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Argumentele îi aparțin Annelisei Royles.

”Overall, Slaughterhouse-Five is difficult to define as dystopian, but it contains some key elements of a classic dystopian: world war, an unreliable narrator, intersection with sci-fi, questions of free will, and the perception of unimportant human life. We do not get a glimpse of a totalitarian government or any sort of societal oppression; we simply follow a man’s strange life out of order.”

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Simultaneously whimsical and dark, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five stretches the genre of the dystopian and possibly expands beyond it. The narrative focuses on Billy Pilgrim, a war veteran who cannot stop traveling to different times in his own past. Pilgrim's nonlinear narrative exposes the reader to a different kind of unreliable narrator; the reader cannot form an informed opinion on Pilgrim until the end of the novel.

In other words, Pilgrim's being an unreliable narrator is not entirely by choice. The reader becomes more informed about Pilgrim the more she reads and puts pieces of his life together. She must do this while also questioning Pilgrim's memory, as the first sentence of the novel sets a tone similar to that in A Clockwork Orange where the narrator may not tell the whole truth or exclude important details of his life. Doubt ensues with this first line, "All this happened, more or less" (1), but it could mean a few different things.

The reader quickly learns that Billy wants to remember his wartime experience as a soldier and write a book about it. This first sentence could be Billy's warning to the reader that he may not remember everything in its entirety and/or that the fellow soldiers he met may not remember/want to speak truthfully about what they saw. This first sentence could also be the reader's first exposure to Vonnegut's sharp and witty style. Fleshed out, this sentence could be spoken by Vonnegut about his own fiction piece: Billy Pilgrim tells of events that are fictitious and have both occurred in the real world. He immediately comments on the fine line every dystopian finds between fact and fiction where fictitious elements stem from facts such as fears of totalitarianism and world wars. Either way, Slaughterhouse-Five forces its reader to determine what is fact and what is fiction.

From what we have already read as part of this series, time is extremely important in dystopian fiction. For example, it only takes Fahrenheit 451's Guy Montag a few days to completely transform his worldview and opinions of his society; Alex's arrest occurs only about fifty pages into A Clockwork Orange, and his experimental treatment program only lasts about a week. Things move quickly in dystopian fiction to parallel the protagonist's (and in some cases, antagonist's) Additionally, time is what (supposedly) separates the reader from the dystopian world about which she is reading.

World War II is where Vonnegut draws his line in the sand between fact and fiction. Billy is shipped off to fight in the war but the Germans quickly capture him and he becomes a POW. He travels with other men in his unit as they try to outrun the Germans. This point in Billy's life provides the reader with some truly gruesome imagery that Vonnegut cuts with his signature quirky and chilling style. When Weary, one of these men in Billy's unit who becomes a traitor, attempts to kill Billy, "[h]e slipped his knife into this scabbard. Its triangular blade and blood gutters on all three faces. And then he shook Billy hard, rattled his skeleton, slammed him against a bank...Weary drew back his right boot, aimed a kick at the spine, at the tube which had so many of Billy's important wires in it. Weary was going to break that tube" (65). The ruthlessness of war shines through in this scene, and demonstrates Vonnegut's clear anti-war stance.

However, does this negative picture of war make Slaughterhouse-Five a dystopian novel? No, if that were true then All Quiet on the Western Front would be wrongly regarded as a piece of dystopian fiction. Rather, the famous nonchalant phrase "so it goes," which is repeated whenever a character dies in the novel, illustrates this society's disregard for human life. This paired with the possibility that Billy's shell shock leads him to believe that he is abducted by aliens tell of how a war-driven society can drive a man to insanity. Should the reader believe Billy's alien story or should she explain it away with his "more or less" (1) philosophy about truth and his traumatic experiences with war?

Overall, Slaughterhouse-Five is difficult to define as dystopian, but it contains some key elements of a classic dystopian: world war, an unreliable narrator, intersection with sci-fi, questions of free will, and the perception of unimportant human life. We do not get a glimpse of a totalitarian government or any sort of societal oppression; we simply follow a man's strange life out of order.

I believe that this novel, with all of Vonnegut's strange quirks and inexplicably twisted humor, revolves about the slippery nature of truth, which is another dystopian theme. Does the truth of the society in which Billy lives or what Billy believes to be true about his life matter more? Is it for the reader to decide, and how should she react to this story? Does Vonnegut aim to bury this key question under a discombobulating story? If the last question is true, then he definitely succeeded. The reader must decide if one's personal truth equals factual truth, and if that distinction matters.

I apologize for leaving everyone with more questions than answers, but every Vonnegut story I read leaves me somehow both satisfied and puzzled.

- Annelise Royles is an English major at Kenyon College. She edits for Persimmons Literary Magazine, which was founded and still operates on Kenyon's campus. A few of her favorite books include A Clockwork Orange, Passing, and Middlemarch.

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Dystopia?: A Glance At Slaughterhouse-Five - Siblíní Journal

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Simultaneously whimsical and dark, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five stretches the genre of the dystopian and possibly expands beyond it. The narrative focuses on Billy Pilgrim, a war veteran who cannot stop traveling to different times in his own past.

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O altă opinie despre cărui gen îi aparține cartea

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O altă opinie despre cărui gen îi aparține cartea

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Spune Lindsay Smith:

”Genre is a fickle thing. When we set narrow boundaries on stories, genre quickly becomes a trope—the grizzled fantasy war vet facing a grimdark, recognizably European world, for example—and that too can quickly become cliché. The science fiction and fantasy genre fortunately has a way of reinventing itself, which can be both delightful and vexing.”

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Everyone has a favorite book from their childhood, and for me, that book was Slaughterhouse Five. Whenever I'd get bored of rereading my hundreds of secondhand copies of The Baby-sitters Club and Sweet Valley High books, I'd go trawling through my mom's bookshelves, and somewhere around age nine I found a slender, battered copy of Slaughterhouse Five wedged between the doorstoppers of Cujo and It. I had no idea what I was in for, but it said "the children's war" in the subtitle, so clearly it was For Me.

I was right, though not for the reasons I expected.

Billy Pilgrim's journey in and out of time is everything I wanted in a genre novel-which is to say, every genre. Gritty World War II historical angst and political commentary. Time travel! Otherworldly science fiction, complete with aliens who keep human zoos and deploy catchy metaphors for complicated concepts like the fourth dimension. A 1970s domestic drama. The hack pulp writer self-insert, Kilgore Trout.

Vonnegut manages all this while dropping some of my favorite descriptions in literature: the firebombed remnants of the town of Dresden resemble the "surface of the moon"; Billy Pilgrim and his dirty poncho hobbling through the snowy Black Forest looks like a "filthy flamingo." And then it's all stitched together with weird and wonderful recurring themes: and so it goes.

Granted, I didn't catch all (or even half) of this on the first read. Or the second. Probably not even the third, when I read it for a high school literature class that grouped it with Fahrenheit 451 and 1984. (I forget the class's stated theme-dystopia doesn't quite apply to Slaughterhouse Five-so draw your own dots.) All I knew was that I wanted to tell stories like that -stories that flowed up and down and refused to be boxed in.

Genre is a fickle thing. When we set narrow boundaries on stories, genre quickly becomes a trope-the grizzled fantasy war vet facing a grimdark, recognizably European world, for example-and that too can quickly become cliché. The science fiction and fantasy genre fortunately has a way of reinventing itself, which can be both delightful and vexing. Delightful in the sheer breadth of options, but vexing when the market gorges too much on one narrow segment of the genre that collapses onto itself. Young adult, another category I'm closely familiar with, is even guiltier of this-if you wanted brooding teen vampires in 2007, you were in all kinds of luck, but not so much in 2017. And all those dystopians we loved in the early 2010s now feel woefully inadequate to prepare us for the improbable premise and on-the-nose, caricaturish villains we find ourselves confronted with today.

My favorite stories are those like Slaughterhouse Five that mix genres-not necessarily into a fine puree, but a chunky, sometimes messy blend. The Cornetto Trilogy movies ( Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World's End) offer send-ups of zombie movies, action flicks, and apocalyptic dramas respectively while never neglecting comedy and interpersonal drama. The cultish Frog Fractions video games excel at subverting game genres as they flow from one into the next, if not always to flawless effect.

And then the other books that draw from the same well. I'm currently reading Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, which is at once a gentle British family drama, a war epic, and a Groundhog Day-sian quest to kill Hitler. Tim Powers's Conviction slices up the creeping, spiderwebbing brand of spywork to mix it with magic and mysticism. My first novel, Sekret, draws from a similar well: my Cold War-era Russian teens, forced against their will to spy for the KGB, are imbued with a variety of psychic powers that add a new dimension to the espionage thrills. And in The Witch Who Came In From the Cold, the digital serial I showrun at Serial Box, we blend spycraft with witchcraft to create new factions that transcend the Iron Curtain.

But the time travel-or "unstuck in time"-aspect of Slaughterhouse Five might be one of the most pervasive aspects of the novel's contribution to science fiction and fantasy. Recently, the fourth dimension has become a major plot factor in science fiction, in everything from Interstellar and The Edge of Tomorrow to (spoiler alert) The Arrival. The Tralfamadorians describe humans' conception of time as watching the world go by while strapped to a rail car, watching through a narrow straw, rather than seeing the whole scenery-the span of all time.

In these stories, the human is often overwhelmed with the truth of their life: they try to use that knowledge to change things, or to deliver warnings or information that will let others make a necessary change. Some argue that to know the future is boring; it's why we avoid spoilers and love the plot twists we can't see coming. Billy Pilgrim, though-not so much. Through Billy Pilgrim's eyes, we're along for that rail car ride, knowing how the sliced-up story ends, and yet enjoying its composition all the same.

Lindsay Smith is the lead writer on The Witch Who Came In From The Cold from Serial Box, which recently began its second season. She is also the author of the YA espionage thrillers Sekret, Skandal, and Dreamstrider, all from Macmillan Children's. Her stories "Doppel" and "Kingmaker" have appeared on Tor.com. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and dog, where she writes on international issues in cyber security. Find her on Twitter @LindsaySmithDC.

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Everyone has a favorite book from their childhood, and for me, that book was Slaughterhouse Five. Whenever I'd get bored of rereading my hundreds of secondhand copies of The Baby-sitters Club and Sweet Valley High books, I'd go trawling through my mom's bookshelves, and somewhere around age nine I found a slender, battered copy of Slaughterhouse Five wedged between the doorstoppers of Cujo and It.

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The New Yorker o numește „distopie clasică”

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The New Yorker o numește „distopie clasică”

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”Fifty years ago this week, Kurt Vonnegut published the dystopian classic “Slaughterhouse-Five.” With everything that’s going on in the world, it’s easy to feel as though we’re living in a dystopia from which there’s no escape.”

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Fifty years ago this week, Kurt Vonnegut published the dystopian classic "Slaughterhouse-Five." With everything that's going on in the world, it's easy to feel as though we're living in a dystopia from which there's no escape. This weekend, we're bringing you pieces about the scary, strange, magnetic appeal of dystopian fiction. Rebecca Mead profiles Margaret Atwood, whose novel "The Handmaid's Tale" has been adapted into a popular television series; Anthony Burgess reflects on how he came to write "A Clockwork Orange." Richard Brody explores the themes of authoritarianism and anti-Semitism in Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America," and Ginger Strand describes Jane Vonnegut's significant influence on the work of Jane's husband, Kurt. Jill Lepore surveys the history of dystopian novels and examines the origins of postwar pessimism. Finally, Laura Miller contemplates the boom in dystopian fiction published for younger readers. (The surveillance states portrayed in many Y.A. novels, she writes, echo the real-life experiences of adolescents "growing up under nearly continuous adult supervision.") Dystopian novels can be a form of lurid escapism. But they can help us perceive our own world more clearly, too.

"Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it's become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of fake news and infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness."

"Jane Vonnegut was in some sense a character invented by Kurt. But only in the sense that Kurt Vonnegut was, and equally, a character invented by Jane."

"Margaret Atwood is a buoyant doomsayer. Like a skilled doctor, she takes evident satisfaction in providing an accurate diagnosis, even when the cultural prognosis is bleak."

"What I was trying to say in 'A Clockwork Orange' was that it is better to be bad of one's own free will than to be good through scientific brainwashing."

"The novel dramatizes the American character as vast, manifold, and inchoate; it can use its prodigious and uninhibited energy for good or for evil, and it shifts under the sudden force of unforeseeable events."

"Dystopian fiction may be the only genre written for children that's routinely less didactic than its adult counterpart. It's not about persuading the reader to stop something terrible from happening-it's about what's happening, right this minute, in the stormy psyche of the adolescent reader."

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Fifty years ago this week, Kurt Vonnegut published the dystopian classic "Slaughterhouse-Five." With everything that's going on in the world, it's easy to feel as though we're living in a dystopia from which there's no escape. This weekend, we're bringing you pieces about the scary, strange, magnetic appeal of dystopian fiction.

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Citită de Jules.

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Eu am citit ediția din colecția "Cărți cult" de la Editura Art. Cred că e ultima apărută.

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Am citit-o pe diagonală & frunzărit apoi în ediția „serie de autor” de la ART: https://www.editura-art.ro/info/carte/abatorul-cinci4ba

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Abatorul cinci - Kurt Vonnegut - hardcover - Editura ART

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Comanda Abatorul cinci de Kurt Vonnegut - hardcover la preturi foarte bune.

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O vreme, so it goes a avut rezonanța unei resemnări, cu o ridicare din umeri, a celor umblați prin timp și viață. Un soi de „ce să faci, așa-i viața”. Când conștientizezi și începi să observi că nu despre viață-i vorba, ci despre moarte, căci Billy spune că „așa merg lucrurile” de fiecare dată când cineva moare sau în contextul mortalității, în general, expresia capătă greutate. Într-un fel, nu face decât să pună în cuvinte simple, seci și reci, faptul că războiul te poate desensibiliza. E și o formă de a face față întâmplărilor asupra cărora nu avem control, așa ca toată violența absurdă a războiului. Dacă ținem cont și de viziunea cărții asupra timpului, so it goes se transformă din resemnare în acceptare: așa merg lucrurile acum, dar în alt moment, merg, poate, altfel.

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Extratereștrii de pe Tralfamadore nu-s de lepădat, cu siguranță :D Paul Lazzaro mi s-a părut interesant, în dorința lui de răzbunare, dar care totuși nu-l face „antagonistul” clasic în roman. Destinul lui Edgar Derby m-a întristat.

Despre Billy, deși e personajul nostru principal, n-aș putea spune că e o figură marcantă, un caracter care-ți rămâne în minte. E un personaj șters, de altfel, ni se și spune: „... una dintre principalele consecințe ale războiului este aceea că oamenilor li se taie elanul de-a mai deveni personaje principale.”

Dresda m-a bântuit multă vreme după lectura cărții.

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Îmi place mult viziunea aceasta a timpului alcătuit din momente ce au loc simultan, nu linear. Acest timp, trăit fragmentar de Billy, fără cronologia cu care ne-am obișnuit, devine singurul mod prin care toată moartea și violența și absurditatea războiului pot fi acceptate și integrate în viața lui.

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Mi-a plăcut. Unele povești nu pot fi spuse într-o formă clasică...