Slaughterhouse V

In chapter one and two of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" there seems to be two separate but telling stories. The first relates to our history, a very brief fraction of it in WWII involving our main character who never tells us his actual name , and his life trying to recreate and historicize the Dresden bombings. The massacre, and seemingly reluctance of the audience he writes and discusses his ideas and recollections to at the time following his return home from a POW camp with the Allied forces. The second also has a tie to a history being the same war, but told from the perspective of "Billy", a very damaged and confused boy/man and his travels from the past to the future and back to the present in an instant. I believe a key idea of the story so far is the anti-war propaganda indirectly portrayed throughout the chapters thus far. Such instances would be O'Hare and his wife, who was very outspoken against making the story of Dresden a fluff piece for movie stars to portray as heroic and manly when they were simply children, dragged into a fight they were still struggling to understand post-war. Another example to support this theory is the time period the book was written. The Vietnam war had started in 1955, shortly after WWII had taken its toll, and did not end until 1975. I think Kurt Vonnegut was, like the rest of America, sick to death of war, and it was a very acceptable time to release the book he had been working on, in 1969, our nation having just started to recover from the massive losses, deflated patriotism that left most mothers without children, angry and resentful, pride fallen by the wayside.

-Josh Nowaczyk

This past week we read chapters one and two in “Slaughterhouse V”. I was very confused when I started the second chapter, and I still am even after the literature circles in class. The first chapter was easy to read and understand but once the second chapter started and talked about Billy and how he has come unstuck in time is when I started to get confused. I understand that Billy may have PTSD from Dresden and the war, or the plane crash. But the way it jumps from one year and story to another does not make much sense. Also, we were talking about in our group how everything Billy is saying may no0t be true, and we found that out from the very first page. It says everything is “pretty much true”. We were wondering what we can and can’t believe. In chapter two when he was talking about being abducted by aliens and the planet Tralfamadore was very interesting. The way they think about death was kind of eye opening in a way. On Earth, what we think when someone dies, everything goes with them. Including moments. But really, we have moments and memories forever. When a tralfamadorian thinks of death, the person isn’t technically dead. They are just in bad condition at that time. They have had plenty of other good moments. We think of the negative things and how someone will never be with us again. This is where the repeated line, “so it goes” comes from.

-Mattisyn Woods

My blog for this time is centered around the beginning chapters of Slaughter House Five by Kurt Vonnegut. For my role for this past week’s work was that of Starving artist; which is an easy interpretation to a person who creates or finds something that can relate to the piece at hand. For my piece, I found a picture of a young child drawing in crayon on a wall a bunch of chaotic lines with no sort of direction or clear picture. This relates back to how the beginning of Slaughter House Five, which has no real direction or picture insight since Vonnegut like the child is one that scatters not only his thoughts but also the readers on how to understand where this “story” goes.

These chaotic thoughts of Vonnegut and the picture of the young child and his doodle, reminds me of how our country is being run in these days, by a big child named Donald Trump. President Trump (Mr. Trump is what I like to call him) has so far run our country with a crayon in one hand and a rattle in the other. He has no sense of direction so far in leading our country and when he talks his ideas are always so scattered that we as the populist have no idea what might come out of his tweets yet. A child that has us on the brink of our seats.

-Jessica Fehrman

Our discussion from this week was more complicated than that the week prior. This is simply because the novel's introduction is far more complex than we had anticipated. This book goes against structuralism because the events are so randomly placed, this was an adjustment for me since I'm so used to reading novels that follow a clear plot.

One question I brought up as discussion leader is if the narrator has a memory issue (which repeated passages seem to indicate), then how can we as readers trust anything he is saying? Reliability of the narrator is very important to stories, or that’s what I was taught at least. Maybe that’s Vonnegut's purpose? I’m sure this question will continue to pop up throughout my reading of the novel.

The repeated “So it goes” sparked my attention as I read the first two chapters. Through discussion, our group concluded that "so it goes" refers to the fact that death is going to happen no matter what and that other life will continue. This was a fascinating conclusion to come to!

Anna