Slaughterhouse number 5 children's crusade. Book Massacre Number Five, or the Children's Crusade read online. Title and background
"Slaughterhouse Five, or the Children's Crusade"(English) Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade ) () is an autobiographical novel by Kurt Vonnegut about the bombing of Dresden during World War II.
Title and background
Vonnegut was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945.
According to the writer, the bombing of Dresden was not caused by military necessity. Most of the victims of this operation were civilians, residential areas were destroyed, architectural monuments were destroyed. Vonnegut, being indisputably against fascism, does not admit that the destruction of Dresden was a "punishment" for the crimes of the fascists. The novel was censored in the United States, it was listed as "harmful" books and removed from libraries.
At the beginning of the novel, the idea of the book about the bombing of Dresden is described. The author complains that he cannot think of the right words for this book, which he considered his main work. To draw up a plan for a future book, he met with his fellow soldier Bernard O'Hare. O'Hare's wife Mary was very angry when she learned about the intention of the book about the war, because in all such books there is an element of war glorification - cynical lies that support new wars. Vonnegut's conversation with Mary is a key episode at the beginning of the novel, he explains why the book about Dresden turned out to be so strange, short, confused, which does not prevent it from being anti-war. It is also clear from this dialogue where the second title of the novel came from.
Yes, you were just kids then! - she said.
What? I asked.
You were just kids in the war, like our guys upstairs.
I nodded my head - its true. We were at war foolish virgins barely parted from childhood.
But you don't write like that, do you? - she said. It wasn't a question - it was an accusation.
I… I don't know myself,” I said.
But I know, she said. - You pretend that you were not children at all, but real men, and you will be played in the movies by all sorts of Frankie Sinatra and John Wayne or some other celebrity, nasty old men who love war. And the war will be shown beautifully, and wars will go one after another. And the children will fight, just like our children upstairs.
And then I understood everything. That's why she got so angry. She didn't want her children killed in the war, anyone's children. And she thought that books and movies also incited wars.
And then I raised my right hand and made a solemn promise to her.
Mary, I said, I am afraid I will never finish this book of mine. I've already written five thousand pages and threw it all away. But if I ever finish this book, I give you my word of honor that there will be no role for either Frank Sinatra or John Wayne in it. And guess what, I added, I'm going to call the book The Children's Crusade.
After that she became my friend.
As a result, the novel was dedicated to Mary O'Hare (and the Dresden taxi driver Gerhard Müller) and was written in a "telegraphic-schizophrenic style", as Vonnegut himself puts it. Realism, grotesque, fantasy, elements of madness, cruel satire and bitter irony are closely intertwined in the book.
The protagonist is American soldier Billy Pilgrim, a ridiculous, timid, apathetic man. The book describes his adventures in the war and the bombing of Dresden, which left an indelible imprint on the Pilgrim's mental state, which has not been very stable since childhood. Vonnegut introduced a fantastic moment into the story, which grows from a comically naive "story about aliens" into some harmonious philosophical system.
The bombing of Dresden remains in the novel exactly what it is - a black hole, a void. Wrapped in a word, the void would lose its status.
Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) rose to prominence in the 1960s with Cat's Cradle (1962) and rose to fame with Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children's Crusade (1969).
In the face of modern evil, which has taken on a mass and impersonal character, the old standards of justice and goodness, washed the writer, are naive and inapplicable.
For many years, Vonnegut's works were perceived as literary futurology. This is not true. Although his action is often transferred to other planets or to distant times, the artistic fabric of his books consists of conflicts and problems that are too relevant for our time.
Vonnegut's prose gives the impression of fragmentation. Relationships between the characters arise and break off as if without any logic. The links between the episodes seem to be random. But behind the external randomness, Vonnegut reveals a very thoughtful composition. Its fragmentation is a mosaic that is formed into a single whole at the end of the work.
The mosaic composition is conditioned by the nature of the era: the anthills of cities, the mechanistic nature of human contacts, the facelessness and uniformity of life - all this is captured by the writer with genuine accuracy.
The novel Slaughterhouse Number 5, or the Children's Crusade (1969).
Artistic time in the novel is past and present. Several time plans are combined and intertwined in the mind of the protagonist Billy Pilgrim. These temporary plans are combined in Billy's mind through associations (for example, in 1967, Billy goes to breakfast at a club, through a quarter burned down as a result of Negro unrest, and is immediately transferred by memory to the warped pavements of Dresden after the bombing in the last month of the war).
The foundation of the artistic construction at the very beginning of the book is based on the metaphor: “Listen! Billy Pilgrim is out of time." This metaphor is progressively revealed as the action develops. Billy "travels" in time in jerks and has no control over where he goes. Thus, the narrative in the novel is devoid of a chronological component and plot sequence. The reader is faced with the need to compare the past, present and future that arise in Billy's memory. The non-existent planet Tralfamador, Dresden during the bombing, America in the mid-60s are connected by a strong semantic connection. This connection is the idea of absolute rationalism (dominating Tralfamadore) and the practice of that same rationalism here on Earth, on the night Dresden was bombed.
In the novel, the most impressive episodes are associated with the depiction of the final stage of the war, when the power of Germany was finally undermined and the denouement was approaching. On February 13, 1945, American aviation wiped out Dresden, a city where there were actually no defense facilities, in a few hours with massive raids. More than 130 thousand inhabitants died (Vonnegut himself was in Dresden at that time as a prisoner of war; during the bombing, he escaped only because he worked in slaughterhouses, where there was a refrigerator deep underground):
“It was dangerous to leave the shelter until noon the next day. When the Americans and their guards went outside, the sky was completely covered with black smoke. The angry sun looked like a nail head. Dresden was like the moon - only minerals. The stones were hot. There was death all around. The girls, the ones Billy saw naked, were also all killed in the less deep hiding place at the other end of the slaughterhouses. Dresden has become a complete conflagration. The flame devoured all living things and in general everything that could burn. So it goes".
A team of prisoners of war sent to clear the rubble makes their way along the "lunar surface", which a few hours ago was a big city. Everyone is silent.
“Yes, and there was nothing to talk about. Only one thing was clear: it was assumed that the entire population of the city, without any exception, should be destroyed, and anyone who dared to stay alive spoiled the case. People weren't supposed to stay on the moon." Planes flying over the ruins opened fire on everything that moved below. "All this was conceived in order to end the war as soon as possible."
When the war ended, it was useless to talk to the Americans about the tragedy of Dresden - to them "this bombing did not seem at all something outstanding." The past grows too quickly with the grass of oblivion. But it is necessary to remind of such a past, so that an analogy does not extend from such a past into the future.
This is what a rational approach looks like in practice. It was then, in those fateful days, that something broke in Billy. His subsequent disconnections from time were only a consequence, and the Tralfadorians "just helped him understand what was really happening."
The fictional planet Tralfamador is terrible for its absolute soullessness. There can be no contradictions, no conflicts at Tralfamador, because a strictly rational view of things prevails here. The secret of the Tralfadorians is extremely simple: in order to find inner peace, you just need to become a machine, i.e. to give up any attempts to be a man with all its contradictions and diversity of feelings.
The planet Tralfamador, invented by Vonnegut, is like a crooked mirror that enlarges the proportions so that the whole horror of what is happening on Earth, including the drop of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, is clearly revealed. Thus, the famous professor Rumford asks his wife to read Truman's famous message to the Americans, in which it was announced to the whole world that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima:
“This is an atomic bomb. To create it, we conquered the powerful forces of nature. The source that feeds solar energy was directed against those who unleashed a war in the Far East. Now we are ready to completely and without delay destroy any industry in Japan, in any of their cities on the surface of the earth.
Vonnegut's novel ends on an almost idealistic note. Spring is worth it. Trees are blooming. 130 thousand corpses doused with gasoline and burned. The streets are almost in order. World War II is over. Billy wanders through the ruins of the city in a crowd of prisoners. But the past will stay with him forever. There will be this “pewty-fut” - the cry of a bird, the last thing he heard in dead Dresden. Warning signal. This is a warning against the “stupidity” of all those who forget “such things” too quickly, against the stupidity of a mad rationalism that kills all life on the long-suffering Earth.
Ethnocultural factor in foreign literature of the second half of the twentieth century. Literature of Latin America. The concept of magical realism.
The synthesis of cultures, races and peoples determined the development of the literature of Latin America. It stands in a special position to the literature of Europe and the West - some consider it distant, others still European. There is no reason to withdraw from the European area: the language is common. Sometimes the originality of literature is explained by regionalism, mythology, magical realism, but all these phenomena are known to Europe as well. Even the Brazilian carnival is basically European. The common language also determines the internal unity of Latin American literature.
For several centuries, it experienced a period of formation, after the First World War it became significant: A. Carpentier, M.O. Silva, etc. After the Second World War - a new generation - J. Cortazar, Marquez, Llosa.
From the book: Karolides N.J., Bald M., Souva D.B. et al. 100 Forbidden Books: A Censored History of World Literature. - Yekaterinburg: Ultra Culture, 2008.Slaughterhouse Number Five, or the Children's Crusade
(Dance with death on duty)
Author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Year and place of first publication: 1969, USA
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Literary form: novel
Many years after World War II, Kurt Vonnegut met with Bernard W. O'Hare, whom he had befriended during the war, to talk about the destruction of Dresden. Allied troops bombed Dresden; it stood in ruins - as after the explosion of a nuclear bomb. Vonnegut and other American prisoners of war (POW) who survived the ordeal of "Schlachthof-funf", "Slaughterhouse Five", a concrete shelter designed for slaughtering cattle. The two friends subsequently visited Dresden, where Vonnegut obtained material to supplement his own experience for his "famous book on Dresden".
Billy Pilgrim, the main character, was born in Troy, New York, in 1922. He served in the army as an assistant chaplain. After the accidental death of his father while hunting, Billy returned from leave and was assigned to assist the regimental chaplain in place of the slain assistant. The chaplain himself was killed in a battle in the Ardennes, and Billy and three other Americans fought off their own and got lost in the depths of German territory. One of the three soldiers, Roland Weary, an anti-tank gunner who had been an unpopular guy all his life, who got in the way of everyone and whom everyone wanted to get rid of. Weary repeatedly pushed Billy out of the enemy's line of fire, but Billy was so exhausted and exhausted that he did not realize that his life was being saved. This infuriates Weary, who "saved Billy's life a hundred times a day: scolded him for what he was worth, beat him, pushed him so that he would not stop." Weary and the other two of the four, both scouts, became the "Three Musketeers" in Weary's imagination. However, along with Weary's obsession with keeping the hallucinated Billy alive, so does the scouts' contempt for Billy and Weary, whom they eventually abandon. Weary is ready to kill Billy, but just as he was on his way to killing them, they are discovered and captured by a squad of German soldiers.
They are searched, their weapons and belongings are taken away and they are taken to the house where prisoners of war are kept. They are placed with twenty other Americans. For propaganda purposes, Billy is photographed to show how badly the American army prepares its soldiers. The Germans and prisoners of war go further, meet other prisoners of war along the way, who merge into a single human river. They are brought to the railway station and separated by rank: privates with privates, colonels with colonels, etc. Billy and Weary are separated, but Weary continues to believe that Billy caused the disunity of the Three Musketeers, he tries to instill hatred for Billy in his neighbors by wagon. On the ninth day of the journey, Viri dies of gangrene. On the tenth day, the train stops and the people are transferred to a POW camp. Billy refuses to jump out of the car. He is taken out, corpses remain in the cars.
The prisoners are undressed, their clothes are disinfected. Among them are Edgar Darby, a middle-aged man whose son fought in the Pacific, and Paul Lazzaro, a tiny, shriveled man covered in boils. Both of them were with Weary when he died, Darby held his head in his lap, and Lazzaro promised to take revenge on Billy. The prisoners are given back their clothes and given personal numbers, which they must wear at all times. They are taken to a barracks, which is inhabited by several middle-aged Englishmen who have been prisoners since the beginning of the war. Unlike their American counterparts, the British try to be in shape and take care of themselves. They are also skillful at saving food, and can afford to exchange food with the Germans for various useful things - for example, for boards and other building materials for arranging their barracks.
In a terrible state, delirious, Billy is placed in the sanitary section of the British section, which in reality is six beds in one of the rooms of the barracks. He is injected with morphine and is watched over by Darby, all the while reading The Scarlet Badge of Courage. Billy wakes up from a drugged sleep, not knowing where he is or what year it is. Darby and Lazzaro sleep in adjacent bunks. Lazzaro had his arm broken for stealing cigarettes from the English, and now he rants to Billy and Darby how he will one day avenge this and Weary's death, which he blames on Billy.
The head of the British informs the Americans: “You, gentlemen, will leave today for Dresden, a beautiful city ... […] By the way, you have nothing to fear from the bombing. Dresden is an open city. It is not protected, it does not have a military industry and any significant concentration of enemy troops. Arriving at the place, the Americans see that they were told the truth. They are taken to a concrete shelter, where there used to be a slaughterhouse, now it has become their shelter - "Schlachthof-funf". Americans work in a factory that makes malt syrup fortified with vitamins and minerals for pregnant German women.
Dresden was destroyed four days later. Billy, several Americans and four German guards took refuge in the slaughterhouse dungeon when the city began to be bombed. When they left the next day, “the sky was completely covered with black smoke. The angry sun looked like a nail head. Dresden was like the moon - only minerals. The stones were hot. There was death all around. The soldiers ordered the Americans to line up in fours and led them out of the city to a rural inn far enough from Dresden to escape the bombing.
Two days after the end of the war, Billy and five other Americans return to Dresden, looting abandoned houses, taking things they like. Soon the Russians enter the city and arrest the Americans, and two days later they send them home on the Lucretia A. Mott.
In the war, Billy Pilgrim, among other things, travels through time. His travels happen when he is on the brink between life and death or under the influence of drugs. When Weary attacked him, he traveled to the future and the past. For example, he went back to when he was a little boy and he and his father came to YMKA Young Men's Christian Association - A.E. His father tried to teach Billy to swim using the "swim or sink" method. He threw it into the water in a deep place, Billy went to the bottom - “he was lying at the bottom of the pool and wonderful music rang around. He lost consciousness, but the music did not stop. He vaguely felt that he was being rescued. Billy was very upset." From the pool, he was transported to 1965, visiting his mother in Sosnovy Bor, a nursing home; he then went to a New Year's party in 1961; then returned in 1958 to a banquet in honor of the Youth League team in which his son played; and from there again to the New Year's party, where he cheated on his wife with another woman; in the end, he returned to the Second World War, to the German rear, where he was shaken under the Weary tree.
After falling asleep from a shot of morphine in the British part of the prisoner of war camp, Billy is transported to 1948 in the Veterans Hospital on Lake Placid. He meets Eliot Rosewater, a former infantry captain who addicted Billy to the works of Kilgore Trout, an obscure science fiction writer who became Billy's favorite and whom Billy met years later personally. Billy then travels to a time when he is 44 years old and is on display at the zoo on Tralfamadore as a different life form.
The Tralfamadorians - telepaths who live in four dimensions and have a clear understanding of the concept of death - captured Billy and placed him in a zoo, where he sat naked in a room furnished with furniture from the warehouses of Sears and Roeback, Iowa City, Iowa. Shortly after Billy's kidnapping, the Tralfamadorians kidnapped a dugout woman, Montana Wildback, a twenty-year-old movie star who they hoped would become Billy's girlfriend. In time, she trusted Billy and they fell in love, much to the delight and delight of the Tralfamadorians.
Shortly after their sexual experience, Billy awakens. Now it's 1968, he's sweating under the electric blanket, which keeps him warm. His daughter put him to bed upon his return from the hospital, where he was admitted after a plane crash in Vermont on his way to an optometry convention in Canada, in which he alone survived. His wife is Valencia Merble, the daughter of a successful optician who brought Billy into his business and thus made him a wealthy man. She dies of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning while Billy is in the hospital.
The next day, Billy Pilgrim travels to New York, where he hopes to get on a TV show and tell the world about the Tralfamadorians. Instead, he ends up on a radio talk show whose theme is "Is Roman Dead or Not?" Billy talks about his travels, the Tralfamadorians, Montana, multiple dimensions and the like, until he was "delicately escorted out of the studio during a commercial break. He returned to his room, dipped a quarter dollar into the electric "fairy fingers" connected to his bed, and fell asleep. And time traveled to Tralfamador." Billy Pilgrim died on February 13, 1976.
According to Lee Burres, Slaughterhouse Five is one of the most frequently banned books of the last twenty-five years, and boasts dozens of cases where students, parents, teachers, administrators, librarians, and priests have advocated for the novel's removal or destruction for the following reasons: obscenity , vulgar language, cruelty, "toilet" vocabulary, "not recommended for children" language, godlessness, immorality, "too modern" language and "unpatriotic" depiction of war.
June Edwards addresses the protests of parents and religious leaders: "The book is an indictment of the war that criticizes the actions of the government, it is anti-American and unpatriotic." This accusation does not take into account the reason why Vonnegut wrote the novel, which was supposed to show that "it is impossible to speak politely about the massacre." Edwards reinforces the author's position with the following arguments: "Young people may refuse to participate in future battles by reading about the horrors of war in novels like Slaughterhouse Five ... but this does not make them anti-American. They do not want their country to be involved in cruelty, the extermination of entire peoples, but they want it to find other ways to resolve conflicts.”
Nat Hentoff reports that Bruce Savery is the only teacher at North Dakota's Drake High School who, in 1973, used Slaughterhouse Five in class as an example of a "living modern book." Savery submitted the book to the headmaster for consideration, but after receiving no response, he decided to go on his own and studied it in class. Student objections to the "inappropriate language" led the school board to call the book "the devil's tool". The school board ruled that the book should be burned despite the fact that none of the board members read it. Savery, upon learning that his contract would not be renewed, said: “A few three-letter words in a book are of little importance. Students have heard them before. They didn't learn anything new. I always thought that the purpose of the school is to prepare these guys for life in the "big, bad world", it seems I was mistaken. Savery, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, sued the school board. To avoid going to court, the following agreement was reached: 1) "Slaughterhouse Five" could be used by Drake High School teachers in 11th and 12th grade English classes; 2) Severi's lecture cannot be called orally or in writing unsatisfactory; 3) Severi is paid compensation of 5 thousand dollars.
The Librarian's Guide to Dealing with Censorship Conflicts provides a detailed account of the Pico v. Board of Education trial in Island Trees Union Free School District, which was tried in 1979, 1980, and 1982. It is significant as the first time that a case of school library censorship reached the Supreme Court. The case arose from the initiative of school board members attending a meeting of the Parent Society of New York (PONY-U) in 1975, at which the issue of "control of textbooks and books in school libraries" was raised. Using a list that included books deemed "extra" in other school libraries, Richard Aearns, then chairman of the Long Island School Board, went into the school library one evening with board member Frank Martin to see what books were on the list. . They found nine books, including Slaughterhouse Five. At their next meeting, with two high school principals in February 1976, the board decided to withdraw those nine books (plus two more) from the junior high school curriculum. This decision prompted a memo from director Richard Morrow, who stated, "I don't think we should agree and act on anyone's list ... we already have our own course ... aimed at solving such problems." At a meeting on March 30, Director Aearns ignored the memo and ordered the books to be removed from the district's libraries. After the press got involved, the council issued a rebuttal that read:
“The Board of Education intends to clarify the situation - we are NOT PERSECUTORS or BOOK BURNERS in any way. Although most of us agree that these books can be on the shelves of a public library, but we all believe that these books are NOT suitable for school libraries, where they are easily accessible to children whose minds are still at the stage of formulation [sic] and where they are available entice children to read and absorb them…”
Morrow responded that it was "the error of the board, as of any individual group, to withdraw books without a detailed study of the opinions of the parents whose children read these books and the teachers who use these books in the learning process ... and without properly studying the books themselves." In April, the council and Morrow voted to form a committee of four parents and four teachers that would review the books and make recommendations on their future status. Meanwhile, Morrow demanded that the books be returned to the shelves and remain there until the completion of the review process. The books were not returned to the shelves. At their next meeting, the committee decided that six of the eleven books, including Slaughterhouse Five, could be returned to school libraries. Three books were not recommended to be returned, and a single decision was not reached on two more. Be that as it may, on July 28, the council, despite the committee's decision, voted to return only one book - "The Laughing Boy" - without restrictions, and the second - "BLACK" - with restrictions that will depend on the position of the committee. Aearns stated that the other nine cannot be used as required, optional, or recommended reading, but discussion of them in class is allowed.
In January 1977, a lawsuit was filed by Stephen Pico and other students represented by the New York Civil Liberties Union. Pico said the council violated the First Amendment by removing these books from the library.
As noted in the trial notes, the school board denounced the books as "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and downright dirty"; they cited a number of passages about male genitalia, sexuality, written in obscene and sacrilegious language, and blasphemous interpretations of the gospel and Jesus Christ. Leon Hurwitz writes, "The federal district court quickly ruled in favor of the council, but the appeals court remanded the case on the students' petition." The Supreme Court, to which the school board appealed, upheld (5 votes to 4) the decision of the appeal court, rejecting the opinion that "there is no likely violation of the Constitution in the actions of the school board in this area." The cycle ended on August 12, 1982, when the school board voted 6 to 1 to return the books to the library shelves, but with the proviso that the librarian must notify parents in writing that their child is taking books that they may find offensive. (For more on the discussions surrounding this case, see the Censored History of "BLACK").
Quite a few other episodes took place around Slaughterhouse Five in the seventies, eighties and nineties. According to the study "Forbidden Books: 387 BC to 1987 AD", an unidentified Iowa city school board ordered the burning of 32 copies of the book in 1973 because of the obscene language of the work. The teacher who included the book in the program was threatened with dismissal. In McBee, South Carolina, a teacher who used this text was arrested and charged with using obscene material.
The Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom reports that in 1982 in Lakeland, Florida, a review committee voted to ban the book (3 votes to 2) from the Lake Gibson High School library, citing explicit sex scenes, violence, and obscene language. The board member's complaint was echoed by Polk County Associate School Principal Cliff Maines, who said the book review policy justifies the decision's validity.
On May 27, 1984, in Racine, Wisconsin, William Grindland, district administrative assistant, prohibited the purchase of Slaughterhouse Five, stating, "I don't think it should be in the school library." United School Board member Eugene Dank countered, "To deny our youth a quality reading program is a crime." This sparked a lively controversy that led to the council's banning of five textbooks, three in the social sciences and two in economics. Council member Barbara Scott has proposed a "backup list" of books that require written permission to read.
parental permission. Meanwhile, the Racine Education Association threatened to take legal action and sue the school board in federal court if the books were banned. The association's executive director, Jim Ennis, said the goal of the process would be "to prevent the school board from removing 'modern and significant literature' from libraries and programs." On June 14, a committee of officials recommended that the school district purchase a new edition of Slaughterhouse Five and also proposed a new library acquisition policy. The latter was supposed to involve parents in the formation of a committee consisting of parents, librarians and educational leaders who would jointly select new materials for the library. The news of this deterred the Association from taking legal action against the school district.
On May 15, 1986, Jane Robbins-Carter, president of the Wisconsin Library Association, informed the Racine Unified School District that the resolution of the censorship problem "owes its resolution to a conflict between district policy and practice, as they affect the selection and purchase of library materials, as well as to the principles of intellectual freedom that the Library Association of America's Bill of Rights proclaims." The protests were sparked by the actions of William Grindland, who claimed "his power to destroy orders for library materials 'not in accordance with acquisition policy'", using "vague and subjective criteria" in the selection of materials, and to direct "requests for materials of a controversial nature ... to public libraries, local bookstores and newsstands." Robbins-Carter adds that "censorship will continue as long as the Board of Education adopts a revised selection and purchase policy for library materials." In December, the Racine Unified School District review committee adopted such a course in June 1985. On December 9, the Racine Unified School District Library Materials Review Committee voted 6 to 2 to place Slaughterhouse Five on a restricted basis and release to students only with parental permission. Grindland, a member of the book selection committee, said: “I objected to this book being in the school library and I still do. But the limitation is a worthy compromise.”
In October 1985, in Owensboro, Kentucky, parent Carol Roberts protested that "Slaughterhouse Five" was "simply disgusting", referring to passages about atrocities, "magic fingers" [name of the vibrator - A.E. ] and the phrase - "The shell flashed like lightning on the trousers of the Almighty himself." She also prepared a petition that was signed by more than a hundred parents. In November, a meeting was held between the administration, teachers and parents who voted to keep the text in the school library. Judith Edwards, director of the city's education department, said the committee "felt that the book deserved approval." In April 1987, in Lyaree, Kentucky, the District Board of Education refused to remove Slaughterhouse Five from school libraries, despite numerous complaints of profanity and sexual perversion in the book. Director Phil Isen defended the book, stating that it "shows the filth of war": "We don't force them [those who are against the book] to read them [the books in the library]."
In August 1987, Fitzgerald, Georgia, school authorities decided to ban Slaughterhouse Five from all city schools, and to offer similar protections against other "obnoxious" material. The book was banned (6 votes to 5) after Ferize and Maxine Taylor, whose daughter brought the book home, filed a formal complaint in June: "If we don't take action here, they will bring this rubbish into the classroom and we We will put the seal of our approval on him.
In February 1988, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, school board member Gordon Hutchison announced that he wanted to ban Slaughterhouse Five and all books like it, which he called "books with dirty language." His attention was drawn to a complaint by Brenda Forrest, whose daughter had chosen the novel from Central High School's recommended reading list. District Teachers and Parents Association president Beverly Treihan commented on the event: "You could have a very serious problem with book bans." Dick Eike, executive director of the Baton Rouge East Union of Educators, echoed Traichen in defending the book. School Board President Robert Crawford, a Vietnam veteran, agreed with Eike and Treihan, stating, "I think it's dangerous to start banning books. We can clean up the libraries if we want." In March, school superintendent Bernard Weiss said a committee would be set up to evaluate the book. A committee of twelve voted (11 yes, one abstained) to keep the book. Community member Bill Huey stated, “I find it hard to believe this society … in which the removal of books from library shelves can be discussed. I don't want to live in a society that favors bingo and bans books."
"Banned in the USA: A Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public Libraries" mentions a 1991 scathing of "Slaughterhouse Five" in Plummer, Idaho. Parents protested against the use of the book in the 11th grade English Language and Literature program, citing blasphemy. Since the school did not develop a mechanism for such prohibitions, the book was simply withdrawn from the school, and the teacher who used the book in the classroom threw away all copies.
Listen:
Billy Pilgrim is out of time.
Billy went to bed an elderly widower and woke up on the wedding day. He entered the door in 1955 and left the other door in 1941. Then he returned through the same door and found himself in 1964. He says that he saw both his birth and his death many times, and every now and then he fell into various other events of his life between birth and death.
That's what Billy said.
He is thrown in time by jerks, and he has no power over where he will get now, and this is not always pleasant. He is constantly nervous, like an actor before a performance, because he does not know what part of his life he will now have to play.
Billy was born in 1922 in Ilium, New York, the son of a barber. He was a strange boy and became a strange youngster - tall and weak - like a Coke bottle. He graduated from the Ilium gymnasium in the top ten of his class and studied for one semester in the evening courses of optometrists, in the same Ilium, before he was called up for military service: there was a second world war. During this war, his father died hunting. So it goes.
Billy fought in the infantry in Europe - and was captured by the Germans. After demobilization in 1945, Billy again enrolled in optometry courses. In the last semester, he became engaged to the daughter of the founder and owner of the courses, and then fell ill with a slight nervous breakdown.
He was admitted to a military hospital near Lake Placid, treated with electric shock, and was soon discharged. He married his betrothed, graduated from the courses, and his father-in-law got him a job in his business. Ilium is a particularly advantageous location for opticians because the General Steel Company is located there. Each employee of the company is required to have a pair of safety glasses and wear them at work. In Ilium, sixty-eight thousand men served for the company. So, it was necessary to make a lot of lenses and a lot of frames.
Frames are the most money-making business.
Billy got rich. He had two children, Barbara and Robert. Over time, Barbara married, also an optician, and Billy took him into business. Billy's son, Robert, did not study well, but then he entered the famous Green Berets military unit. He recovered, became a handsome young man, and fought in Vietnam.
In early 1968, a group of optometrists, including Billy, hired a special plane from Ilium to an international optometry convention in Montreal. The plane crashed over the Sugarbush Mountains in Vermont. Everyone died except Billy. So it goes.
While Billy was recovering in a Vermont hospital, his wife died from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. So it goes.
After the disaster, Billy returned to Ilium and at first was very calm. He had a monstrous scar across the top of his head. He no longer practiced. The housekeeper took care of him. My daughter came to see him almost every day.
And suddenly, without any warning, Billy went to New York and spoke on an evening program that usually broadcast all sorts of conversations. He told how he got lost in time. He also said that in 1967 he was abducted by a flying saucer. This saucer, he said, came from the planet Tralfamador. And he was taken to Tralfamador and there he was shown naked to visitors to the zoo. There he was mated with a former movie star, also from Earth, named Montana Wildback ...
Some sleepless citizens in Ilium heard Billy on the radio and one of them called his daughter Barbara. Barbara was upset. She and her husband went to New York and brought Billy home. Billy insisted softly but stubbornly that he was telling the truth on the radio. He said he was kidnapped by Tralfamadorians on the day of his daughter's wedding. No one missed him, he explained, because the Tralfamadorians spent him in such a loop of time that he could stay on Tralfamador for years, and be absent from Earth for one microsecond.
Another month passed without incident, and then Billy wrote a letter to the Ilium News, and the paper published the letter. It described creatures from Tralfamador.
The letter said they were two feet tall, green, and shaped like a bleed, the thing plumbers use to bleed pipes. Their suction cups touch the ground, and the extremely flexible rods usually point upwards. Each rod ends in a small hand with a green eye in the palm. The creatures are quite friendly and can see everything in four dimensions. They pity the earthlings because they can only see in three dimensions. They can tell earthlings wonderful things, especially about time. Billy promised to tell in his next letter about many of the wonderful things that the Tralfamadorians had taught him.
When the first letter appeared, Billy was already working on the second. The second letter began like this:
“The most important thing I learned at Tralfamador is that when a person dies, it only seems to us. He is still alive in the past, so it is very stupid to cry at his funeral. All moments past, present and future have always existed and will always exist. Tralfamadorians can see different moments in the same way that we can see the entire Rocky Mountain chain. They see how permanent all these moments are, and they can consider the moment that interests them now. Only we, on Earth, have the illusion that moments go one after another, like beads on a string, and that if a moment has passed, it has passed irrevocably.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a dead body, he thinks that this person is just looking bad at the moment, but he is quite well in many other moments. Now, when I hear that someone has died, I just shrug my shoulders and say, as the Tralfamadorians themselves say about the dead: “That’s the way it is.”
Billy was writing a letter in the basement of his empty house, where all sorts of rubbish was piled up. The housekeeper had a day off. There was an old typewriter in the basement ... Junk, not a typewriter. She weighed more than a heating boiler. Billy couldn't move it anywhere else, so he wrote in a cluttered basement instead of in his room.
The heating boiler has failed. The mouse gnawed through the insulation on the thermostat wire. The temperature in the house dropped to fifty Fahrenheit, but Billy did not notice anything. And he was not dressed too warmly. He sat barefoot, still in his pajamas and dressing gown, although it was getting late. His bare feet were ivory blue.
But Billy's heart burned with joy. It burned because Billy believed and hoped to bring comfort to many people by revealing to them the truth about time. The bell rang endlessly at the front door. His daughter Barbara came. At last she unlocked the door with her key and passed over his head, crying, "Daddy, daddy, where are you?" - etc.
Billy did not respond, and she fell into complete hysterics, deciding that she would now find his corpse. And finally looked into the most unexpected place - in the basement pantry.
Why didn't you answer when I called? Barbara asked, standing at the basement door. In her hand she clutched a copy of the newspaper in which Billy described his acquaintances from Tralfamador.
“I didn’t hear you,” Billy said.
The parts in this orchestra at the moment were distributed as follows: Barbara was only twenty-one years old, but she considered her father to be elderly, although he was only forty-six - elderly, because he was damaged in the brain during a plane crash, And also she thought she was the head of the family because she had to attend to her mother's funeral and then hire a housekeeper for Billy and all that. And besides, Barbara and her husband had to manage Billy's money affairs, and, moreover, quite significant amounts, since Billy had been completely indifferent to money for some time. And because of all this responsibility at such a young age, she became quite a nasty person. Meanwhile, Billy tried to maintain his dignity, to prove to Barbara and everyone else that he had not aged at all and, on the contrary, had devoted himself to a much more important cause than his previous work.
Slaughterhouse Five, or the Children's Crusade
an American of German origin (fourth generation), who now lives in excellent conditions at Cape Cod (and smokes too much), for a very long time he was an American infantryman (non-combatant service) and, having been captured, witnessed the bombing of the German city of Dresden ("Florence on Elbe”) and can tell about it, because he survived. This novel is partly written in a slightly telegraphic-schizophrenic style, as they say on the planet Tralfamador, from where flying saucers appear. World.
Dedicated to Mary O'Hare and Gerhard Müller
Bulls roar.
The calf is mooing.
Awake the Christ Child
But he is silent.
Almost all of this actually happened. In any case, almost everything about the war is true. One of my acquaintances was indeed shot in Dresden for taking someone else's teapot. Another acquaintance actually threatened that he would kill all his personal enemies after the war with the help of hired killers. Etc. I changed all the names.
I actually went to Dresden for a Guggenheim Fellowship (God bless them) in 1967. The city was very much like Dayton, Ohio, only more squares and squares than Danton. Probably, there, in the ground, there are tons of human bones crushed into dust.
I went there with an old fellow soldier, Bernard W. O'Hare, and we became friends with the taxi driver who took us to Slaughterhouse Five, where we POWs were locked up for the night. The taxi driver's name was Gerhard Müller. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans. We asked him how life was under the communists, and he said that at first it was bad, because everyone had to work terribly hard and there was not enough food, clothing, or housing. And now it's much better. He has a cozy apartment, his daughter studies, gets an excellent education. His mother burned to death during the bombing of Dresden. So it goes.
He sent O'Hare a Christmas card, and it read: "Wishing you and your family and your friend a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and hope we meet again in a peaceful and free world, in my taxi, if the occasion pleases."
I really like the phrase "if the case wants."
Terribly reluctant to tell you what this damn little book cost me - how much money, time, worries. When I returned home after the Second World War, twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be very easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, because I only had to tell everything I saw. And I also thought that a highly artistic work would come out, or at least it would give me a lot of money, because the topic is so important.
But I just couldn't think of the right words about Dresden, in any case, they were not enough for a whole book. Yes, the words do not come even now, when I have become an old fart, with familiar memories, with familiar cigarettes and grown-up sons.
And I think how useless all my memories of Dresden are, and yet how seductive it was to write about Dresden. And the old naughty song is spinning in my head:
Some academic assistant
Angry at your instrument:
"He ruined my health,
Capital squandered
But you don’t want to work, impudent!”
And I remember another song:
My name is Ion Johnsen
My home is Wisconsin
In the forest I work here.
Whom I meet;
I answer everyone
Who will ask:
"What is your name?"
My name is Ion Johnsen
All these years, acquaintances often asked me what I was working on, and I usually answered that my main work was a book about Dresden.
So I answered Garrison Starr, the film director, and he raised his eyebrows and asked:
Is the book anti-war?
“Yes,” I said, “it looks like it.
“Do you know what I say to people when I hear that they write anti-war books?
- I do not know. What are you telling them, Harrison Star?
“I tell them: why don’t you write an anti-glacial book instead?
Of course, he meant to say that there will always be warriors and that stopping them is as easy as stopping glaciers. I think so too.
And even if the wars were not even approaching us like glaciers, there would still be an ordinary old woman-death.
When I was younger and working on my notorious Dresden book, I asked an old fellow soldier of mine, Bernard W. O'Hare, if I could come to him. He was the district attorney in Pennsylvania. I was a writer at Cape Cod. In the war, we were ordinary scouts in the infantry. We never hoped for good earnings after the war, but both settled down quite well.
I instructed the Central Telephone Company to find him. They are great at it. Sometimes at night I have these seizures, with alcohol and phone calls. I get drunk and my wife goes to another room because I smell mustard gas and roses. And I, very seriously and elegantly, make a phone call and ask the telephone operator to connect me with one of my friends whom I have long lost sight of.
So I found O'Hare. He is short and I am tall. In the war we were called Pat and Patachon. We were taken prisoner together. I told him on the phone who I was. He immediately believed. He didn't sleep. He was reading. Everyone else in the house was asleep.
“Listen,” I said. I am writing a book about Dresden. Could you help me remember something. Is it possible for me to come to you, to see you, we would have a drink, talk, remember the past.
He showed no enthusiasm. He said that he remembers very little. But still he said: come.
“You know, I think the denouement of the book should be the shooting of that unfortunate Edgar Darby,” I said. “Think of the irony. The whole city is on fire, thousands of people are dying. And then this same American soldier is arrested among the ruins by the Germans for taking a teapot. And they are judged by the whole handicap and shot.
“Hmmm,” said O'Hare.
“Do you agree that this should be the denouement?”
“I don’t understand anything about this,” he said, “this is your specialty, not mine.”
As a specialist in denouements, plots, characterizations, marvelous dialogues, tense scenes and confrontations, I have sketched out the outline of a book about Dresden many times. The best plan, or at any rate the most beautiful plan, I have sketched on a piece of wallpaper.
I took colored pencils from my daughter and gave each character a different color. At one end of the piece of wallpaper was the beginning, at the other end, and in the middle was the middle of the book. The red line met the blue one, and then the yellow one, and the yellow line ended because the hero represented by the yellow line was dying. Etc. The destruction of Dresden was depicted as a vertical column of orange crosses, and all the lines that survived passed through this binding and exited at the other end.
The end where all the lines ended was in a beet field on the Elbe, outside the city of Halle. Lil rain. The war in Europe ended a few weeks ago. We were lined up and Russian soldiers guarded us: English, Americans, Dutch, Belgians, French, New Zealanders, Australians - thousands of former prisoners of war.