Slaughterhouse 5Day 4: Emerging Themes, Character, & Postmodernism

Agenda

• Warm up: War Stories

• Emerging Themes (contd.)

• Character tracking

• Clarify and answer confusions

• Introduce (and find) central ideas of text

• Practice close reading for theme

• Address essential question

Goals

Warm up: War Stories

How would you classify a war story?

What specific stories do you think of?

How do you tell a “true” war story?/What makes a war story “true?

Emerging Themes

Find a quote from today’s reading (or previous chapters) that you feel addresses a major idea in the novel.

1) write the quote on the top of your sheet of paper

2) “translate” the quote into your own words—what doesit mean? Are there multiple layers of meaning?

3) based on this understanding, what central ideas or concerns does this passage address?

4) write a question based on this passage—either for the specificmoment, the central idea, or the book as a whole

Postmodernism: a drastically reduced history

Postmodernism

“Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.”

-Terry Eagleton

Postmodern literature is intrinsically difficult to define. It is a combination of many movements starting around the end of WWII and extending up to the present, but a timeline is little help, due to the fragmented and disjointed nature of postmodernism.

Postmodern literature is perhaps most easily defined by what it rejects and reacts against:

Traditional power structures (hierarchies).

Singular explanations of truth and good.

The idea that reason will save humanity.

Order and Reason: The Pre-WWII World

Where did order and reason take us?

Hitler used evolutionary theory, in the form of Social Darwinism, to explain and support his ideals of a Master Race.

The utopian ideals of Marxism led to repressive regimes.

Scientific advancement leads to horrifically powerful weapons.

Does this accurately reflect the world in the aftermath of WWII?

Postmodernists reacted to the horrors of WWII

To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.-Theodore Adorno

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.-J. Robert Oppenheimer

Many postmodern texts exhibit abandonment of traditional plot structures

Stems from distrust of grand texts and metanarratives

Grand Narratives: Hero’s journey, etc.

So, why does this matter for Slaughterhouse?

• Vonnegut is writing about WWII (1945), during the height of the Vietnam war (1969)

• He is writing from personal experience, and rejecting the traditional narrative structure

• Three (major) layers of story• WWII• Tralfamadore• Post-war

• Non linear story telling• ‘unstuck’ in time• repetition• direct address

• Satire! (we’ll talk more about this Thursday)

Tralfamadorian Novels (p. 88 / 110)

“Billy couldn’t read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could at least see how the books were laid out—in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. Billy commented that the clumps might be telegrams.”

“a brief, urgent message—describing a situation, a scene.”

“There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

Character Tracking

• What characters have we seen so far?1. Billy Pilgrim

2. Roland Weary

3. Edgar Derby

4. Kilgore Trout

5. Eliot Rosewater

6. Montana Wildhack

7. Paul Lazarro

8. Howard Campbell

9. Kurt Vonnegut/Narrator