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Interviewer
Good morning Mr. Vonnegut! First of all, I would like to thank you for giving me this wonderful opportunity of having to interview you!
Vonnegut
Good morning to you too! It's actually my honor and pleasure to be interviewed by a popular columnist like you. I hope this will not be the last.
Interviewer
Oh certainly Kurt. I am a very good fan of yours. In fact, I have read a lot of your stories and I find them all very interesting. And speaking of which, such is the reason why I am very eager to have this interview with you -- to talk about your masterpiece, if I must say, the Slaughterhouse-Five.
Vonnegut
Great! Thanks for the compliment! Yes, the Slaughterhouse-Five is among the stories I wrote where I guess I spent so many years before I have the "courage," if that's the right word I must use, to start writing the story. This is because, if you might not know yet, the story is actually based from my experiences at war.
Interviewer
That's what I heard. That's why you and your story really awaken my interest concerning how you relate to it. I do believe that the Slaughterhouse-Five would be hard to write if I were in your shoes. But then, we should celebrate because you successfully surpassed the trials of war. Most importantly, I admire that you are able to use such experiences, bitter as they may have been, to bring out the best in you; as it is obvious that you are successful with the Slaughterhouse-Five.
Vonnegut
Oh ... thank you, thank you. There's nothing we can do anyway but to face what we have today and live our present life.
Interviewer
So, tell me Kurt, for the record, what made you write Slaughterhouse-Five?
Vonnegut
Well, you already...
And perhaps, no one would assume that being in the middle of people's and nations' war is a joyful experience ... because it's really, really not; whether you survive from the war, there is always something in that experience that will somehow haunt your memories and your life. And to me, my experiences at war haunted me for years. Until one day, when I woke up, I just realized that I should let go of that bad feeling that used to haunt me. And so, as a way of conquering my fear of my past's memories of war, I started writing the Slaughterhouse-Five.
Interviewer
I see. Though I have not experienced being in a war, I think I do understand your feelings about it. I could only just imagine. And what a good way you used to conquer your fear! It's a method that most psychologists actually recommend. And based on how I see in your aura, I'm sure you are successful using that method. However, while writing the story, did there ever come a time when your fear of your war memories haunted you again? ... Or perhaps because of such fear when you thought that you don't want to finish the story anymore?
Vonnegut
Yes, it did. But lucky for me because it only caused me slight feelings of indifference or fear. No, I did not come to the point of throwing what I had started...I mean the Slaughterhouse-Five. Maybe one reason to this is because I really focused myself on writing the story ... although there is nothing much good that a reader can get from reading a story of massacres, pain, and death.
But focusing on the story helped me a lot because it became an outlet of my fears.
Interviewer
That's good for you! Aside from wanting to conquer you fear of the past, what inspired you to write…
The author even inserts himself as a character throughout key events, such as the latrine at the POW camp and digging in the corpse mines in Dresden. The insertions serve to remind the reader that though fiction, the events described in the novel actually happened, to people like Billy Pilgrim/Kurt Vonnegut. However, Vonnegut also uses several techniques not found in the works of noted memoir writers such as Tobias Wolff
The best evidence for this suffusion in the author's own life is in the final chapter, when the main character/author returns in full force. Traveling peacefully and happily in a plane above Berlin, during a moment he considers "one of the nicest ones in recent times" (Vonnegut, p. 211), removed in time and space from Dresden, Vonnegut "imagined dropping bombs on those lights, those villages and cities and towns," (Vonnegut,
I enjoyed Vonnegut's commentary on the strangeness of humankind's foibles and I was not shocked by some of his matter-of-fact depictions. Indeed, when Vonnegut draws on his own real-life experiences, the novel takes on an air of authenticity. This authenticity coupled with Vonnegut's wry, black humor makes the novel seem caustic and ironic, but at heart it is neither -- it is simply a record of things both real and
Through his experiences and adventures, Billy becomes a symbol more than a mere character. He obviously has more insight into how things truly are, than the rest of the characters in the book. Not accidentally, Billy becomes unstuck in time precisely during the Second World War, hinting thus at the need to escape the imminence of death as a constantly pending menace: "The Tralfamadorians didn't have anything to do
The failed quest of Vonnegut the character underlines another important theme of the novel -- although life may seem 'fated' as Pilgrim perceives it to be, our own perceptions affect how we see our past and reconstruct the past. Our minds are erasers, always writing and rewriting events. Our perception of time is highly personalized. For example, Vonnegut the character is surprised that his old friend Bernard has changed
The critic called Vonnegut "overrated at best" and goes on to say, "Like many inferior novelists, he films better than he reads" (33). On the other hand Peter Reed talks of the novel's depiction of many "grim" and "downright painful" scenes sliced together to sustain the impression of concurrent actions that "intensifies" the interrelationship of events transcending time. The novel conveys an image of life that is not always beautiful,