Tag Archives: Slaughterhouse-five

Slaughterhouse-five Presentations.

Hey Everyone,

Thanks for those of you who did your presentations yesterday. I thought they were all great!

Maybe this is a good place to expand on some of the ideas that were brought up in the presentations yesterday. I for one, found it interesting how Kurt Vonnegut, in the letter that Karina quoted, referred to the nazis as supermen. Also note how in the novel Rumfoord is referred to as a superman. Interesting parallel…no?

Anything you picked up on during the presentations that you thought was interesting and wanted to comment or expand on, comment here!

Movie (Cont.)

So now that we have finished the book and the movie, rip into either one. The movie, while definitely changing some of the order of the book, does deal with a great deal of problems in expressing them on screen. It’s not necessarily the director’s fault, but perhaps it is just not a book that can have a similar movie rendition. I know some of you were probably thinking about this anyways, so why not just throw it out there.

if you were going to make a different version of this movie, what would you change? How would you make it more similar to the book? or less similar? What are some of the strengths that the movie had and what were some weaknesses? What would you leave in and what would you take out?

Have atter…

Body Images in Slaughterhouse-Five

Something that was brought up today briefly was the aspect of body image. There seem to be conflicting views throughout the novel about body image. The Englishmen, for example, are fascinating in their obsession with body image, and their subsequent ability to stay alive because of it. In other circumstances, though, like that of Edgar Derby, his body doesn’t seem to help him at all. It may have helped him when he was a tennis court at his high school, but in Dresden, bullets cut through nicely shaped muscle the same way they cut through deformed muscle.

What are some different ways in which we can view Vonnegut’s reference to body image, not only in these instances, but in others as well? Namely Valencia, Billy in the zoo or any others you can think of

Slaughterhouse-Five: writing an anti-glacier novel

Hey everyone,

So the first chapter of the novel is really interesting to me because it goes over a lot of biographical stuff and it really is Vonnegut writing to us directly. It’s more of a Preface in that sense. one thing that came out as interesting, which we have briefly discussed in class, has to do with Vonnegut’s practicality in writing some of these novels.

The quote goes something like this:

Harrison Starr, “Is the novel and anti-war book”

Vonnegut: “Yes, I guess so”

HS: “You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing an anti-war book?”

Vonnegut: “No, what so you say Harrison Starr?”

HS: “I say “Why don’t you write and anti-glacier book instead?””

“What he meant, of course. was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too” (page 3)

This comes back to our discussion about the motives of leftist or any -ists for that matter. Why do people write anti-war books if they know that they are inevitable?