Slaughterhouse-Five: Chapters
7-10 and Overall Impression
I think that, at some point, I
would like to pick a day and read this book in its entirety, all in one
sitting. I’m curious about how I would
feel about it after reading it that way. I’d have to wait a few years first, and let
the details of the story fade. Even then
I would still be influenced by my memories of the first time I read it. Nonetheless, I feel like I may appreciate it
even more that way. Though I understand
that breaking it up into pieces was a necessity for this class, I can’t help
but feel that the first few and last few chapters need the middle three to be
complete, and to have the impact that they were meant to have. That said, I still quite enjoyed Slaughterhouse-Five.
The last four chapters in the
book fill in the remaining holes in our knowledge of the life of Billy Pilgrim. The bombing of Dresden occurs at last, and
Vonnegut lets us see the impact that it has on Billy later in life, connecting the dots between his symptoms and his wartime experiences. Reading this part of the book was simultaneously satisfying, in that I
finally knew the whole story, and depressing, in that the story itself isn’t a
happy one. At one point, the book briefly switched
back to Vonnegut’s perspective and told a bit more about his trip back to
Dresden. I think that this is important
because, otherwise, one could easily become too wrapped up in the tale of Billy
Pilgrim to remember that the story is connected both to Vonnegut’s life and to
our world in general.
Slaughterhouse-Five could have been a very difficult book to
read. Had it been a straight
autobiography that only told of the horrors of war, I probably would have cried
through most of it, and then promptly tried to forget as much of it as I
could. I don’t like to read sad
things. I can’t think of many people who
do. This is where comedy and the absurd
come in. I think that Vonnegut understood
this, and so he wrote a book that people could enjoy reading without losing the
core message. By interspersing the images of
war among absurd alien stories and unrelated events, Vonnegut was able to
create something that people would want to keep reading, without losing sight
of what he really wanted to say.
Towards the beginning of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut promises
that it will be an antiwar book. In my
last blog over this book, I mentioned the backwards war movie as an example of
these sentiments. Now, however, I think
that Professor Rumfoord, Billy’s hospital roommate, illustrates Vonnegut’s
feelings towards war even better. I
think that Rumfoord is intended represent the wartime state of mind, or
something to that effect. His opinion
that “people who are weak deserved to die” is harsh and unsympathetic, and
causes the reader to dislike him instantly.
This book is, in my opinion, filled
with great quotes. So, to conclude my last
blog about it, I’ll just leave you with this:
“Still—if I am going to spend
eternity visiting this moment and that, I’m grateful that so many of those
moments are nice.”
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