Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: Bookmarked. Curtis Smith
The Bookmarked Series
John Knowles’ A Separate Peace by Kirby Gann
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five by Curtis Smith
Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children by Paula Bomer
Stephen King’s The Body by Aaron Burch
Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano by David W. Ryan
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby by Jaime Clarke
Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves by Michael Seidlinger
Copyright © 2016 by Curtis Smith.
All rights reserved.
First Paperback Edition
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Ig Publishing
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New York, NY 10163
ISBN: 978-1-63246-014-1 (ebook)
To the uncounted, forgotten by the writers of history
Contents
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: Bookmarked
So it goes. . . .
Perhaps the most often-quoted line from American literature, or at least a close second to Melville’s “Call me Ishmael,” Vonnegut’s melancholy refrain is readily expressed by anyone reacting to bad news on a scale so large and devastating as to be abstract. No author has managed to wring so many levels of meaning and allusion, or trigger so many different feelings, from the repetitive statement of three simple words as Vonnegut has in Slaughterhouse-Five, arguably the novel for which he is best known. It’s a musical motif that falls just short of being a chant, the echo to each instance of death and decay that appears in the novel’s dark pages—over 100 times in scarcely more than 200 pages—a memento mori that reverberates among the numerous storylines and punctuates the author’s absurdist sense of humor.
The book is a bit of a Trojan horse: its slim spine denies it the heft of those works typically anointed classic status, and on those few pages swims an abundance of white space, too, leaving room for scribbled illustrations no more detailed than doodles. A reader can be forgiven for thinking going in that here’s a novel that can be sped through in a couple of hours for a quick fix of entertainment—maybe provocative entertainment, going on what people say about Vonnegut’s writing—but entertainment nonetheless, and hopefully a few laughs along the way. The text encourages us to read in that way, the narrator/author opening his tale with a series of jokes and limericks and dismissive commentary on what he has prepared for us to read. And then he gets us, lightly alluding to the inescapable processes of war and inscribing in precise strokes of detail horrific images of mankind’s inhumanity to itself—even as he maintains that superficially breezy tone. Our eyes slow down to make certain we don’t miss anything. Billy Pilgrim has been cast out of linear time and thus we’re in a jumble of past-present-future along with him, with nothing to hold on to save a tenuous faith in our charming, intermittent narrator. It’s the kind of novel that can transform what a reader expects from the category, widening yet again the scope of the umbrella that covers all texts classified as The Novel. And it’s fun. Moreover, if one is open to such possibilities, the story of Billy Pilgrim and the Trafalmadorians (who can sense and observe in four dimensions and see time as one simultaneous present) can change how one views the world.
It helps to be young and impressionable. For Curtis Smith the encounter came in his early teens, as he makes clear early on. As best as he can remember it, at least—he confesses to being unable to recall the day he bought the novel (the original copy of which he still owns, bound with tape and rubber bands). In this far-ranging exploration of Vonnegut’s novel and its ramifications and repercussions in his own life and the wider world, Smith goes all-in Trafalmadorian himself, half imagining, half remembering his first reading of Slaughterhouse-Five and using it as the springboard from which to dive into many of the threads and themes presented in the novel. A history of destruction, and our intrinsic talent for cruelty; the effects, form, and nature of memory, and the love between parent and child; the moral and ethical betrayals we all endure and try to evade as we each attempt to build a life of our own, preferably without destroying the lives of others.
In a spirit similar to that of his literary subject, Curtis Smith draws on the unavoidable and blunt pain of the world in history, from the smiting of Sodom to the invasion of Iraq, as material for constructing a resonant work of contemplative art.
It makes for an excellent introduction to the Bookmarked project, a series of brief volumes in which we look to showcase authors who offer a unique consideration of a single classic literary work, preferably one that has helped shape their own writing and sensibility; not necessarily an essay readied for the academic audience—no theory required here—but an offbeat approach to literature’s expansive conversation, an example of how books can form (and inform) the visions of those who write them.
Kirby Gann
Series Editor
February 2016
“There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.”
Slaughterhouse-Five
I can only imagine.
No, I can’t.
I found a picture. Cinder blocks propping long metal beams, the open space beneath, oxygen for the flames. Atop the beams, stacked bodies. Forty, fifty, more. Feet and hands. A child, and I look away. I wanted to draw the scene, but I can’t. Sadder still—the picture isn’t one of a kind. It’s an echo. A turn of the wheel.
Here’s what I’ll draw—a frame. Fill it how you like. How you must. God bless us all.
*
“All this happened, more or less.”
The first line of Slaughterhouse-Five is a trickster’s greeting, a fitting introduction from a guide as charming as he is sly. With these words, Kurt Vonnegut opens a door, and as we cross the threshold, we enter a realm dimly lit and full of mirrors, a set built with the warped architecture of dreams. The door shuts. We’ve entered the slaughterhouse, and the only exit leads to a moonscape of smoking rubble.
In the first chapter, Vonnegut (or the character who claims to be Vonnegut) travels back to Dresden, the city whose destruction he witnessed as a POW. He brings a book with him—Erika Ostrovsky’s Céline and His Vision. Céline was a soldier wounded in World War I, and upon his return home, he suffered sleeplessness and auditory hallucinations. At night, while those untouched by the war dreamt, he penned grotesque novels. He wrote, “No art is possible without a dance with death.”
There is death in Slaughterhouse-Five, death on almost every page. Some are deaths of individuals, others occur in the thousands. So it goes. The dance goes round and round, picking up partners along the way. The dance swirls through time and space. Our partner is a master, light on his feet, as old as time itself, and when he whispers in our ear, we smile at the absurdity of all that has come before. Death holds us close, and when we return the embrace, we understand the hollowness of worldly desires and the foolishness of men, their stupidity, their brutality. We laugh. What else can we do?
*
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