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CathalMagus · 10-22-2009, 11:49 PM

I only read Slaughterhouse-Five about a month or so ago, and I must say it left a deep impression. It's tricky though, I can't explain exactly why it affected me, but it's a book I'd definitely recommend, and I'd probably call it a modern classic. To my mind it works as a powerful anti-war book in the same manner as Catch-22, but where Catch-22 personalizes the horror and absurdity as experienced by Yossarian, Slaughterhouse-Five detaches us from the same thing - as if we're receiving sense data but no emotions, the cold, numb sense you get when you experience something through shock.

At first, I thought the science-fiction aspect was intended as a device or metaphor, but it really makes more sense literally. The Tralfamadorians believe in fatalistic determinism, as you say - and this reflects the fact that no matter where in time Billy Pilgrim ends up, the war remains an unspeakable waste of life either lurking in his past, or numbly experienced all around him. But the real purpose of this is to level the scale of the deaths with the dreadful yet poignant Tralfamadorian refrain "So it goes". I knew the refrain (from an arts show on the wireless) before I even picked up the book, and the fact that it's repeated for individual executions, accidents, illnesses (during and after the war) and then the barely-referred-to events in the massacre in Dresden, gives each death the same kind of weight, whereas the deaths of thousands tend to blur into statistics. But this is only possible if you give barely any weight at all to any individual death. Hence the alien perspective.

Your comparison with Waiting for Godot was unexpected. Apart from trying to express something of existential absurdity, I don't see that the authors were trying to accomplish remotely similar goals. And Slaughterhouse-Five is not self-consciously literary in the same way, it's more self-consciously 'pulp' on the surface, but with the weirdness of time-travel and the depth of the Dresden theme shaping the telling.

I'd be interested in other perspectives on the book, because I'd like to understand more clearly why I like it so much. I'm sure half an hour of discussion would tease it out, but it was something of a chore for me to attempt to explicate the few descriptions above by myself. (I would say I'd lost the knack since college, but actually I always discussed books for my courses face-to-face with my fellow students, so I suppose nothing's changed!)

10-22-2009, 11:49 PM	#2
CathalMagus Member Posts: 22 Karma: 68 Join Date: Apr 2008 Location: Ireland Device: Hanlin V3 (lBook r2) with OpenInkpot	I only read Slaughterhouse-Five about a month or so ago, and I must say it left a deep impression. It's tricky though, I can't explain exactly why it affected me, but it's a book I'd definitely recommend, and I'd probably call it a modern classic. To my mind it works as a powerful anti-war book in the same manner as Catch-22, but where Catch-22 personalizes the horror and absurdity as experienced by Yossarian, Slaughterhouse-Five detaches us from the same thing - as if we're receiving sense data but no emotions, the cold, numb sense you get when you experience something through shock. At first, I thought the science-fiction aspect was intended as a device or metaphor, but it really makes more sense literally. The Tralfamadorians believe in fatalistic determinism, as you say - and this reflects the fact that no matter where in time Billy Pilgrim ends up, the war remains an unspeakable waste of life either lurking in his past, or numbly experienced all around him. But the real purpose of this is to level the scale of the deaths with the dreadful yet poignant Tralfamadorian refrain "So it goes". I knew the refrain (from an arts show on the wireless) before I even picked up the book, and the fact that it's repeated for individual executions, accidents, illnesses (during and after the war) and then the barely-referred-to events in the massacre in Dresden, gives each death the same kind of weight, whereas the deaths of thousands tend to blur into statistics. But this is only possible if you give barely any weight at all to any individual death. Hence the alien perspective. Your comparison with Waiting for Godot was unexpected. Apart from trying to express something of existential absurdity, I don't see that the authors were trying to accomplish remotely similar goals. And Slaughterhouse-Five is not self-consciously literary in the same way, it's more self-consciously 'pulp' on the surface, but with the weirdness of time-travel and the depth of the Dresden theme shaping the telling. I'd be interested in other perspectives on the book, because I'd like to understand more clearly why I like it so much. I'm sure half an hour of discussion would tease it out, but it was something of a chore for me to attempt to explicate the few descriptions above by myself. (I would say I'd lost the knack since college, but actually I always discussed books for my courses face-to-face with my fellow students, so I suppose nothing's changed!)