Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five by Curtis Smith

Author:Curtis Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781632460141
Publisher: IG Publishing
Published: 2016-04-02T04:00:00+00:00

*

As I held that radio from my youth in the antique barn, what I felt wasn’t so much reunion as a type of surfacing, the rising of the past into the present. For Billy Pilgrim, the years melt, and the linked heads of a barbershop quartet are supplanted by memories of his German captors. This layering exists throughout the book. An underlying network of times and events. A structure reminiscent of the child’s board game of Chutes and Ladders. Billy Pilgrim, after pulling a blanket over his head or wandering through a door, finds himself cast across time, the blanket pulled down or the threshold crossed into a new reality.

Billy Pilgrim was twenty-two when he emerged from the slaughterhouse and into the moonscape of Dresden. At twenty-two, I was thoughtlessly strong. I lifted weights, churned out push-ups and pull-ups until I lost count. I jogged off hangovers. I witnessed my share of sunrises. With luck, I could have survived a war. I could have learned to walk past fallen soldiers without a second glance. At fifty-five, I understand I would never have been strong enough to shake off the experience of stacking the bodies of women and children and watching them burn.

We all have nightmares, but perhaps what separates scars that heal from those that don’t depends upon whether we’ve been forced to live a nightmare with eyes opened wide. Kurt Vonnegut was a child plucked from the warm center of the American Midwest and deposited in faraway Dresden. He witnessed the darkness of our kind, and here waits the strange physics of memory, the images that sink then rise on their own volition, a fickle buoyancy over which one has scant control. Vonnegut had to write about Dresden, and I’ve got to believe even when he wasn’t writing about Dresden, he was still writing about Dresden. What other choice did he have? How could one ever stop the continual surfacing of such memories?

*

The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless finally that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I’m in.

*

If I could draw, I’d be a visual artist. The medium’s immediacy appeals to me, its universal communication. I’m especially captivated by twentieth century collagists and assemblers, the ones who reimagined the detritus of consumerism into art—Rochenberg, Hoch, Rodchenko, Cornell. My eyes wander over their pieces, the disparate harmonies, the logic of dreams. The layers and blurred boundaries. In its own fractured way, collage is a truer take on life than a single scene, for here waits the flotsam and random snippets we struggle to knit into a whole.

Vonnegut tried for twenty years to write his Dresden novel. In the first chapter, he describes his early attempts to shape his story.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.