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Kurt Vonnegut And SlaughterHouse Five Essay Research (стр. 2 из 2)

Vonnegut’s strange, yet fascinating, trip through World War II, which one critic called “an inspired mess,” did not come easy. He worked on the book on and off for many years. In 1967 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and returned to Dresden with his fellow POW Bernard O’Hare to gather material for the book. Three years earlier Vonnegut had visited O’Hare at his Pennsylvania home and received, as he recounts in the opening chapter to Slaughterhouse Five, a rather chilly reception from his friend’s wife, Mary, who believed the Hoosier author would gloss over the soldiers’ youth and write something that could be turned into a movie starring Frank Sinatra or John Wayne. “She freed me,” Vonnegut reflected, “to write about what infants we really were: 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. We were baby-faced, and as a prisoner of war I don’t think I had to shave very often. I don’t recall that was a problem.”

He promised Mary O’Hare that if he ever finished his Dresden book there would be no parts in it for actors like John Wayne; instead, he’d call it “The Children’s Crusade.” Vonnegut kept his word. Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children’s Crusade, A Duty Dance with Death, with its recapitulation of previous themes and characters (such old favorites as Kilgore Trout, Eliot Rosewater and Howard Campbell Jr. appear), brings together in one book all of what Vonnegut had been trying to say about the human condition throughout his career. With wild black humor mixed with his innate pessimism and particular brand of compassion, Vonnegut asks his readers not to give up on their humanity, even when faced with potential disaster – offering as an example Lot’s wife who was turned into a pillar of salt for daring to look back at her former home.

Although Vonnegut considered the book a failure – it had to be, he said, as it “was written by a pillar of salt” – the public disagreed. Written during the height of the Vietnam War, Slaughterhouse Five’s compassion in the face of terrible slaughter struck a nerve with an American populace trying to come to grips with the war and a society that seemed to be, at best, headed for major changes. After all, Vonnegut’s book was released during a year that saw such shocking events as Neil Armstrong taking the first step on the moon, the New York Mets winning the World Series, more than a half a million youngsters gathering on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in New York for a music festival called Woodstock, and the uncovering of a massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American troops in a village named My Lai. Slaughterhouse Five’s success, and the release of a feature film based on the book in 1972, gained Vonnegut a position as an American cultural icon. College students, in particular, responded well to Vonnegut’s sense of the absurd, his Cassandra-like warnings about the bleak future the planet faced. “I do moralize,” Vonnegut has admitted. He added that he tells his readers “not to take more than they need, not to be greedy. I tell them not to kill, even in self defense. I tell them not to pollute water or the atmosphere. I tell them not to raid the public treasury.”

For those wondering about the phrase, “So it goes,” which appears every time a character dies in Slaughterhouse Five (which happens one hundred and three times, by the way), Vonnegut was inspired to use the phrase after reading French author Celine’s masterpiece, Journey to the End of the Night. Using the phrase, Vonnegut noted, exasperated many critics, and seemed fancy and tiresome to him too, but it “somehow had to be said.”

Since its publication, Slaughterhouse Five has retained its reputation as Vonnegut’s greatest, and most controversial, work. It has been used in classrooms across the country, and also been banned by school boards. In 1973 school officials in Drake, North Dakota, went so far as to confiscate and burn the book, an action Vonnegut termed “grotesque and ridiculous.” He was glad, he added, that he had “the freedom to make soldiers talk the way they do talk.” I, for one, like Vonnegut’s idea on how to end book-banning in the United States. Under his plan, every candidate for a school board position should be hooked up to a lie detector and asked: “Have you read a book from start to finish since high school? Or did you even read a book from start to finish in high school?” Those who answer no would not be eligible for service on a school board.

A final thought on Slaughterhouse Five from its writer, who today continues to produce quality literature. Asked for his thoughts on the book, Vonnegut responded by claiming that only one person on the entire planet benefited from the bombing. “The raid,” Vonnegut said, “didn’t shorten the war by half a second, didn’t free a single person from a death camp. Only one person benefited – not two or five or ten. Just one.” That one person was Vonnegut who, according to his own reckoning, has received over the years about five dollars for every corpse.

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