Description:
Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade, is told in a nonlinear order. Events become clear through various time travel experiences from the narrator who describes the stories of Billy Pilgrim. Billy Pilgrim, "tall and weak, and shaped like a bottle of Coca-Cola," was born in Ilium, N.Y., the only child of a barber there, (23). After graduating from Ilium High School, he attended night sessions at the Ilium School of Optometry for one semester before being drafted for military service in World War II. Billy is a disoriented, ill-trained American soldier who refuses to fight during the war. He doesn’t like war and is captured by the Germans during Battle of the Bulge in 1944. Before his capture, Billy meets Roland Weary, a bully who is in favor of the war and constantly chastises Billy for his lack of enthusiasm for it. It’s implied that Billy and Weary are both relatively young, in their early 20s. The Germans confiscate everything Weary has, including his boots, giving him wooden clogs to wear. As a result, Weary dies of gangrene in Luxembourg. In a train car full of prisoners of war, Weary convinces another solider, Paul Lazzaro, that Billy is to blame for Weary’s death. Lazzaro vows to avenge Weary by killing Billy.
During the war, Billy becomes “unstuck in time,” experiencing moments from different points in his life. By 1945, Billy and the other prisoners are taken to Dresden to do “contract labor.” The Germans put the prisoners in an empty slaughterhouse in Dresden. The building is known as “Schlachtof-funf,” Slaughterhouse-Five. During the bombing, the prisoners and German guards hide in a cellar. They are some of the few survivors of the firestorm caused by allied bombing between February 13-15, 1945. After the war, Billy goes back to the United States, receiving an honorable discharge from service in July 1945.
A few months after the war ends, Billy is institutionalized with PTSD and put into psychiatric care. There he meets another veteran, Eliot Rosewater, who introduces Billy to the novels of an obscure science fiction author named Kilgore Trout. Trout writes stories that bear a strong resemblance to Billy’s experiences on Tralfamadore. Once Billy is released, he marries Valencia Merble. Her father owns the Ilium School of Optometry, which Billy attends again and becomes an optometrist. Billy and Valencia have two children, Robert and Barbara. On Barbara’s wedding night, Billy is abducted by an alien space ship and taken to a planet, Tralfamadore, billions of miles away. The Tralfamadorians are two feet high, green, and shaped like plungers, with suction cupss on the ground and little green hands with eyes on their palms at the top of their shafts. They are wise, and they teach Billy Pilgrim many things. They teach him that humans cannot see time, which is really like "a stretch of the rocky Mountains," with all moments in the past, the present and the future, always existing. On the planet, he meets an actress, Montana Wildhack, who is also abducted. The Tralfamadorians put Billy and Montana together in a cage in their zoo. They have a child together. Billy is sent back to Earth.
In 1968, Billy is in a plane crash. He and the copilot are the only survivors. Billy’s wife, Valencia, dies of carbon monoxide poisoning while driving to the hospital where Billy is being treated. Billy shares a hospital room with Bertram Rumfoord, a history professor at Harvard. He’s writing a short history of the U.S. Air Force and insists the bombing of Dresden was necessary.
Billy’s daughter takes him home to Ilium. He sneaks out and drives to New York City. While wandering around Times Square, he visits a bookstore, sees some Kilgore Trout books and reads them. That night, he goes on a radio show to talk about his time travels to Tralfamadore and is kicked out of the studio. He goes back to his hotel room, falls asleep and time travels to 1945 Dresden where the book ends.
About Kurt Vonnegut:
Born November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana. He’s known for his satirical literary style as well as the science-fiction elements in much of his work. After studying at Cornell University, Vonnegut enlisted in the U.S. Army. He served in Europe and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Vonnegut was captured by the German army. He was in Dresden, Germany, during the allied firebombing of the city and saw the devastation caused by it. Vonnegut wasn’t injured during the bombing because he, along with other prisoners, was working in an underground meat locker. After he returned from war, he married his high school girlfriend, Jane Marie Cox. They had three children and adopted his sister’s three children after her death in 1958. He died on April 11, 2007, at the age of 84 as a result of head injuries sustained from a fall.
The Bombing of Dresden:
The bombing of Dresden was an American and British attack on the city of Dresden during the final months of WWII. 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces dropped nearly 4,000 tons of explosives on the city. The bombing and resulting firestorm destroyed more than 1,600 acres of the city. An estimated 25,000 people were killed, although in 1945, German authorities said 200,000 people were killed. The true number of casualties is still being debated. The bombing is controversial for a number of reasons: the number of victims killed, the deliberate creation of a firestorm, whether Dresden was a necessary military target, and the fact that it was attacked toward the end of the war. Many people question whether the bombing was needed to end the war.
Why I chose this text:
Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the most bizarre books I’ve ever read. It’s profound, political, and humorous. It’s perplexing and the non-chronological order of events challenge the reader. I like that it’s an anti-war book about a bombing, yet the bombing is never described. The book explores the relationship between free will and fatalism, which the Trafalmadorians believe. They accept all events as inevitable and submit to fate. Slaughterhouse-Five manages to be a WWII novel and a sci-fi novel at the same time, with a heavy dose of time travel, death, and alien abductions. Because of this, I think it has value in an ELA classroom.
The book is appropriate for 10th-12th graders. Although there is some mature language in the novel, I think high school aged students would be able to handle it. They’re the age of some of the soldiers in the novel and should be exposed to the important topics Vonnegut addresses. Vonnegut also has a unique way of writing that students should be exposed to. He uses elements like: manipulating fiction and reality; using short, declarative sentences; the disjointed, discontinuous sequence of events; and the point of view of Vonnegut throughout the novel. The strangeness of the book would also be appealing to them.
Teaching Ideas:
1. Investigating
the Historical Background
a. The
central themes of Slaughterhouse-Five grow out of Vonnegut’s personal response
to historical events. Students might explore the following historical topics:
causes and effects of the medieval Children’s Crusade and its relationship to
Billy’s pilgrimage; causes and effects—military, political, cultural, and
personal—of the firebombing of Dresden; justifications given for WWII and
reasons for writing a novel against it.
2. Looking
at literary elements
a. Examples
of things to look at with students: character development, plot structure,
tone. You can also look at the use of black humor, satire, parody, dramatic
irony, anti-hero, ambiguity in theme, science fiction, first and third person
points of view, symbols and metaphors, and use of short and clipped sentences.
3. Examining
the life of an author
a. The
book begins with a chapter on why Vonnegut is writing the book and his
struggles with making it meaningful. There are direct correlations between the
author’s life and the lives of the characters in Slaughterhouse-Five. Students can look at how events in Kurt
Vonnegut’s own life influenced the novel. Is Vonnegut the narrator? Is he Billy
Pilgrim? In Chapter 5, Billy encounters a sick American soldier who says he is
the narrator. I think looking at this book with regard to who Vonnegut is and
how he is reflected in the novel would be useful it an ELA classroom.
Obstacles:
Slaughterhouse-Five is a controversial book that’s banned in some schools. The novel, originally written for adults, has graphic language, sexual and violent content, and there’s a drawn picture of boobs on page 209. Some have called it, “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar, and anti-Christian.” I would expect an administrator to ask questions about the inappropriate elements of the book, but as long as a teacher is able to give well thought out reasons for why the book is important in and ELA classroom, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be approved. I would expect parents to be worried about the language and content as well. I think sending a note home saying students are going to read a book that is controversial, but also giving reasons for why it’s relevant will at least let parents know what’s going on. I think students would really enjoy the book because of the story and for all of the reasons administrators and parents might have a problem with it.
Sources:
http://www.biography.com/people/kurt-vonnegut-9520329#further-success
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDoQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Feolit.hrw.com%2Fhlla%2Fnovelguides%2Fhs%2FMini-Guide.Vonnegut.pdf&ei=Iln3VNzzLtO5ogS8zoKIDQ&usg=AFQjCNGCIECoGuk5PbBwmULGUcqex60leg&sig2=QFtlw6mbb8UL8bxkt5igjA
http://www.shmoop.com/slaughterhouse-five/teaching.html
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