HMWK: Read ch. 1, 2, and 3 for TUESDAY---Work on your paper!
1. Explore background material on Kurt Vonnegut using NY Times Learning Network
2. Write one-pager
About Kurt Vonnegut
NPR interview with Terry Gross
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9567370
Letter from prison
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/11/slaughterhouse-five.html
1. As a class, read and discuss the
first fourteen paragraphs of the article “Kurt Vonnegut, Counterculture’s
Novelist” (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/featured_articles/20070413friday.html,
focusing on the following questions:
a. Who is Kurt Vonnegut?
b. Why is he considered to be a literary idol?
c. Would you enjoy reading Mr. Vonnegut’s work? Why or why not?
d. What might you expect to learn by reading a novel written by Mr. Vonnegut?
e. Why do you think Mr. Vonnegut set his novels in alternate universes? What purpose did using these fictitious settings serve?
f. What was the defining moment in Mr. Vonnegut’s life?
g. How did this defining moment influence Mr. Vonnegut’s work?
h. Given the article’s description of Mr. Vonnegut’s views on war, how do you think he would perceive the war with Iraq or the war on terror? Why?
i. How do you feel about an author using the same character in different novels? Why?
j. What are some of the less enthusiastic views about Mr. Vonnegut’s body of literary work? Why?
3. Write a one-pager response to how the events of Mr. Vonnegut’s life shaped his beliefs and work. These one-pagers will be displayed and discussed at the end of class. The following items must be included in the one-pager (written on the board prior to class):
“Your one-pager must include:
-a visual representation of something in the text
-a quotation from the article related to the visual representation
-two questions you’d like to ask someone mentioned in the article — whether the reporter, the subject, someone quoted, etc.”
a. Who is Kurt Vonnegut?
b. Why is he considered to be a literary idol?
c. Would you enjoy reading Mr. Vonnegut’s work? Why or why not?
d. What might you expect to learn by reading a novel written by Mr. Vonnegut?
e. Why do you think Mr. Vonnegut set his novels in alternate universes? What purpose did using these fictitious settings serve?
f. What was the defining moment in Mr. Vonnegut’s life?
g. How did this defining moment influence Mr. Vonnegut’s work?
h. Given the article’s description of Mr. Vonnegut’s views on war, how do you think he would perceive the war with Iraq or the war on terror? Why?
i. How do you feel about an author using the same character in different novels? Why?
j. What are some of the less enthusiastic views about Mr. Vonnegut’s body of literary work? Why?
3. Write a one-pager response to how the events of Mr. Vonnegut’s life shaped his beliefs and work. These one-pagers will be displayed and discussed at the end of class. The following items must be included in the one-pager (written on the board prior to class):
“Your one-pager must include:
-a visual representation of something in the text
-a quotation from the article related to the visual representation
-two questions you’d like to ask someone mentioned in the article — whether the reporter, the subject, someone quoted, etc.”
Major Themes
Time and memory
The science fiction elements of the novel include time travel. Billy leaps in time, experience his life's events out of order and repeatedly. He learns on the alien world of Trafalmadore that all time happens simultaneously; thus, no one really dies. But this permanence has its dark side: brutal acts also live on forever. Memory is one of the novel's important themes; because of their memories, Vonnegut and Billy cannot move past the Dresden massacre. Billy leaps back in time to Dresden again and again, but at critical points we see Dresden simply because Billy relives it in his memory.
Narrative versus non-narrative and anti-narrative
This is a broad theme that encompasses many important ideas. Vonnegut is interested in protecting his novel from becoming a conventional war narrative, the kind of conventional narrative that makes war look like something exciting or fun. Throughout the book, we see narratives of this kind in history texts and the minds of characters. But this novel is more interested in non-narrative, like the nonsense question asked by birds at the novel's end, or anti-narrative, like the out-of-order leaping through the many parts of Billy's life. Vonnegut does not write about heroes. Billy Pilgrim is more like a victim.
The relationship between people and the forces that act on them
This theme is closely connected to the idea of narrative. Vonnegut's characters have almost no agency. They are driven by forces that are simply too huge for any one man to make much of a difference. Vonnegut drives home this point by introducing us to the Trafalmadorians and their concept of time, in which all events are fated and impossible to change.
Acceptance
One of the book's most famous lines is "So it goes," repeated whenever a
character dies. Billy Pilgrim is deeply passive, accepting everything
that befalls him. It makes him able to forgive anyone for anything, and
he never seems to become angry. But this acceptance has it problems.
When Billy drives through a black ghetto and ignores the suffering he
sees there, we see the problem with complete acceptance. Vonnegut values
the forgiveness and peace that come with acceptance, but his novel
could not be an "anti-war book" if it called on readers to completely
accept their world.
Human dignity
In Vonnegut's view, war is not heroic or glamorous. It is messy, often disgusting, and it robs men of their dignity. The problem of dignity comes up again and again in the novel, as we see how easily human dignity can be denied by others. But Vonnegut also questions some conceptions of dignity; he sees that they have a place in creating conventional war narratives that make war look heroic.
The science fiction elements of the novel include time travel. Billy leaps in time, experience his life's events out of order and repeatedly. He learns on the alien world of Trafalmadore that all time happens simultaneously; thus, no one really dies. But this permanence has its dark side: brutal acts also live on forever. Memory is one of the novel's important themes; because of their memories, Vonnegut and Billy cannot move past the Dresden massacre. Billy leaps back in time to Dresden again and again, but at critical points we see Dresden simply because Billy relives it in his memory.
Narrative versus non-narrative and anti-narrative
This is a broad theme that encompasses many important ideas. Vonnegut is interested in protecting his novel from becoming a conventional war narrative, the kind of conventional narrative that makes war look like something exciting or fun. Throughout the book, we see narratives of this kind in history texts and the minds of characters. But this novel is more interested in non-narrative, like the nonsense question asked by birds at the novel's end, or anti-narrative, like the out-of-order leaping through the many parts of Billy's life. Vonnegut does not write about heroes. Billy Pilgrim is more like a victim.
The relationship between people and the forces that act on them
This theme is closely connected to the idea of narrative. Vonnegut's characters have almost no agency. They are driven by forces that are simply too huge for any one man to make much of a difference. Vonnegut drives home this point by introducing us to the Trafalmadorians and their concept of time, in which all events are fated and impossible to change.
In Vonnegut's view, war is not heroic or glamorous. It is messy, often disgusting, and it robs men of their dignity. The problem of dignity comes up again and again in the novel, as we see how easily human dignity can be denied by others. But Vonnegut also questions some conceptions of dignity; he sees that they have a place in creating conventional war narratives that make war look heroic.
About Slaughterhouse Five
Published in 1969, Slaughterhouse Five
is a novel written in troubled times about troubled times. As the novel
was being finished in 1968, America saw the assassinations of Martin
Luther King, Jr. and Robert
Kennedy. In the South, Blacks and their supporters were struggling to
overturn centuries of racial inequality under the law. At times, the
struggle became violent. American values were being convulsed by the
coming-of-age of the baby boomers. Never before had young people felt so
certain in their rebellion against their parents and their parents'
values.In the U.S. opposition to the war grew, but in Vietnam the killing continued. The Americans would eventually suffer fifty thousand dead, but the Vietnamese would pay a much heavier price. Millions of Vietnamese died, many of them from heavy bombing. The U.S. dropped more explosive power onto Vietnam than all of the world's powers had dropped in all of World War II put together, including the two atomic bombs and the bombing of Dresden and Tokyo. Vonnegut's novel about the bombing of Dresden was written while American policy makers and pilots were implementing one of the most brutal bombing campaigns in history.
Although Vonnegut despairs of being able to stop war (he likens being anti-war to being anti-glacier, meaning that wars, like glaciers, will always be a fact of life), Slaughterhouse Five is an earnest anti-war novel. Vonnegut's own war experiences turned him into a pacifist. Like his protagonist, Vonnegut was present at Dresden as a POW when American bombers wiped the city off the face of the earth. The bombing, which took place on February 13, 1945, was the most terrible massacre in European history. Over 130,000 people died, putting the death toll above the 84,000 people who died in the Tokyo bombing and the 71,000 people who died in Hiroshima. In Europe's long and often bloody history, never have so many people been killed so quickly. The novel is disjointed and unconventional. Its structure reflects this important idea: there is nothing you can say to adequately explain a massacre. Part of Vonnegut's project was to write an antidote to the war narratives that made war look like an adventure worth having.
No comments:
Post a Comment