Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-five (Bloom's Guides)

115 Pages·2006·0.45 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

Bloom’s
GUIDES
Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five
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Bloom’s
GUIDES
Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five
Edited & with an Introduction
by Harold Bloom
Bloom’s Guides: Slaughterhouse-Five
Copyright © 2007 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2007 by Harold Bloom
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-five / Harold Bloom, editor.
p. cm — (Bloom’s guides)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-9295-X
1. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse five. I. Bloom, Harold.
II. Title: Slaughterhouse-five.
PS3572.O5S6356 2007
813’.54—dc22 2006025339
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Contents
Introduction 7
Biographical Sketch 9
The Story Behind the Story 13
List of Characters 17
Summary and Analysis 20
Critical Views 51
Peter J. Reed on the Structure of the Novel 51
Peter J. Reed on the Context of Dresden 53
Stanley Schatt on Stream of Consciousness in the Novel 57
Stanley Schatt on Vonnegut’s View of War and Death 59
Richard Giannone on the Novel as Moral Testimony 62
James Lundquist on the “New Reality” of
Slaughterhouse-Five 71
William Rodney Allen on the Use of Time in the Novel 78
Kurt Vonnegut on Dresden (Interview with Lee Roloff) 83
Josh Simpson on Billy Pilgrim and Science Fiction 88
Alberto Cacicedo on Slaughterhouse-Five andCatch-22 92
Works by Kurt Vonnegut 101
Annotated Bibliography 102
Contributors 105
Acknowledgments 107
Index 109

Introduction
HAROLD BLOOM
On December 19, 1944, Kurt Vonnegut was captured by the
Germans during the Battle of the Bulge; he was 22 years old.
Sent to Dresden, he survived the firebombing of the city on
February 13–14, 1945, in which 135,000 Germans were killed.
That is the biographical context (in part) for the novel,
Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade(1969).
Since Vonnegut had begun publishing novels in 1952, it is
clear that nearly a quarter-century had to go by before the
trauma of 1945 could be transmuted into the exorcism of
Slaughterhouse-Five. I have just reread the novel after thirty
years, remembering my shocked admiration for it when it first
appeared, and not looking forward to encountering it again. As
it should, Slaughterhouse-Five remains a very disturbed and
disturbing book, and still moves me to troubled admiration. I
prefer Cat’s Cradle, but Slaughterhouse-Five may prove to be an
equally permanent achievement.
The shadow of Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night never
quite leaves Vonnegut’s starker works, including Slaughterhouse-
Five. I myself read the anti-Semitic Céline with loathing; one
sees what is strong in the writing, but a Jewish literary critic is
hardly Céline’s ideal audience. So it goes.
It is difficult to comment upon Slaughterhouse-Five without
being contaminated by its styles and procedures, which is
necessarily a tribute to the book. In “structure” (an absurd term
to apply to almost any novel by Vonnegut), Slaughterhouse-Five
is a whirling medley, and yet it all coheres. Billy Pilgrim, as a
character, does not cohere, but that is appropriate, since his
schizophrenia (to call it that) is central to the book.
The planet Tralfamadore, where Billy enjoys pneumatic bliss
with Montana Wildhack, is certainly preferable to a world of
Nazi death camps and Dresden firebombings. The small
miracle of Slaughterhouse-Five is that it could be composed at
7
all. Vonnegut always writes from the survivor’s stance, where all
laughter has to be a step away from madness or fury. So indeed
it goes.
Somewhere in the book, the Tralfamadorians tell Billy
Pilgrim that their flying-saucer crews had verified the presence
of seven sexes on Earth, all of them necessary if babies are to go
on being born. I think that is one of the useful moral
observations I will keep in mind whenever I recall
Slaughterhouse-Five.
8
Biographical Sketch
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on
November 11, 1922. His mother, Edith, was the daughter of a
wealthy brewer; his father was a prominent architect. With the
Depression of 1929, the family suffered a serious financial
setback. Without work, his father was forced to sell their
luxurious home, and they lived in considerably reduced
circumstances. Both his father and mother became quite
despondent, his mother so much so that on May 14, 1944, she
committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. After
her death, until his own on October 1, 1957, Kurt Vonnegut,
Sr. withdrew rather completely into himself.
Young Kurt Vonnegut was withdrawn from private school
and attended public schools. He went to Shortridge High in
Indianapolis and began writing there for the Daily Echo, of
which he became the editor. In 1940, after graduation, he
enrolled at Cornell University in upstate New York. At his
father’s urging, he was a biology and chemistry major, like his
elder brother, Bernard, who became a pioneer rainmaker by
discovering a way to “seed” clouds. Vonnegut, however, did not
have an academic aptitude for the sciences. He did, however,
become the managing editor of the Cornell Daily Sun and a
regular columnist for the paper. In 1943, in the midst of the
Second World War, before being asked to leave Cornell
because of poor academic performance, Vonnegut enlisted in
the army. On December 22, 1944, he was taken prisoner by the
Germans at the Battle of the Bulge, an attempt by more than
half a million German troops to break through the Allied lines
in the Ardennes, a wooded plateau extending through France,
Belgium, and Luxemburg. Hitler’s armies suffered an
overwhelming defeat, however, in January 1945. Over 100,000
men were killed or wounded, and the Allies suffered grave
casualties, too, with around 81,000 killed or wounded.
Vonnegut was taken to Dresden where he was among
prisoners incarcerated in the cellar of a slaughterhouse and
made to work in a factory that manufactured vitamin syrup for
9