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OK...just a few things to consider as you begin this novel...three things, to be precise.
1) Why did Vonnegut choose to include a verse from "Away in a Manger" to start the novel? Is there anything significant here?
2) Why did Vonnegut choose to dedicate the book to two of the fictional characters from the novel?
3) What do you make of the alternate title for the novel: The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death?
Give those things some thought and share your ideas here...
24 comments:
I feel that the alternate title for the novel is very fitting. In the first chapter, Mary O’Hare gets very angry that a book is being written about Dresden. She rants about how the soldiers in the war were just babies, and how in the book the author will pretend that it was men fighting. I agree with the statement that Mrs. O’Hare makes about the soldiers being babies. I feel that the men and women that enter the army have to grow up a lot faster than the rest of us. The responsibility of defending a country is a lot for anybody, but especially for someone that is young and hasn’t fully lived their young years. War in my opinion is a frightening thing, and facing war at just eighteen is terrifying.
One of my favorite things about this book is the repetition of the phrase “So it goes.” Vonnegut will describe something completely horrible and then tag “So it goes” on the end of the description and it made everything horrible that was just described seem not so bad. The one that sticks in my mind the most is the description of an iron maiden. The whole paragraph I had this horrible look on my face and an even worse picture in my head and then when I read “So it goes” I couldn’t help but smile. It’s absolutely horrible that I would laugh at that, but it was something that I couldn’t help doing while reading.
While reading Slaughterhouse Five I felt like I was sitting in a coffee house with Vonnegut and he was telling me the story. To me his tone seemed very calm and even throughout the story. It was different, but a good different. When I first picked up the book I assumed that it was going to be intense and over bearing, but it wasn’t. While it was definitely intense, Vonnegut made it manageable intense through his tone.
The dedication of the book to Mary O’Hare was nice. It was Vonnegut’s way to stay true to his characters words. He promised Mrs. O’Hare that he would not write the book from a grown man’s point of view, and he didn’t. He kept it from a young soldier’s point of view. Billy Pilgrim was a very naïve soldier, that didn’t even want to be in the war. By using Pilgrim, it addresses the topic of innocent children fighting the war.
At times I was really confused with what was going on in the book. I had to go back and reread things a few times before I was comfortable with the jumping between past and present. Once I understood what was going on, I started to enjoy how the story jumped around. It was once again something different with Vonnegut that doesn’t usually happen so often in a story with other authors.
I agree with Nicole. The jumping around confused me at first, but then I got used to it and learned to like it. I could connect different parts and it was like solving a puzzle within a book. The alternate title does fit the novel. While Mary O'Hare mentions that all of the soldiers were just babies, Vonnegut also mentions that after the war he and his wife "lost their baby fat". Vonnegut called him and his fellow veterans, and their wives, scrawny. He kept his word seeing as the alternate title is The Children's Crusade.
Another thing I found interesting was Vonnegut's description of a massacre. Everyone has different ideas of what a massacre may look like, how gruesome it may be, and what happens afterwards. Vonnegut beings the description by describing what it is supposed to be. How everyone is supposed to be dead and everything is supposed to be quiet. He then mentions an exception. Vonnegut says that the birds aren't quiet like everything else. They "say" "All there is to say about a massacre , things like "Poo-tee-weet?"". I feel as though this has some significance and may come up later in the novel.
After reading through the first chapter, I could tell I would be very interested in this book. I liked the idea of Vonnegut jumping from past to present to describe different situations. It kept me curious about how they all linked together, and it kept me wondering on what memories he would bring up next. I also enjoyed the fact that Vonnegut used himself as the main character for the beginning of the novel. I feel like it gave me more of an understanding on where his thoughts throughout the rest of the story were coming from.
Vonnegut is not like most authors. Very few write in a way of jumping through time. As I began reading this pronoun journey he created a realized that they were all connected in a way. That's why the author states, "Among the things Billy Pilgram could not change were the past, the present, and the future" (60). To me it seemed like they were supposed to be the same fourth dimension that "Billy” described was used by the Tralfamadorians. I feel that this is what the author was portraying throughout the book. He was trying to write like them, as if his book was in their language. His story was like the mountain range described very different and yet all connected in a way unseen and untouchable because it’s already been decided.
This is going to sound silly: until just now, I thought that the first chapter was actually about Vonnegut. Now, since the first chapter is fictional, does that make Slaughterhouse-Five a book about a guy who wants to (and does) write a book about Dresden? Then Vonnegut has created a fictional author to tell his fictional story. Got it.
It's hard for me to tell why Vonnegut used lyrics from "Away in a Manger" to open his novel. My best guess after reading the first five chapters is that it is a tool for emphasizing that the war was a children's war, fought by soldiers who were hardly grown up. If "the baby awakes" and "no crying he makes," the "baby," meaning the young soldier, has hardened his emotions. This coldness could be the effect of the war experience.
Perhaps Vonnegut dedicated Slaughterhouse-Five to two of the fictional characters from it because those two characters represented prominent ideas from the novel. Gerhard Muller may represent optimistic faith in a crumbling world. Mary O' Hare could be the embodiment of opposition to war and sensitivity.
The alternate title for Slaughterhouse-Five, The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, seems to reference Mary O' Hare's strong distaste of wars fought by children for their parents' strife.
The alternate title for this book works in a sad way. This book is all about war and how young people at the age of eighteen have to enter it head on without experiencing the true happiness of their younger years. To create a title that shows this emotion was brilliant and I give Vonnegut credit for choosing it. People that enter the war at such a young age are having the last years of their childhood stripped away. It isn't fair, and it isn't something that should be taken lightly, and I think that this is the idea that Vonnegut is trying to express.
At first, I thought that this book was just another crazy summer book that we were being forced to read. I never imagined that it would hold my interest. At all. But after reading the first five chapters, I feel myself not wanted to put it down. Not many authors can pull off the decade-jumping like Vonnegut. I will admit that at first it was kind of confusing, but after I figured out what was going on I began to appreciate what Vonnegut was trying to do.
The first few chapters of this book didn’t really catch my attention. At first, all the time traveling was really confusing. I caught myself having to reread pages to get what was going on. Now that I’ve read more of the book, I really enjoy all the time shifts. It’s very unique and keeps the book interesting.
I must admit that I am intrigued how he jumps from subject to subject and place to place at the beginning of the novel. I find it ironic how he dedicates the book partly to Mary when he believes she makes it very clear she doesn't like him or anything he stands for. I haven't read far enough to answer about the title, however I do realize as I read that certain things are uncovered and it makes me realize how the characters are represented as children and maybe even why Mary wouldnt like it.
After reading the first chapter of this novel, I have realized that I really enjoy the way that Vonnegut bounces between the past and the present. This unpredictable style really keeps me intrigued. At first it was hard for me to follow, but i soon discovered that it kept me guessing.
The alternative title, The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, relates to the antiwar theme in the book. The Children's Crusades is linked to when Nicholas Cologne inspired thousands of children and teens to march to Jerusalem and join the Crusades in the thirteenth century. Many of these children died which links the second part of the title.
I was very confused at the first chapters of this novel, and once I realized what was happening I actually had to re-read the chapters over again. Now that I have a better understanding, I could not put the novel down!
First off, I believe that Vonnegut used lyrics from "Away in a Manger" to emphasize a particular part of the war at the start to create the tone and to guide us into the right direction. He used this to portray that these were not grown and mature men that were fighting, but instead were "children" who were fighting and who barely had the chance of growing up. I agree with what Katelyn had said, but also I can guess that it was suggesting how immature and undeveloped the minds were before war and as a result "coldness" is what was made of their minds after the war.
When I first started this book, I had no idea what I was getting into. I started the first chapter and thought I was on the wrong page. The first chapter sounded like more of an introduction to the novel rather than part of it. It was not until I reached the second chapter that I really got into the book. Before that, I was not sure what to expect. I wondered if the entire book was going to be a narrative, but it was not. This is one of the unique characteristics of the book. Vonnegut portrays himself, the author, as a character. As a result, the line between reality and fiction is blurred, forcing the reader to make their own interoperations. This goes for the book’s genre as well. As Kayla had mentioned, it is hard to fit this novel into one specific category. Sure, it takes place during WWII and follows the journey of a young soldier. This would seem to make it a war novel, but it also involves time travel and aliens, which are two common elements used in science fiction novels. So what genre would you consider it to fall in?
After finishing the first chapters, I completely do not understand the alternate title for the novel: The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death. However, here is my guess- I feel that the phrase is connected to the idea that soldiers fought in the war because it was their duty, not entirely because they wanted to. Also that the whole experience was a "dance with death", meaning that death was never far away, it was always lurking near, and they are constantly dodging to avoid it, hence "the dance".
the verse from away in a manger could have been to show the innocence of the soldiers, or to show the apparent lack of grief after tragic events expressed by "so it goes.". also it could just be a funny reference to billy's problem with crying while he slept, but that's a little bit of a stretch.
the alternate title makes sense, derby refers to the war as "the children's crusade" in chapter 5, and "a duty dance with death" pretty fairly describes what is happening to the soldiers in the war.
As I first started to read the novel I was quite confused. It took me a while to catch on to the fact that the first chapter of the book was the author speaking to the reader as more of a preface to the story. After I realized what was going on (which unfortunately wasn’t until I had reached the middle of chapter two) I went back and reread chapter one looking at it as a message from the author and it made a lot more sense. I started out looking too far into the beginning of the plot line, in my mind I was trying to turn Vonnegut’s message into a central part of the story. I was intrigued by the multitude of stories that were written into the first chapter and I feel like a spent too much time trying to find the significance of each of them to the story as a whole, rather than take in each one as a note and save it for later.
Along with Nicole, I also feel like the alternate title is fitting. Mary O’Hare’s reaction to how she believed Vonnegut was going to tell the story was obviously significant to him. It shows how easy his opinion of himself and his experiences could be swayed by an outside perspective. It really struck me as interesting that he went as far as to make an alternate title for his book because of how right he thought that Mary was. I agree that fighting in a war when you are just barley as an adult is childish, but I have never been in a position even remotely close to that, so I’m probably not the greatest judge. However, I do feel like that alternate title is fitting.
I agree that the alternate title for the novel makes sense, because, generally, war makes one grow up quickly. It is interesting that Vonnegut makes a promise to change the title of the book because of his talk with Mary O'Hare. It reflects his own opinion of wars and his personal experience in them. It is obvious that he does not glorify wars. however, he does say earlier that he is not writing an anti-war book. He is only stating th facts and telling his own story.
I think that Vonnegut dedicates his book to two fictional characters because they are the ones who have impacted the way he veiws the war. First, he dedicates it to Gerhard Muller. This is the taxi driver who tells him about his experiences with communism. Vonnegut was fighting in a war against communism, and Muller tells him about his own experiences with it. The taxi driver shows Vonnegut some of the positives associated with communism and changes his veiw of it. Secondly, Vonnegut dedicates the book to Mary O'Hare, who he also talks to about the war. She leaves a new impression with Vonnegut also. She really makes him think about how war ages and changes people. Both these people impacted his opinion of the war he fought in, and because of this, he chooses to dedicate his book to them.
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