote his course assignments in the form of letters, as a way of speaking personally to each member of the class.” The result is part assignment, part letter, part guide to writing and life.
This assignment is reprinted from Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, edited by Dan Wakefield, out now from Delacorte Press.
FORM OF FICTION TERM PAPER ASSIGNMENT
November 30, 1965
Beloved:
This course began as Form and Theory of Fiction, became Form of Fiction, then Form and Texture of Fiction, then Surface Criticism, or How to Talk out of the Corner of Your Mouth Like a Real Tough Pro. It will probably be Animal Husbandry 108 by the time Black February rolls around. As was said to me years ago by a dear, dear friend, “Keep your hat on. We may end up miles from here.”
As for your term papers, I should like them to be both cynical and religious. I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be. “This above all ...”
I invite you to read the fifteen tales in Masters of the Modern Short Story (W. Havighurst, editor, 1955, Harcourt, Brace, $14.95 in paperback). Read them for pleasure and satisfaction, beginning each as though, only seven minutes before, you had swallowed two ounces of very good booze. “Except ye be as little children ...”
Then reproduce on a single sheet of clean, white paper the table of contents of the book, omitting the page numbers, and substituting for each number a grade from A to F. The grades should be childishly selfish and impudent measures of your own joy or lack of it. I don’t care what grades you give. I do insist that you like some stories better than others.
Proceed next to the hallucination that you are a minor but useful editor on a good literary magazine not connected with a university. Take three stories that please you most and three that please you least, six in all, and pretend that they have been offered for publication. Write a report on each to be submitted to a wise, respected, witty and world-weary superior.
Do not do so as an academic critic, nor as a person drunk on art, nor as a barbarian in the literary market place. Do so as a sensitive person who has a few practical hunches about how stories can succeed or fail. Praise or damn as you please, but do so rather flatly, pragmatically, with cunning attention to annoying or gratifying details. Be yourself. Be unique. Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.
Since there are eighty of you, and since I do not wish to go blind or kill somebody, about twenty pages from each of you should do neatly. Do not bubble. Do not spin your wheels. Use words I know.
poloniøus
Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, edited by Dan Wakefield. Delacorte Press.
A Little About Slaughterhouse Five
from Wikipedia
The Story
Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969) is a
satirical novel by
Kurt Vonnegut about
World War II experiences and
journeys through time of a soldier called
Billy Pilgrim. Ranked the 18th greatest English language novel of the 20th century by
Modern Library, it is generally recognized as Vonnegut's most influential and popular work.
Plot summary
Chaplain's Assistant Billy Pilgrim is a disoriented, fatalistic, and ill-trained American soldier. He does not like wars and is captured by the Germans during the
Battle of the Bulge. The Germans put Billy and his fellow prisoners in a disused
slaughterhouse (although there are animal carcasses hanging in the underground shelter) in
Dresden. Their building is known as "Slaughterhouse number 5." During the
bombing, the
POWs and German guards alike hide in a deep cellar. Because of their safe hiding place, they are some of the few survivors of the city-destroying
firestorm.
Billy has become "unstuck in time" and experiences past and future events out of sequence and repetitively, following a
nonlinear narrative. He is
kidnapped by extraterrestrial aliens from the planet
Tralfamadore. They exhibit him in a zoo with B-movie starlet Montana Wildhack as his mate. The Tralfamadorians, who can see in four dimensions, have already seen every instant of their lives. They say they
cannot choose to change anything about their fates, but
can choose to concentrate upon any moment in their lives, and Billy becomes convinced of the veracity of their theories.
As Billy travels, or believes he travels, forward and backward in time, he relives occasions of his life, both real and fantasy. He spends time on Tralfamadore, in Dresden during the war, walking in deep snow before his German capture, in his mundane post-war married life in the United States during the 1950s and early 1960s, and in the moment of his murder by a petty thief named Paul Lazzaro.
Billy's death is the consequence of a string of events. Before the Germans capture Billy, he meets Roland Weary, a
jingoist character and bully, just out of childhood like Billy, who constantly chastises him for his lack of enthusiasm for war. When captured, the Germans confiscate everything Weary has, including his boots, giving him hinged, wooden
clogs to wear; Weary eventually dies of gangrene caused by the clogs. While dying in a railcar full of POWs, Weary manages to convince another soldier, Paul Lazzaro, that Billy is to blame. Lazzaro vows to avenge Weary's death by killing Billy, because revenge is "the sweetest thing in life." Lazzaro later shoots and kills Billy with a laser gun after his speech on flying saucers and the true nature of time before a large audience in
Chicago, in a
balkanized United States on February 13, 1976 (the future at the time of the book's writing).
Major themes
Slaughterhouse-Five explores
fate,
free will, and the illogical nature of human beings. Protagonist Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time, randomly experiencing the events of his life, with no idea of what part he will next visit.
Billy Pilgrim says there is no free will, an assertion confirmed by a Tralfamadorian, who says, "I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will." The story's central concept is that most of humanity is insignificant—they do what they do, because they must.
To the Tralfamadorians, everything simultaneously exists, therefore, everyone is always alive. They, too, have wars and suffer tragedies (they destroy the universe whilst testing spaceship fuels), but, when Billy asks what they do about wars, they reply that they simply ignore them. The Tralfamadorians counter Vonnegut's true theme:
life, as a human being, is only enjoyable with unknowns. Tralfamadorians do not make choices about what they do, but have power only over what they think (the subject of
Timequake). Vonnegut expounds his position in chapter one,
"that writing an anti-war book is like writing an anti-glacier book," both being futile endeavours, since both phenomena are unstoppable.
Like much of Vonnegut's other works (e.g.,
The Sirens of Titan),
Slaughterhouse-Five explores the concept of
fatalism. The Tralfamadorians represent the belief in war as inevitable. In their hapless destruction of the universe, Vonnegut's characters do not sympathize with their philosophy. To human beings, Vonnegut says, ignoring a war is unacceptable when we have free will; however, he does not explicitly state that we actually have free will, leaving open the possibility that he is satirizing the concept of free will as a product of human irrationality.
This human senselessness appears in the climax that occurs, not with the Dresden fire bombing, but with the summary execution of a man who committed a petty theft. Amid all that horror, death, and destruction,
time is taken to punish one man. Yet, the time is taken, and Vonnegut takes the outside opinion of the bird asking, "Poo-tee-weet?" The same birdsong ends the novel
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
Slaughterhouse-Five is framed with chapters in the author's voice, about his experience of war, indicating the novel is intimately connected with his life and convictions. That established, Vonnegut withdraws from the unfolding of Billy Pilgrim's story, despite continual appearances as a minor character: in the POW camp latrine, exiting the train at Dresden, the corpse mines of Dresden, when he mistakenly dials Billy’s telephone number. These authorial appearances anchor Billy Pilgrim’s life to reality, highlighting his
existential struggle to fit in the human world.
Literary significance and reception
The reviews of
Slaughterhouse-Five have been largely positive since the 31 March 1969 review in
The New York Times newspaper that glowingly concedes: "you'll either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner."
[3] In its publication year,
Slaughterhouse-Five was nominated for a best-novel
Nebula Award and for a best-novel
Hugo Award, 1970. It lost both to
The Left Hand of Darkness, by
Ursula K. Le Guin. In 1998, the
Modern Library ranked
Slaughterhouse-Five eighteenth on its list of the
100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It also appeared in
Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923.
[4]
Literary techniques
The story continually employs the refrain "So it goes." when death, dying, and mortality occur, as a narrative transition to another subject, as a
memento mori, as
comic relief, and to explain the unexplained. It appears 106 times.
As a
postmodern,
metafictional novel, the first chapter of
Slaughterhouse-Five is an author's
preface about how he came to write
Slaughterhouse-Five, apologizing, because the novel is "so short and jumbled and jangled," because "
there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." As in
Mother Night, but more extensively, Vonnegut manipulates fiction and reality. The first sentence says: "All this happened, more or less." (In 2010, that sentence was ranked No. 38 on the American Book Review's list of "100 Best First Lines from Novels.") The author later appears in Billy Pilgrim's World War II as another sick prisoner, which the narrator notes by saying:
That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.
The story repeatedly refers to real and fictional novels and fiction; Billy reads
The Valley of the Dolls (1966), and skims a Tralfamadorian novel, and participates in a radio talk show, part of a literary-expert panel discussing "The Death of the Novel."
Form
The Narrator introduces Slaughterhouse-Five with the novel's genesis and ends discussing the beginning and the end of the Novel. The story itself begins in chapter two, although there is no reason to presume that the first chapter is not fictional. This is
a technique common to postmodern meta-fiction.
[5] The story purports to be a disjointed, discontinuous narrative, from Billy Pilgrim's point of view, of being unstuck in time. Vonnegut's writing usually contains such disorder.
The Narrator reports that Billy Pilgrim experiences his life discontinuously, wherein he randomly experiences (re-lives) his birth, youth, old age, and death, not in (normal) linear order. There are two narrative threads: Billy's experience of War (itself interrupted with experiences from elsewhere in his life), which is mostly linear; and his discontinuous pre-war and post-war lives. Billy's existential perspective was compromised in witnessing Dresden's destruction, although he had come unstuck in time before arriving to Dresden.
[6] Slaughterhouse-Five is told in short, declarative sentences that impress the sense of reading a report of facts.
[7]
Point of view and setting
The narrator begins the novel telling of his connection to the Dresden bombing, why he is recording it, a self-description (of self and book), and of the fact that he believes it is a desperate attempt at scholarly work. He then segues to the story of Billy Pilgrim: "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time", thus, the transition from the writer's perspective to that of the third-person, omniscient Narrator.
Kilgore Trout, whom Billy Pilgrim meets operating a newspaper delivery business, can be seen as Vonnegut's alter ego, though the two differ in some respects. For example, Trout's career as a science-fiction novelist is checkered with thieving publishers, and the fictional author is unaware of his readership.
Censorship controversy
Slaughterhouse-Five has been the subject of many attempts at
censorship, due to its irreverent tone and purportedly obscene content. In the novel, American soldiers use profanity; his language is
irreverent; and the book depicts sex.
It was one of the first literary acknowledgments that homosexual men, referred to in the novel as "fairies," were among the victims of the Nazi Holocaust.
In the USA it has at times been banned from literature classes, removed from
school libraries, and struck from literary curricula;
[8] however, it is still taught in some schools. The U.S. Supreme Court considered the First Amendment implications of the removal of the book, among others, from public school libraries in the case of
Island Trees School District v. Pico, [457
U.S. 853 (1982)], and concluded that "local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to 'prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.'"
Slaughterhouse-Five is the sixty-seventh entry to the
American Library Association's list of the
100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–1999.
Slaughterhouse-Five continues to be controversial. In August 2011, the novel was banned at the Republic High School in Missouri. The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library countered by offering 150 free copies of the novel to Republic High School students on a first come, first served basis.
[9]
Criticism
The
bombing of Dresden in World War II is the central event mentally affecting
Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist. Within, Vonnegut says the firebombing killed 135,000 German civilians; he cites
The Destruction of Dresden, by
David Irving. However, recent publications place the figure between 24,000 and 40,000 and question Irving's research.
[10]
Critics have accused
Slaughterhouse-Five of being a
quietist work, because Billy Pilgrim believes that
the notion of free will is a quaint Earthling illusion.[11] The problem, according to Robert Merrill and Peter A. Scholl, is that:
Vonnegut's critics seem to think that he is saying the same thing [as the Tralfamadorians]. For
Anthony Burgess, “
Slaughterhouse is a kind of evasion — in a sense, like
J. M. Barrie's
Peter Pan — in which we’re being told to carry the horror of the Dresden bombing, and everything it implies, up to a level of fantasy... ” For Charles Harris, “The main idea emerging from
Slaughterhouse-Five seems to be that the proper response to life is one of resigned acceptance." For
Alfred Kazin, “Vonnegut deprecates any attempt to see tragedy, that day, in Dresden... He likes to say, with arch fatalism, citing one horror after another, ‘So it goes’." For Tanner, “Vonnegut has... total sympathy with such quietistic impulses." And the same notion is found throughout
The Vonnegut Statement, a book of original essays written and collected by Vonnegut’s most loyal academic “fans."
[11]
Allusions and references
Allusions to other works
As in other novels,
certain characters cross over from other stories, making
cameo appearances, connecting the discrete novels as a greater opus. Science fiction novelist
Kilgore Trout, often an important character in other novels, in
Slaughterhouse-Five is a social commentator and a friend to Billy Pilgrim. In one case, he is the only non-
optometrist at a party, therefore, he is the odd-man-out.
He ridicules everything the Ideal American Family holds true, such as Heaven, Hell, and Sin. In Trout's opinion, people do not know if the things they do turn out to be good or bad, and if they turn out to be bad, they go to Hell, where "the burning never stops hurting".
It should be noted that while Vonnegut re-uses characters, the characters are frequently rebooted and do not necessarily maintain the same biographical details from appearance to appearance. Kilgore Trout in particular is palpably a different person (although with distinct, consistent character traits) in each of his appearances in Vonnegut's work.
In the Twayne's United States Authors series volume on Kurt Vonnegut, about the protagonist's name, Stanley Schatt says:
By naming the unheroic hero Billy Pilgrim,
Vonnegut contrasts John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" with Billy's story. As Wilfrid Sheed has pointed out,
Billy's solution to the problems of the modern world is to "invent a heaven, out of 20th century materials, where Good Technology triumphs over Bad Technology. His scripture is Science Fiction, Man's last, good fantasy".[12]
Allusions — historic, geographic, scientific
Slaughterhouse-Five speaks of the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II, and refers to the Battle of the Bulge, the Vietnam War, and the Black anti-poverty racial riots in American cities during the 1960s. Billy's wife, Valencia, wears a
Reagan for President! bumper sticker on her car, referring to Reagan's failed 1968 Republican presidential nomination campaign. The bumper sticker was edited out of a broadcast version of the film which aired on at least one cable channel during or after the Reagan administration. Another bumper sticker is mentioned that says "Impeach
Earl Warren."
[13]
The slaughterhouse in which Billy Pilgrim and the other POWs are kept is also a real building in Dresden. Vonnegut was beaten and imprisoned in this building during World War II, and it is because of the meat locker in the building's basement that he—and Billy—survived the fire-bombing. Today, the site is largely intact and protected. One can visit it and take a two-hour guided tour.
Adaptations
A
film adaptation of the book, also called
Slaughterhouse-Five, was
made in 1972. Although critically praised, the film was a box office flop. It won the
Prix du Jury at the 1972
Cannes Film Festival, as well as a
Hugo Award, and
Saturn Award.
Vonnegut commended the film greatly.
Guillermo del Toro has confirmed his intention to remake the 1972 film, originally hoping to release it in early 2011;
[14] but due to his
previous involvement with The Hobbit, the date of release for a film adaptation was pushed back. Although Guillermo del Toro has since dropped out of involvement with
The Hobbit, the possibility of a new Slaughterhouse-Five adaptation remains in question since Del Toro is currently in pre-production on
Pacific Rim.
[15]
In his new book, A Thicker Jesus: Incarnational Discipleship in a Secular Age, Fuller seminary’s Christian ethicist, Glen Stassen, proposes a new kind of discipleship — a discipleship fit for a secular age and for a public faith. He calls this model “incarnational discipleship.” Framing an ethic, or discipleship, for the public sector will lead me to questions about the church as our politic, but we need to hear Glen out.
