Spring Break Blogging Challenge: Day 3

Slaughterhouse-Five Chapters 1-3

So far, most of our readings for this class have been fairly lighthearted.  Even if not everyone found them funny, they were still fairly light readings that weren't too deep in nature.  Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is definitely breaking this pattern.

Most of the humor in the book so far comes from irony, with a bit of the absurd sprinkled in.  After the first chapter, which jumped between random events in Vonnegut’s life that led up to the publishing of this book, the story follows a character named Billy Pilgrim who, as we learn, is (or at least believes that he is) “unstuck in time.”

In World War II, Billy is a chaplain’s assistant who is assigned to a regiment that is destroyed before he even meets the chaplain he was supposed to assist.  In the aftermath, he is left wandering behind German lines with a few other survivors, and is eventually taken prisoner.

Interspersed with the story of Billy’s wandering and imprisonment are scenes from his life before and after the war, which he seems to relive at random.  This is the reason that Billy thinks himself to be “unstuck.”  We also find that after the war and an airplane accident that caused him head trauma, Billy began to tell papers and radio stations that he had once been kidnapped by an alien race, the Tralfamadorians, and shown the secrets of life and time.

Every time someone dies, or someone dead is mentioned, Vonnegut uses the Tralfamadorian phrase, “So it goes” as something of a sidenote.  I believe that there is a bleak, weary sort of humor in the use and overuse of this phrase.  The redundancy of the expression highlights just how much death is in this book, while also making it seem mundane.  The implication that the depressing is also the ordinary causes a slight shift in understanding that is too sad to be considered especially amusing, yet too incongruous to be overlooked.

The irony of Billy’s story is similarly dark.  There are several points at which he should logically be the one to die, but someone else winds up dying instead.  One example is when the two capable and seasoned soldiers abandon him and another incompetent man behind enemy lines, Billy and the other are taken prisoner, while the two soldiers are soon discovered and shot.

Furthermore, after Billy was the sole survivor of a plane crash, his wife died of carbon monoxide poisoning while he was still recovering in a hospital.  The cognitive shift here is from the good news that Billy has survived to the horrible news that his wife dies while he is away.

Thus far, I have enjoyed Vonnegut’s writing style, despite the darkness of his story.  The interwoven tales about Billy keep one from becoming too bogged down in the depressing details, and the absurdity of the bits about Tralfamador contrast nicely with the solemnity of Billy’s experiences as a POW.

So it goes.