What “Slaughterhouse-Five” Tells Us Now

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-kurt-vonneguts-slaughterhouse-five-tells-us-now

by prostoalex • 7 years ago

123 68 7 years ago

neilv2• 7 years ago

A detail missed due to the HN title matching the linked page's title: the byline is Salman Rushdie.

jandrese2• 7 years ago

    [Harrison Starr] raised his eyebrows and inquired, “Is it an anti-war book?”

    “Yes,” I said. “I guess.”

    “You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”

    “No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”

    “I say, why don’t you write an 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.

Well good news for humanity. We're well on our way to stopping glaciers, so maybe we can stop war after all.

mirimir3• 7 years ago

Soon after stopping glaciers will come stopping technological human civilization. Maybe that won't stop war, but it'll reduce scale considerably. So it goes.

soperj• 7 years ago

I wonder what Mr.Vonnegut would have to say about the historians that try to minimize the causalities that occurred during the firebombing of Dresden.

jandrese2• 7 years ago

"You weren't there".

oh_sigh• 7 years ago

What historians try to do that? Are they respected in their field? And are you sure about their intentions? Are they trying to minimize casualties, or just trying to find an accurate number(which may be smaller than reported casualties).

Melchizedek• 7 years ago

http://www.unz.com/article/how-many-germans-died-under-raf-b...

alexandercrohde• 7 years ago

The very first time I read his book, over a decade ago, I really sympathized with his cries for Dresden. But it didn't last for me:

http://www.fallen.io/ww2/

tomohawk2• 7 years ago

If the Nazis did not want to be bombed, they should not have picked a fight with the 2 superpowers (UK, US) who had heavy bombers when they had none.

I know someone who survived Dresden, and what those people went through was terrible. However, it was an inevitable consequence of stopping an ideological movement that did not value humanity in the least. When you hear people touting their ideology and how they can't respect people's rights because they're trying to achieve a greater good - watch out.

mcbuilder• 7 years ago

I think it is generally agreed that the Dresden bombing had little strategic impact, so I would do a little more reading on the subject before you go claim that it was a necessity to stop the Nazis. Unless you think vindictively bombing a civilian population as revenge is justifiable.

neves• 7 years ago

Please now explain why exploding nuclear bombs to mass murder civilians were really necessary and also why it was necessary as a demonstration of power instead of doing something like exploding Mount Fuji.

Tsubasachan• 7 years ago

The consensus during and after WW2 was that the Germans deserved it. If you start a war expect to get burned.

Sadly history tends to fade and now the Germans were just a tragically misunderstood people doing nothing wrong.

chachachoney• 7 years ago

How amazingly reductive. Citizens are not governments.

I wonder how you'd feel if you or a family member endured a horrible death by firestorm due to the machinations of a government which happens to rule the nation in which you currently reside?

On whose perfect soil do you presently live?

deogeo2• 7 years ago

If only the writers of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_I and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_II shared your gift for stating things so concisely and unambiguously!

emmelaich3• 7 years ago

What minimization? The recent (2010) study commissioned by the Dresden council came to the same ~25k that is the popular opinion.

To be fair I could easily see it being much higher but that figure is the best we have.

neilv2• 7 years ago

In early high school computer programming class (which officially was about programming in a particular language), our teacher didn't just teach that. The class put substantial time into things like history of programming (e.g., Ada Lovelace), and the thing I remember most was that we read and discussed Vonnegut's "Player Piano". In hindsight, that class was formative.

onemoresoop• 7 years ago

In his seminal book on advanced industrial society, One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse makes the case that even many ostensibly democratic nations are, at heart, totalitarian. Totalitarianism, he argues, need not manifest as dystopian wastelands with labor camps, dictatorship, secret police, and all those other Orwellian characteristics: “For ‘totalitarian’ is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.”

Player Piano, which purports to be “not a book about what is, but a book about what could be,” is such a totalitarian society – not one organized by terrorism but by economic-technical coordination of vested interests. Its society is one that appears, as its main character Paul Proteus notes, as a “clean, straight rafter,” that, once the surface is scraped away, is rotten to the core.

[0] http://www.vonnegutreview.com/2013/06/player-piano-one-dimen...

r00fus• 7 years ago

So I really struggle with the concept of subtle economic coercion (ie, the basis of western society) being described as "totalitarian".

It's like 1st-world problems being described as legitimate oppression.

oceanghost2• 7 years ago

I generally respect Salman Rushdie (the author of the article), But I really feel he's missed the point. I am far less qualified to criticize literature than he, but I'm going to do it anyways.

SL5 is about one thing. PTSD. PTSD was not a diagnosis when the book was written, but it is at least clear to me, that the book is about a fractured man trying to repair itself by creating a world view that is comforting to it. His becoming unstuck in time is, in my mind, simply a sci-fi flashback, or perhaps, flash-forward in this case?

cafard• 7 years ago

Nobody said PTSD, but one heard of shell shock or combat fatigue.

funkjunky• 7 years ago

That's a pretty reductive viewpoint. While PTSD is certainly a component of the story, it is all but a facet of the humanity and consequences of war

oceanghost2• 7 years ago

All viewpoints are reductive. That's exactly the point of them.

clairity• 7 years ago

"It tells us that most human beings are not so bad, except for the ones who are, and that’s valuable information."

this sentiment underlies the misperception of risks like terrorism, school shootings, and child abduction.

tangentially, billy pilgrim was a great little southern folk rock band. wish they'd made more music.

empath75• 7 years ago

I read this book from a Summer Reading List as a Stephen King fan in the 1990s. I assumed from the name, that it was a horror novel like Cujo.

It was not a horror novel like Cujo but it sort of was in its own way. It had a huge impact on me, though. I'm fairly sure it was the first book that ever made me cry.

afro88• 7 years ago

If you ever find yourself in Dresden there's a fantastic tour based on Slaughterhouse Five, run by a local man who loves the book and is quite a character. A unique lens to learn about the city through.

http://kurtvonnegut-tour.com/

8bitsrule• 7 years ago

"Billy Pilgrim ... “comes unstuck in time” and begins to experience chronology the way Tralfamadorians do, he understands why his captors find comical the notion of free will."

The belief that time is linear is not universal. Another fictional take on 'eternal recurrence' is explored in Ouspensky's 1915 Strange Life of Ivan Osokin. The protagonist becomes conscious of having lived the same life repeatedly, and struggles to fix his mistakes.

It's a valuable metaphor, though I reject the concern that the timeline of every quark is scripted.

stcredzero• 7 years ago

The protagonist becomes conscious of having lived the same life repeatedly, and struggles to fix his mistakes.

Abbreviated weeb version: Re:Zero. Also, All you need is Kill. (Aweebrviated?)

It's a valuable metaphor, though I reject the concern that the timeline of every quark is scripted.

Let's say I implement a huge, immersive, highly emergent video game, where all of the entity states are recorded, but all of the random number generation is constantly seeded by a feed from CloudFlare's lava lamps. I could present the entire history of my toy universe as a single, static 4 dimensional data object. I could even save that data on a 2D surface, then set the archive as a physical object on my mantelpiece. Yet the timeline of every entity in that toy universe wasn't scripted.

nine_k• 7 years ago

I remember this idea brought to the logical extreme (though I don't remember author's name).

A character gets born, lives, dies, repeatedly, in different circumstances. At one.moment he manages to remember something that a being from outside time tells him between incarnations, in "limbo" / "bardo" type of setting.

All the people in the world is that same character, only transpoted in time. All the worst villains he faces are himself, all the best saints he meets are his (future) selves. This world is entirely by him.

looeee• 7 years ago

The Egg is the most famous story based on that idea, I think.

http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

martinpw• 7 years ago

The related quote is the one part I remember and thought about most from the book:

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. [...] When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.

tempguy9999• 7 years ago

I read it and thought it a remarkable book. I lent it to a mate who thought the same. Said mate lent it to his dad who had fought in the 2nd WW. His dad apparently said it was the best book on the war he'd ever read. If true, that's really saying something.

pstuart• 7 years ago

The movie adaptation of the book is as well done as one could ask for of such a work, at such a time. Joe Bob says check it out.

emmelaich3• 7 years ago

I loved the book when I read it as youngster. Now .. it's faded a bit.

A little factoid I found interesting -- Vonnegut was inspired in part to write it by the holocaust denier David Irving's book "The Destruction of Dresden"

http://lipstadt.blogspot.com/2007/04/kurt-vonnegut-and-david...

quote

"Vonnegut helped perpetuate that myth and spread this form of denial. He probably did so initially unwittingly. But since the publication of that book enough has been written to show this is not true and he could have corrected it has he been so inclined"

zeristor• 7 years ago

Is there an eBook edition? Strangely there’s an Italian eBook but I’ve not found an English one.

dredmorbius2• 7 years ago

http://libgen.io/search.php?req=slaughterhouse+five&open=0&r...

http://booksdescr.org/ads.php?md5=B238DC565A4E2BB3FA5FBA8D9E...

What “Slaughterhouse-Five” Tells Us Now

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