Criticism of Kurt Vonnegut's Novel Slaughterhouse-Five

Writing about the 1997 pack recital of Vonnegut's World fight II novel stimulate Night, Klinkowitz (44) compares the depiction of authorship in that film to that of the film version of Slaughterhouse-Five, noting that Slaughterhouse-Five as film lacks the literary resonance of the novel. It

is unable to hold one of the novel's most important elements: Kurt Vonnegut himself, who is present as the source struggling to tell his basically untellable story. There is, in short, no one to say "so it goes" [a key memoir device in the novel] when somebody or something dies (Klinkowitz 44).

As Vonnegut himself explains in the introduction to the book, the novel was always meant to be "about the last of Dresden" (2). Klinkowitz sees a parallel in the whole of Vonnegut's work, with Dresden, where Vonnegut in substantial life "looked into the abyss," organism what Vonnegut's own life was "about" and Slaughterhouse-Five being what Vonnegut's literary opus as a whole was reverberate to be "about." As Klinkowitz puts it (46), Vonnegut's "sense of shock from that terrifying linear perspective has imprinted itself on his writer's personality ever since." Thus whatever the intimate literary merit of Slaughterhouse-Five, its importance as a objet d'art of literary and publishing history, linked as it is with a defining moment of the uathor's life and with one of the half-dozen defining moments of World War II (itself a defining moment of history), seems difficult to overstate. Indeed, an

Slaughterhouse-Five has been cited as an example of serious manipulation of the horrors of war. While Beidler does not focus exclusively on Vonnegut, he does make the point that Slaughterhouse-Five's episodic pattern of abrupt sentence shifts parallels the abruptness of experience in a war setting. That such(prenominal) abruptness and disconnection characterizes Slaughterhouse-Five is telegraphed in the novel's long subtitle, which refers, in part, to the novel's " slenderly . . . telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore" (Vonnegut i). In 1969, the ridiculousness and surrealism associated with the experience of surviving Dresden could be set beside the same attributes associated withpursuing an less-traveled and unwinnable war in Vietnam.

In that regard, Klinkowitz, who appears to be Vonnegut's primary literary chamption, says that before Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969 Vonnegut had been perceived as a evenhandedly minor American writer, confined to representation in the literary genres of magazine and pulp science fiction and fantasy. Slaughterhouse-Five, however "so perfectly caught America's transformative mood [in 1969] that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the impudently age" (22).

Puhr, Kathleen M. "Postmodernism for High-School Students." English Journal, 81 (January 1992): 64-66.

The ability of Slaughterhouse-Five to capture the normal imagination of the late 1960s so profoundly appears to lease led to what has been described as a "quantitative kick in the 1970s" of scholarship, much of it of uneven quality, devoted to Vonnegut (Davis 351). Meanwhile, in the popular press, there is evidence of Vonnegut's stemma in reputation--and a similar decline in the reputation of Slaughterhouse-Five. The content of that decline can be seen in a Village part interview of Vonnegut about his life and work, in which Slaughterhouse-Five is dismissed much or less offhand as "his most famous and not even best book" (Carson 29). On the other(a) hand, Carson--who wan
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