Slaughterhouse Five 1
Slaughterhouse FiveThis first chapter, a preface, is insistent on the fact that the book is based on real events. Vonnegut, like our narrator, is a veteran of World War II, a former prisoner of war, and a witness to a great massacre, and that fact lends a certain authority to what follows.
Vonnegut shares with us his enduring inability to render in writing the horror of Dresden. There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre, yet he feels the need to say something. The book unabashedly charts the author’s struggle to find a way to write about what he saw in a way that neither belittles nor glorifies it. This struggle we keep in the back of our minds as we proceed to read of Billy Pilgrim’s life.
The author also irrevocably creates himself as a character in the narrative. It is Kurt Vonnegut, the writer, the former POW, who speaks of the many times he has tried and failed to write this book. It is Kurt Vonnegut, too, who utters the first “So it goes” after relating that the...
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