Explanation of the novel's title

"Slaughterhouse-Five" refers to the slaughterhouse (named Schlachthof Fünf in the novel) in which the main character, Billy Pilgrim, stays as a POW in Dresden during the firebombing. (This parallels Vonnegut's own experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden.) Vonnegut, as he does in some of his other works such as Breakfast of Champions, uses an alternative title for the book; in this case it is The Children's Crusade. He explains this in the first chapter as referring to the Children's Crusade of the 13th century, in which children were sold as slaves (the facts of the actual historical event are disputed, but for literary purposes, the purposeful selling of children into slavery is the intended meaning). This is used to duplicate war which, in Vonnegut's opinion, is comparable to the sale of children into slavery.

A disoriented and ill-trained American soldier named Billy Pilgrim is captured by German soldiers and is forced to live in a makeshift prison, the deep cellars of a disused slaughterhouse in the city of Dresden, Germany. Billy has become "unstuck in time" for unexplained reasons (though it's hinted towards the end that his surviving a plane crash left him with mild brain damage) so he randomly and repeatedly visits different parts of his life, including his death. He meets, and is later kidnapped by, aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who exhibit him in a Tralfamadorian zoo with Montana Wildhack, a pornographic movie star. The Tralfamadorians see in four dimensions, the fourth dimension being time. Tralfamadorians have seen every instant of their lives already; they cannot choose to change anything about their fate, but can choose to focus on any moment in their lives that they wish.

Throughout the novel, Billy hops back and forth in time, reliving various occasions in his life; this gives him a constant sense of stage fright, as he never knows what part of his life is coming up next. He spends time on Tralfamadore; in Dresden; numbly wading through deep snow in WWII Germany before his capture; living married in America after the war; up to the moment of his murder on Earth many years later. By the time of his murder, Billy has adopted Tralfamadorian fatalism, which has given him great personal peace; he has spread this philosophy to millions of humans and has become a popular public figure on Earth.

Billy's fatalism appears to be grounded in reality (at least in the reality which Billy perceives); after noting that Billy had a copy of the Serenity Prayer in his office, the narrator says, "Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future." One of his Tralfamadorian captors, who seems sympathetic to humans, says that out of 31 inhabited planets it has visited, "only on Earth is there any talk of free will."

The book examines many other events in Billy's life, including the death of his wife, his capture by the Nazis in World War II, and the infamous bombing of Dresden that was the inspiration for the book. The novel uses certain phrases repetitively, such as "so it goes"—which, used whenever death or dying is mentioned (be it that of a man, an animal, or the bubbles in champagne), serves to downplay mortality, making it routine and even humorous—and "mustard gas and roses", to denote the horrible odor of a rotting corpse or a drunk's breath.

Billy's death is the result of a strange string of events. Billy was an incredibly inept fighter, which, according to fellow soldier Roland Weary, led to the capture of both. Because Weary blames Billy for his capture (and eventual death), Weary's morbid friend Lazzaro vows to have him killed, as, according to him, revenge is "the sweetest thing in life." Billy, who travels in time, already knows where and how he will be killed: Lazzaro has him shot after a public speaking event in a future where the United States has been balkanized. During Billy's public speech he declares that following his lecture he will be killed, so he uses this fact to convey his message that because time is another dimension all three-dimensional slices as we know them exist simultaneously. Therefore, everyone is always alive and death is not a tragic event.

Major themes

Vonnegut most thoroughly explores the ideas of fate, free will, and the illogical nature of humans. The main character is "unstuck in time," meaning that he experiences the events of his life in a seemingly random order, with no idea which part of life he will "visit" next. As a result, his life does not end with death; rather, he experiences his own death jumbled amongst so many of his other experiences. This is followed with confirmation by one of the Tralfamadorians, who says, "I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe... Only on Earth is there any talk of free will". This device is central to Vonnegut's belief that the vast majority of humanity is completely inconsequential; that is, they do what they do because they must.

To the Tralfamadorians, everything always exists at the same time, and for them everyone is therefore always alive. They too have wars and tragic events (they destroy the universe testing spaceship fuels), but when asked by Billy what they do about wars, the Tralfamadorians reply that they simply ignore them. Vonnegut uses the Tralfamadorians to conflict with the theme he actually presents; life, as a human, is only enjoyable with the unknown. Tralfamadorians do not actually make any choices about what they do, but have power only over what they think (this theme is also explored in Timequake). Vonnegut (as the narrator) seems to believe this theory in the way he states in chapter one, "that writing an anti-war book is like writing an anti-glacier book." This concept is difficult for Billy to accept at first.

However, Vonnegut's writings elsewhere (for example, see The Sirens of Titan), suggest that the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five are intended to satirize the idea of Fatalism. In the main body of the book, the Tralfamadorians represent the belief that war is inevitable. Their hapless destruction of the universe suggests that Vonnegut does not sympathize with their philosophy. To humans, Vonnegut seems to say, ignoring a war is not an acceptable choice when we actually do have free will.

This illogicality of human nature is brought up with the climax of the book. Ironically the climax occurs not with the bombing of Dresden, but with the execution of a man who committed a petty theft. In all of this horror, death, and destruction, so much time is taken on the punishment of one man. Yet, the time is still taken, and Vonnegut seems to take the outside opinion of the bird asking, "Poo-tee-weet?"

Literary techniques

Two techniques Vonnegut pioneered were the use of choruses and the "plant-connect" analogies.

Vonnegut used the chorus "So it goes" every time a passage deals with death, dying or mortality, as a transitional phrase to another subject, as a reminder, and as comic relief. It is also used to explain the unexplained. There are about 106 "so it goes" anecdotes laced throughout the story.

The "plant-connect" analogies are probably best explained with an example. Vonnegut uses the phrase "radium dial" to describe both a Russian's face in the prisoners' camp, and Billy Pilgrim's father's watch in the utter darkness of the Carlsbad Caverns. This emphasizes a connection between the two. The Russian's face reminded him that the other people in the camp were human, and that moment of recognition is thus filled with hope for him. So it was with Billy's father's watch, a bastion of security and familiarity in an unfamiliar place.

Another literary technique used by Vonnegut is the metafiction device. The first chapter of the book is not about Billy Pilgrim, but a preface about how Vonnegut came to write Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut apologizes for the fact that the novel is "so short and jumbled and jangled" and explains that this is because "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." In a similar way to Mother Night, but much more extensively, Vonnegut plays with ideas of fiction and reality. The opening chapter's very first sentence claims that "All this happened, more or less," and during Billy Pilgrim's war experiences Vonnegut himself appears briefly, followed by the narrator's note: "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book."

Vonnegut uses metafiction to an even greater degree in his more recent novel Timequake. In it, Vonnegut discusses an old version of the book and how improvements were made on the original.

Form

Slaughterhouse-Five opens with Vonnegut criticizing his own work for about 20 pages, then explaining the beginning and end of the story. This is an unusual but effective technique, as the story is also written from a point of view "unstuck in time," jumping erratically within Billy's life. It encourages flexibility and resourcefulness in the reader, who must fill in many blanks and build a picture of Billy's life out of order, like a jigsaw puzzle. Vonnegut's work commonly contains such disorder.

Billy Pilgrim's life seems like a cyclone, in which his birth, youth, old age, and death are all thrown violently around by the central event, the destruction of Dresden. By giving his novel this structure, Vonnegut centers everything else the reader has learned on this horrible central event, which is the key to the book's theme.

Point of view and setting

He opens the story describing his connections with the Dresden bombing, and his reasons for writing the book. He describes himself, his book, and the fact that he believes it to be a desperate attempt at scholarly work. He then flows this into Billy Pilgrim's story, as he starts Billy's story as, "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." This serves as a transition from Vonnegut's point of view to the true third person.

As the author, Vonnegut appears as a minor character throughout the story. The character Kilgore Trout, whom Billy Pilgrim meets while the former runs a newspaper line, may also be seen as a persona of the author.

The structure of Slaughterhouse-Five closely resembles a Tralfamadorian novel, a different kind of literature Pilgrim encounters en route to Tralfamadore.

A successful film adaptation of the book, also called Slaughterhouse-Five, was made in 1972. The film won the Prix du Jury at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, as well as a Hugo Award, and Saturn Award. Vonnegut has commended the film greatly.

William Styron

William Clark Styron, Jr. (1925 - 2006) was an eminent American novelist and essayist.

Before the publication of his memoir Darkness Visible in 1990, Styron was best known for his novels which included Lie Down in Darkness (1951), which he wrote at age 25; The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), narrated by Nat Turner, the leader of an 1831 Virginia slave revolt; and Sophie's Choice (1979), which dealt memorably with the Holocaust.

William Styron was born in Newport News, Virginia, not far from the site of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, later the source for his most famous and controversial novel. Though Styron’s paternal grandparents had been slave owners, his Northern mother and liberal Southern father gave him a broad perspective on race relations unusual for his generation. Styron’s childhood was a difficult one: his father, a shipyard engineer, suffered from clinical depression, which Styron himself would later experience, and his mother died of cancer before his fourteenth birthday.

His father soon sent the increasingly rebellious Styron to Christchurch School, an Episcopal college-preparatory school in the Tidewater region of Virginia. Styron once said, "But of all the schools I attended ...only Christchurch ever commanded something more than mere respect - which is to say, my true and abiding affection."

On graduation, Styron enrolled in Davidson College, but eventually dropped out to join the Marines toward the end of World War II. Though Styron was made a lieutenant, the Japanese surrendered before Styron’s ship left San Francisco. Styron then enrolled in Duke University, which would later grant him a B.A. in English; here Styron also published his first fiction, a short story heavily influenced by William Faulkner, in an anthology of student work.

After his 1947 graduation, Styron took an editing position with McGraw-Hill in New York City. Styron later recalled the misery of this work in an autobiographical passage of Sophie’s Choice, and after provoking his employers into firing him, he set about his first novel in earnest. Three years later, he published the novel, the story of a dysfunctional Virginia family culminating in a young woman’s suicide, as Lie Down in Darkness (1951). The novel received overwhelming critical acclaim, including the prestigious Rome Prize, awarded by the American Academy in Rome and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but Styron’s recall into the military owing to the Korean War prevented him from immediately accepting this award. After his 1952 discharge for eye problems, Styron transformed his experience at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina into his short novel, The Long March, published serially the following year.

Styron then spent an extended period in Europe. In Paris, he became friends with Romain Gary, George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, James Baldwin, James Jones, and Irwin Shaw, among others. The group founded the celebrated Paris Review in 1953.

The year 1953 was eventful for Styron in another way. Finally able to take advantage of his Rome Prize, he traveled to Italy. At the American Academy, he renewed an acquaintance with a young Baltimore poet, Rose Burgunder, to whom he had been introduced the previous fall at Johns Hopkins University. They were married in Rome in the spring of 1953.

Styron’s experiences during this period would later be recalled in Set This House on Fire (1960), a novel about intellectual American expatriates on the Riviera. The novel received, at best, mixed reviews, with several critics savaging it for what they described as its melodrama and undisciplined structure.

William Styron was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca in 1985. That year, he suffered from a serious depression which he would later recall in his popular memoir Darkness Visible (1990), in which (in the experience for many readers) he was (arguably) able to describe his descent into madness from the inside. His other works include a play, In the Clap Shack (1973) and a collection of his nonfiction pieces, This Quiet Dust (1982).

Styron died from pneumonia on November 1, 2006, at the age of 81 in Martha's Vineyard.

Sophie's Choice (1979) is a novel written by William Styron about a young American Southerner, an aspiring writer, who befriends the Jewish Nathan Landau and his beautiful lover Sophie, a Polish (but non-Jewish) survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. An immediate bestseller and the basis of a successful film, the novel is often considered both Styron's best work and a major novel of the twentieth century. The difficult decision that shapes the character Sophie is sometimes used as an idiom. A "Sophie's Choice" is a tragic choice between two unbearable options.

The novel won the 1980 National Book Award and was a nationwide bestseller. A 1982 film version was nominated for five Academy Awards, with Meryl Streep winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Sophie.

Sophie's Choice begins with the departure of its narrator, Stingo, from a stultifying position at a New York publishing house and his move to a Brooklyn boarding house to begin work on his own novel. (The early portion of the novel is closely based on Styron's own postwar experiences as a reader at McGraw-Hill). As his work progresses, Stingo supports himself with funds unexpectedly received, many years after the fact, from the unjust sale of one of his grandfather's slaves, Artiste -- an irony on which Stingo frequently reflects.

Stingo soon finds himself drawn into the lives of his upstairs neighbors, Sophie Zawistowska, a beautiful Polish survivor of Auschwitz, and Nathan Landau, a brilliant young Jewish man who claims to be a Harvard graduate and cellular biologist. Sophie and Nathan are lovers, but their relationship is punctuated by Nathan's escalating fits of jealousy and violence. Stingo quickly falls in lust with Sophie, though since he lacks the opportunity to woo her and also idolizes the charismatic Nathan, he continues to try to lose his virginity with other women, in tragi-comic episodes trenchantly revealing of late 1940s attitudes towards sex and sexuality.

Stingo gradually reveals Sophie’s past to the reader as she reveals it to him: the anti-Semitism of her father in Kraków; her refusal to aid the Polish underground movement during World War II; her own incarceration in Auschwitz for attempting to smuggle meat into the city for her dying mother. Sophie's story, which Stingo receives piecemeal, is supplemented by Stingo's own, later, research into the Holocaust. In particular, Sophie recounts her brief experience as a stenographer-typist in the home of Rudolph Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz. We learn that Sophie attempted to seduce Höss in order to have her blonde, blue-eyed, German-speaking son, also confined in the camp, transferred into the Lebensborn program, which would have allowed him to be raised as a German child. When Sophie failed, she was returned to the camp, where she nearly died from malnutrition before her liberation. She never learned the fate of her son.

As Nathan's behavior becomes more erratic and abusive, Sophie tells Stingo about Nathan's past attempt to make a suicide pact with her. Answering a summons from Nathan’s brother Larry, Stingo discovers that Nathan is not a research scientist but rather a repeatedly-institutionalized paranoid schizophrenic. When Nathan’s jealous imaginings focus on Stingo and he threatens their lives, Stingo and Sophie attempt to flee to a Virginia farm belonging to Stingo's father. En route, Stingo learns Sophie's deepest secret: when she arrived at Auschwitz, a sadistic doctor ordered her to choose between the lives of her 7-year-old daughter, Eva, and her 10-year-old son, Jan. With only seconds to decide, she chose her son, leaving her with a guilt that she cannot overcome.

Stingo proposes marriage, and the pair share a single night of passionate sex before Sophie disappears. After following her back to New York, Stingo discovers that Sophie and Nathan have committed suicide in Sophie's apartment by swallowing cyanide capsules. Despite his devastation at the discovery, the novel closes with Stingo awakening on a beach and observing, with a quotation from Emily Dickinson (whose work plays a small but crucial role in the story), that it is morning -- "excellent and fair" -- suggesting a remaining shred of optimism.

Style

Sophie's Choice is a realistic novel largely narrated in the first person by an older Stingo, now a successful novelist, but also including Sophie's (frequently revised) memories of her childhood, wartime Warsaw, and her imprisonment at Auschwitz -- presented in both the first and third persons. The narrative is therefore complex, moving back and forth in time between Stingo's description of the summer of 1947 and his relationship with Sophie and Nathan, his own earlier life in Virginia, and Sophie's experiences. In addition, the mature Stingo digresses at length both on his attitudes as a youth (occasionally including his journal entries, particularly after sexual experiences) as well as on the broader issues involving the American South and the Holocaust.

Major themes

One of the most important parallels in Sophie's Choice, as Stingo explicitly points out, is between the worst abuses of the American South — both its slave-holding past and the lynchings of the book's present — and Polish anti-Semitism. Just as Sophie is left conflicted by her father's attitudes towards Poland's Jews, Stingo analyzes his own culpability derived from his family's slave-holding past, eventually deciding to write a book about Nat Turner — an obvious parallel to Styron's own controversial novel The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Similarly, by placing a non-Jewish character at the center of an Auschwitz story, Styron suggests the universality of the suffering under the Third Reich. Though several characters, including Stingo, discuss in detail the fact that the Jewish people suffered far more than other groups, Stingo also describes Hitler's attempts to eliminate the Slavs or turn them into slave labor and makes the case that the Holocaust cannot be understood as an exclusively Jewish tragedy. In contrast, Nathan, whose paranoid condition makes him particularly sensitive about his ethnicity, is the novel's prime spokesman for this exclusivity. His inability to cope with the fact that Sophie, a Polish-Catholic raised in an anti-Semitic nation, shared the sufferings of European Jews, while he was prevented, by his mental illness, from even enlisting in the military, causes him to accuse Sophie of complicity in the Holocaust and leads to their mutual destruction.

The canon of mainstream: short stories and novels by Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Irving Shaw, Bernard Malamud, Truman Capote, John Cheever, Marry Higgins Clark, Joyce Carol Oates.

EUDORA WELTY 1909-2001

Eudora Welty was born on April 13, 19Q9 in the Southern city of Jackson, Mississippi, where she had lived almost her whole life. As the daughter of an insurance man and a school-teacher, she enjoyed a conventional girlhood. She recalls pleading with her brothers to teach her golf, sharing their enthusiasm for baseball, and bicycling to the library in two petticoats to forestall the librarian's caustic remark, "I can see straight through you."

Welty attended Mississippi State College for Women, studied at the University of Wisconsin from which she graduated in 1929. She did graduate work at Columbia University School of Business, anticipating a career in advertising. However, she was unable to find a steady job in advertising. The Depression sent her home to Jackson with a belief, which did not fail her. She hoped she that she would succeed as a writer of fiction.

She worked as a publicist for a government agency for several years traveling throughout Mississippi, taking photographs and interviewing people. Her experience and observations inspired her to write fiction. Eudora Welty is known for her searching studies of small-town life in the South. She has lived in Mississippi all of her life, and her affection for the South can be seen in her work. Her long-life friends were R.P.Warren and Katherine Anne Porter.

Her first short story Death of a Travelling Salesman was published in a small magazine in 1936. Since then she published numerous collections of short stories, including A Curtain of Green (1941), The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943). These were followed by The Golden Apples (1949), one of her best-known volumes of short stories, The Bride of Innishfallen and Other Stories (1955), Thirteen Stories (1965). Welty's short stories appeared in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, published in 1980 which reveals the whole range of her artistry over four decades of writing. The Wide Net is a comedy of misunderstanding between newlyweds. The young wife threatens to kill herself, and the husband calls the community together to drag the river for her body. The description of the forest in autumn is elegiac, knowing that all things must come to an end, and yet inevitably return.

Her longer fiction consists of the novelette The Robber Bridegroom (1942). She is also the author of several novels, including Delta Wedding (1045), The Ponder Heart (1954), which was made into a Broadway play, Loosing Battles (1970), Welty's fine comic novel about a family reunion in the rural South. Two years later, in 1972, Welty produced The Optimist’s Daughter, a poignant short novel about family conflicts; this book won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. An autobiographical memoir entitled One Writer's Beginnings, based on lectures Welty gave at Harvard University, was published in 1983 to wide critical acclaim.

She described the influence of her family and surroundings on her writing. The book of essays and reviews appeared in The Eye of the Story (1978). Her Complete Novels and Stories, Essays, and Memoirs were published in 1998.

Welty's widely recognized triumph is a painstaking accuracy in colloquial speech. The exactly right word always matters to her. She has always been fascinated by words, by the way people say things, by snatches of overheard dialogue. Welty's style combines delicacy with shrewd, robust humor. The mixture of realism and fantasy in some of her stories gives them an almost mythical quality. Her major themes extend beyond the South - loneliness, the pain of growing up and the need for people to understand themselves and their neighbors.

She greatly admired the work of Catherine Anne Porter, who befriended her when she was sending out stories and getting back rejection slips. It was the literary agent Diarmuid Russell who shared Welty’s belief in an ultimate success. He not only took her on as a client, but said of a certain Welty story that if the editor didn't accept it, "he ought to be horse-whipped." (The editor in question bought the story).

Welty admitted to being blessed with a visual mind, and she said that this gift made for "the best shorthand a writer can have." She once wrote, "To watch everything about me, I regarded grimly and possessively as a need." Clearly that need became an enviable, artistic vision.