Slaughter House-Five (chapter 1)

Slaughter House-Five (chapter 1)

I must say that this first chapter was confusing. First of all because it wasn’t narrated in order. Instead, the author went back and forth from past to future, and sometimes he talked about the present. I see this first chapter as an introduction to the book rather than a part of the novel itself. But I’d say that this “preface” was written after the whole book because of what it says at the very end.

“This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. It begins like this:

Listen:

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck this time.

It ends like this:

Poo-tee-weet?” (page 22)

Evidentially, the second chapter starts with those words and the very last words of the book are “Poo-tee-weet?”

This kind of writing reminds me to Cien Años de Soledad, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez because it uses a circular time-frame. You can see that Vonnegut writes in disorder because he talks about events that don’t follow each other, and yet you don’t really know when is he talking about what time. At first it all seems confusing but I am guessing that later in the book it all connects in ways that result very intriguing.

Another example of how time functions on this novel is with the sentence “so it goes”, at the end of every death which makes connects all deaths and in a way, separates them from the narrative as if there were facts supporting the war, or massacre. Yet, the effect I get from reading this words is a doubt on the validity of the facts. As if he was inventing stories to make his “poor” book more interesting.

I have a feeling that the author might suffer from Amnesia or Schizophrenia and this will affect how the story develops…