Part 3 (of 3): University of Detroit-Mercy history chair and published author of Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels, discusses the iconic writer as a “broken-hearted American dreamer.” By Jeff Milo, used with permission.
Kurt Vonnegut called Slaughterhouse Five ”… the war book,” or his “famous Dresden book.”
He also called it a failure. “Short, jangled and jumbled…” and written as though by someone suffering a similarly salty fate as Lot’s Wife.
“People aren’t supposed to look back,” wrote the famed writer who defied labels such as social commentator, sci-fi-invested satirist or humanistic-dark-humorist … (even whilst flirting coyly with each category).
Whatever Vonnegut was, says one of his numerous biographers, Dr. Gregory Sumner, (a local Professor of History at U-D Mercy,) he was also not a “literary type.”
“He’d say: I’m a…scientist, or a mechanic. He came from a very unorthodox background and I think he felt an inferiority complex about that, because he hadn’t read all the great books you’re supposed to read.”
He eventually did read all those “classics” like Madame Bovary and what-not, even if it took him until his 40′s. Just the same – he eventually did write his “famous Dresden book” and lo and behold, it became his most famous work, to date.
Sumner strikes me when he uses the phrasing: “Accident of time.” It echoes. “… a Coincidence.”
Slaughterhouse Five is the wobbly and horrific, charming and disconcerting tale of Billy Pilgrim. Our “hero” has, somewhere along the line in his life, become mystically detached from from time-itself and is now stringing his way across a quantamly kinked-up web of his own personal history. Neither in this moment of his life or another, be it birth, death or somewhere in-between, like, particularly, as a malnourished, mal-equipped soldier in the middle of the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, in 1943.
“Here’s a guy,” Sumner says, speaking of Vonnegut, “who actually lived through the apocalypse,” Sumner said of Vonnegut, who often sprinkled in countless self-metaphors into his character’s lives or mannerisms, thereby giving the aloof Billy Pilgrim a similar fate, witnessing the mad and senseless desetruction of a beautiful city like Dresden.
“He survived…by accident. Through it all, though, (Vonnegut) retained his humanity. He saw monstrous things and did not become a monster.”
This book, Slaughterhouse Five, was potentially the most important work he ever set down to write, Sumner said.
“I think he had a higher standard for this book,” Sumner said. “And that’s why it took him 25 years to write.”
Read the rest at the Ferndale Patch
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