Slaughterhouse Five Critics Flashcards
(28 cards)
When was S5 published?
1969
When was Armageddon in Retrospect published?
2008
Who was Billy Pilgrim based on?
A PoW who Vonnegut met in Dresden, Private Edward (Joe) Crone from Rochester, New York
How did Vonnegut feel about the spending on war?
His son, Mark stated that Vonnegut thought all the money spent on ‘blowing up things and killing people so far away […] would have been better spent on public education and libraries’
Vietnam compared to WW2?
WW2 was seen as a ‘good war’ compared to the ‘bad war’ that was Vietnam after the 1968 Tet Offensive
WW2 movies?
Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) starring John Wayne, which celebrated the violent heroism of American soldiers
Battle of Dresden?
1945 - 135,000 Germans, mostly civilians, were killed
Who wanted to bomb Vietnam back to the stone age?
Air Force Commander Curtis LeMay, who was responsible for the bombings of 66 Japanese cities, and selected the locations for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945
How is trauma reflected through the narrative structure?
Cathy Caruth asserted in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) that ‘there is no way trauma victims can tell of their experience in a narrative way’
Who was Cathy Caruth?
A leading theorist in trauma studies who focused on the language of trauma and testimony
Interpretation of the chronology?
Czajkowska - the novel’s non-linear chronology ‘mirrors the intricate mechanisms of trauma’ resulting in the sufferer becoming stuck in an ‘endless cycle of forgetting and re-experiencing the traumatic event’
What did Vonnegut admit in an interview in playboy?
‘there was a complete blank where the bombing of Dresden took place’ and that his ‘war buddies’ did not remember it either
How did Vonnegut respond to the Vietnam anti-war movement?
He suggested ‘we might as well have been throwing cream pies’
What is the effect of So it goes?
It mounts like a death toll
Bouhlila suggests that the repetition of this phrase sounds like a parodic sound-reflection of the singularity ‘once upon a time’ in fairy tales
Vonnegut was cavalier about death?
He wrote in a speech that was delivered by his son after Vonnegut’s death that ‘I am suing the manufacturer of Pall Mall cigarettes, because their product didn’t kill me’
How did Vonnegut say that he used comedy?
‘humour is an almost physiological response to fear … I saw the destruction of Dresden […] and certainly, one response was laughter’
The theory of incongruity?
A longstanding theory of humour is that it arises from incongruity - this attracted earlier writers such as William Blake who put forward the proverb ‘Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps’
His humour is notoriously tricky
What is the purpose of humour in Vonnegut’s fiction?
Scholes suggested in his 1969 review of the novel that humour allows us to ‘contemplate the horror that he finds in contemporary existence’
‘‘Comedy can look into the depths which tragedy dares not acknowledge’
What was the children’s crusade?
1213 - 30,000 European children were recruited to march to Palestine to protect the holy land for Christianity, but were instead sold into slavery or died
What is the purpose of Vonnegut’s satire?
‘Vonnegut’s satires offer us hope, not despair—but not hope without action.’ - Conrad Festa in his article, “Vonnegut’s Satire,”
Why Vonnegut wrote the novel?
After finishing the novel, he admits that “It was a therapeutic thing. I’m a different sort of person now. I got rid of a lot of crap”
Who was Robert Scholes?
He was a critic of modern culture and literature
He came up with the term fabulism in his 1967 book to describe the group of mostly 20th century books that are written in the style of magical realism, experimenting with form, style and temporal sequence
What is fabulism?
M. H. Abrams wrote that fabulism blurs distinctions between the serious and the trivial, and the comic and the tragic.
In psychiatry, fabulation is a symptom of mental illness in which a person tells stories they have invented but believe are true
Civil rights activist?
Stokely Carmichael suggests that violence is ‘as American as apple pie’
