Class Notes April 3: Discussion Context for Vonnegut

As we've discussed Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughter-House Five the past two weeks, I've refrained from summarizing our discussions. I was anxious about solidifying our ideas about the novel before we finished it, but now that our discussions can account for his enigmatic ending, it's probably time to reflect on our readings of the novel.

At first, we were put off by some of the rhetorical flourishes he employs throughout his text, like ending every thought about someone's death with "so it goes." It also took time to adjust to his narrative, which skips around in time and place as it follows Billy Pilgrim's life before, during, and after his experience in Dresden, Germany, during the spring of 1945.

As we travelled with Billy through his outer-space adventures with the Tralfamadorians, through his battlefield duties, and through his laconic dental practice in a post-war American midwest, we learned that Vonnegut's novel departs from the systematic investigations of war life we read in Frankl and Hedges. For a main protagonist, Billy sure doesn't speak much. When asked about Dresden toward the novel's conclusion, all he can muster is "I was there."

We've framed our interpretation of Slaughter-House Five by comparing the world-views of Billy Pilgrim and the Tralfamadorians, which both seem defined by a stressless indifference about the responsibility of individual ethical desicions, and the influence horrible warfare has on how we should judge and interpret our being-in-the-world. The Tralfamadorians make it seem easy, since they're different life-forms altogether. For Billy, we know that his quiet refusal to make his experiences into a cogent language reveals just how traumatic Dresden probably was for him to witness.