SLAUGHTER-HOUSE FIVE QUESTIONS:
---What is the significance of the epigram "The Baby awakes / But the little lord Jesus / No crying he makes" to the life of Billy Pilgrim and the author, Kurt Vonnegut, as they are shaped by war?
---What is the significance of the short ditty "My name is Yon Yonson / I work in Wisconsin" to the disjointed, cyclical nature of the narrative and the repetition of the refrain "So it goes...?" (3)
---Why are there no villains in Vonnegut's novels? (10)
---What response does Vonnegut get when he contacts the Air Force about the American bombing of Dresden-one in which he survived as a prisoner of war in the basement of a German slaughter-house? (14)
---How is the Air Force's response an impetus for writing the novel?
---How does Vonnegut's wife's belief that her husband will glorify war influence the manner in which the novel is written? (18-19)
---Why does Vonnegut reject both the Romantic and the Critical View of the Crusades? How does this shape his desire to reject both the Romantic and the Critical View of War and employ a martian perspective of war? (20)
---Why does Vonnegut subtitle the novel 'The Children's Crusade?" or How is the novel a crusade for children everywhere?
---What is ironic about Vonnegut's command to his sons that "they are not to participate in massacres"? (24)
--- Why tell readers how the book will start and end? How does this convey that characters are determined? (28)
--- Why does Vonnegut say the World's Fair allows us to see how the future will be shaped by General Motors? How is this a commentary on materialism as a socially determining force on the individual? (23)
--- Describe how the Tralfalmadorians see life? (34). What is the fourth dimension? (33)?
--- Why does Vonnegut allow Billy Pilgrim to become "unstuck in time?"
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---WHY does Billy want to correct Earthlings' vision? What is wrong with it? (36)
--- Describe Roland Weary: Why does he love violence? How is this a criticism of American machismo and love of war? (35-37)
--- Why does Vonnegut explore in gruesome detail of the crucifix above his bed? How is this familiar crucifix an example of the ubiquity of human love of violence? (38)
---What is the connection between Weary's claim they are the Three Musketeers and the female reporter who, in the opening chapter, want to know what the crushed man looked like and who is eating the Three Musketeers candy bar? (53)
--- What is Vonnegut's description of death? How is this a rejection of the afterlife? (55)
---How does the book about the private justify death for desertion? How does this anticipate the justification for he bombing of Dresden? (57)
---Why is it significant that Weary speaks of his war heroism like the History book of the Crusades that celebrates the Crusades as noble and pious? (64)
---Why have Billy see Adam and Eve as so perfect and innocent in the boots of the German soldier? (67)
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---What caused the black neighborhood to be burned down in 1967? (Google 1967 race riots). Why is it significant that Billy sees the destruction in 1967 as Dresden in 1945? (74-75).
---What is dramtically ironic about the Marine's speech on Vietnam? How does this connect to the bombing of Dresden? (76)
---Why does Billy conclude that he cannot change the past, present, and future? (77)
---Why expose Wild Bob as detached from reality about WWII and then interrupt the fictional narrative with "I was there." Who was there? Why does Vonnegut assert himself into the narrative as Wild Bob professes false heroism? (87)
--- Why does Billy imagine the WWII film as reeling backwards all the way to Adam and Eve? Why does Billy want to return to humans before they were structured by sin? (93-95)
-Why don't the Martians question why? (97)
---Why does Roland Weary want Billy killed after Weary dies? (101)
---How does Newton's Third Law of Motion explain the constant state of war? (101)
---Why tell the reader that Edgar Derby will die by firing squad in 68 days? (106)
--- What is achieved by showing the present and the future at once in the novel? (106)
---Why don't the Tralfamadorians believe in free will and why are they perplexed that only Earthlings of the 31 planets thay have visited ever speak of the possibility of free will? (109)
--- What is the value of the Tralfamadorian, panoptic vision of life in which humans are millipedes with "baby legs on one end and old people's legs on the other"? (110).
--How does this form their belief that there is no free will?
---How does their ability to willingly visit any moment in their lives and the lives of others lessen their despair that there is no free will? (110)
--- How is the Tralfalmadorian novel where all moments in life are presented at once without a chronology or the suspense of exposition, climax, and resolution and the foolish Earthling concept of cause and effect exactly how they experience the lives of others? (112)
---How is the novel Slaughter House Five similar to a Tralfamadorian novel? (112)
-When Billy wets his pants on the edge of the Grand Canyon, how is he unwillingly unstuck in time and returned to the YMCA? (113)
----How does this show that Billy's perceptual powers fall short of the Tralfamadorian perceptual powers?
---As Hemingway cycled images across the stories and vignettes in In Our Time (1925), develop how the "radium dial" of Billy's father's watch cycles Billy back to the "radium dial faces" of the Russian prisoners of war: (114-115):
---How does this underscore that Billy is unwillingly unstuck in time?
Why does Vonnegut indicate that his perforated dog tags are not snapped in two but Edgar Derby's are? (116).
---How does this underscore that life and death are structured, inevitable and beyonf human will? (117)
--- How are the disparate perspectives of war developed between Billy and the British by making the British so in love with war and so pleased with the war effort in phrases like "Good show!" and "Jerry is on the run" while Billy wonders "dimly who Jerry is?" (119)
----Connect this language to Wild Bob's rhetoric about bbq-ing whole steers after the war in Cody, WY?
---What is the origin of the soap the prisoners of war received? (122).
How does this capture the fading smile after laughter about the pompous British soldiers? (122)
---When Billy is hospitalized for shrieking in uncontrollable laughter at Cinderella, Edgar Derby is reading The Red Badge of Courage to Billy. Research this novel. What does it say about physical vs. psychological effects of war? (126).
---Explain Eliot Rosewater's advice to the psychiatrist: "you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people aren't going to want to go on living." (129): How is the Talfamadorian panoptic perspective an example of a good lie?
---Explain the dramatic irony of Rosewater's response to Billy's mom's statement "People would be surprised if they knew how much in the world was due to prayers."
Rosewater: "You never said a truer word, dear."
HOW IS BILLY'S MOM'S FAITH IN DIVINE PROVIDENCE A GOOD LIE THAT ROSEWATER ALLOWS TO EXIST?
WHAT IS THE TRUTH ACCORDING TO BILLY AND ROSEWATER? HOW IS THIS TRUTH NOT HELPFUL? (131)
--- Why does Vonnegut mention the science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout, and his novel, Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, "whose people have diseases that cannot be treated by doctors because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension and three-dimensional earthling doctors could not see those causes at all, not even imagine them?" (132)
How do Kilgore's characters relate to the characters in Slaughter-House Five? (132)
----WHY DOES VONNEGUT BRING IN THE IDEA THAT WILLIAM BLAKE SAW IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION AS TRALFAMADORIANS DO? (132).
HOW IS ORGANIZED INNOCENCE AKIN TO THE WILLFUL PANOPTIC PERSPECTIVE OF THE TRALFAMADORIANS? (132)
--- What is the significance of Derby's description of war from a martian's perspective as "the artificial wealth the earthlings sometimes create for other earthlings when they don't want those other earthlings to inhabit earth anymore. Shells were bursting in the tree tops...with terrific bangs...little lumps of lead and copper jackets were crisscrossing the woods under the shell bursts...?" (135)
--- Why does Vonnegut mock the lesson of the gospel and the crucifixion of Christ as "be merciful to the poor" but "before you kill somebody make absolutely sure he is not well connected. So it goes." and "only lynch those who are not well connected" (138-9)
--- Why does he invoke the brutal violence of the crucifixion of Christ? Why is it important that most miss the brutal methods we killed during the time of Christ?
--- Why does Vonnegut have the Tralfalmadorian television set have a "picture of one cowboy killing another" pasted to it? What is the commentary on media, violence, and the social construction of the individual to become immune to violence and even expect it? (143)
-Why does Billy have no thoughts at all about the photo of "a couple in the 1890's riding a bicycle"? (Consider WWI, Spanish Civil War, WWII, and the Vietnam War (1914-1969):
---Why does Billy describe his vision, as opposed to the panoptic vision of the Tralfamadorians, as looking through "a pipe" while strapped to a railway car that leads only to his death, even though he is not conscious of the railway car? (147)
---Why can't the Tralfamadorians save Earth from being blown up? Apply this to the desire to stop war: (149)
---How is the Tralfamadorian suggestion to ignore the bad moments in life and history and focus on the good ones similar to William Blake's organized innocence? (150). Are both "good new lies to believe in" for Billy?
--- Why is the moment of conception between Billy and Valencia described as Billy "contributing his share of the Green Beret?" (151).
---How is this in keeping with the inevitability of war?
---Why does Vonnegut insert himself into the fictional story as the one who "shit out his brains"? (160)
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---According to Howard Campbell Jr., what is unique about the American poor? (165). How do we socially construct the American poor to hate and blame themselves?
---What is significant about Billy's perspective of Montana Wildhack's beautiful naked body as Dresden architecture before it is bombed (170)?
---When Billy tries to comfort the boy who lost his father in Vietnam by telling the boy that he can visit his father in moments when his father was alive, how is Vonnegut emphasizing the inability of humans / Earthlings to do so? (172). How does this lie make the reality more tragic?
---When Paul Lazarro recounts his excessive revenge on a dog that bit him, how is this commentary about how nations act when attacked? (177)
Say Pearl Harbor that results in Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki?
Say 1,700 innocent Isralies killed by Hamas and 46,000 Palestinians killed by Israel and 23,000 of them are women, children and the elderly.
---Why has the U.S. been balkanized (divided into separate nations) in 1976? (180)
--- Why does Billy not fear death? How does this contrast with Vonnegut's perspective? (181)
---What does the Englshman inform the POW's about Dresden? How is this false hope? (186)
----What does Vonnegut say about Dresden? Why have Vonnegut appear again in the fictional account? (189)
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---When Tralfamadorians claim that all human beings and all creatures are machines, what do they mean? (196)
---Why is mocking Polish people not funny considering the German occupation of Poland in WWII and the hanging of the Polish man? (198)
---When Billy gives Derby a spoonful of syrup, Derby cries. How does this show that despite structured moments and lives that small acts of free will and kindness can make a positive effect? (203)
--- How does Howard Campbell's "Free American Corp" which recruits American Prisoners of War to fight with the Germans against the Russians predict the Cold War? (208)
--- How is Vonnegut's description of the characters in the novel as "listless playthings of enormous forces" in which characters "are discouraged from being characters" the theme of the novel? (208)
--- How is Kilgore Trout's novel The Money-Tree in which "attracted humans who killed each other around the roots and made good fertilizer" connected to the idea that humans are machines programmed to be greedy? (213)
--- Another Trout book, The Gutless Wonder, describes a robot dropping "burning, jellied gasoline" on humans from airplanes. "The dropping is done by robots, because they had no conscience and no circuits to allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground," writes Vonnegut of Trout's novel.
How is this is a criticism of the Vietnam War and the ongoingness of violence, war, evil in the name of stopping Communism? (214)
--- Why does Vonnegut invoke the violence of Judgment Day if you are an unredeemed sinner by saying that some "will burn forever and ever (and) the burning never stops hurting?" (219).
----How is Maggie White an example of how easily humans are programmed like machines? (218-219)
---How is Billy unwillingly unstuck in time by the barbershop quartet? See 228 for the trigger to the four German guards:
--- Why describe Dresden after the bombing as the moon and the survivors of the Dresden bombing in the devastated ruins of the city as "moon-men?" (229-230)
---Connect President Truman's description of bombing Hiroshima to the language of Roland Weary and Paul Lazzaro: (237).
See page for 64 for Roland Weary: and 177 for Lazzaro.
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---What is Vonnegut's comment on history by having Rumfoord's book, Official History of Army Air Force in World War Two, omit Dresden? (244)
---Review the scene in which Billy cries at the condition of the horses after the Dresden bombing. Why does novels use horses to convey that man and animal are "listless playthings of enormous forces?" (251-2)
--- Why is Charles Darwin interesting to the Tralfalmadorians? Does Vonnegut share their view of Darwin's view of death? Are our lives improved by Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden? (269)
--- Why does Vonnegut write that 7 billion people will populate the world by 2000 and "all will want dignity?" (an exaggeration that did not come true, but is true in 2025: 8.2 billion people are alive now). How is this impossible? (271)
--- Vonnegut bookends the novel with commentary on the difficulty of writing the novel in the contemporary world of ongoing violence: JFK, RFK, MLK, Vietnam. He describes himself as "an old fart" who drinks too much and smokes "Pall Malls." This drinking and smoking causes his breath to smell like "mustard gas and roses"-the same smell of "the bodies rotted and liquified" in bombed out Dresden. (274)
---Why does he do this and how is this an appropriate ending to his novel on the psychological trauma caused by war?