SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut Everyone, honestly, should (re)read this book.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Listeners, readers, welcome to the Foxed Page, where we dive
deep into the very best books. You'll come away with
a richer understanding of the text at hand, all while
learning to read everything a little better. I'm kimberly Ford,
one time adjunct professor, a Berkeley best selling author, and
PhD in Spanish and French literature. Today I'm really pleased

(00:24):
about the idea of having a book that is this
rich and the opportunity to dive into it with you all.
We always begin with this question of why I read
this book. I read Slaughterhouse five a long, long time
ago and was absolutely taken by it. I am not
a speculative sci fi fiction kind of person, and so
I had always avoided Vonnegut. I also think of him,

(00:45):
you know, this is my thing about like dude books.
I always think of him as being like, very much
like a dude writer. And I hate to gender any
kind of fiction. But I would actually be interested to
see how that breaks down in terms of numbers of readers.
In terms of gender. For Kurt Vonnegut, my guess is
that it would be more men than women. But I
was so happy when I actually did dive in and

(01:06):
got over the science fiction hurdle because this book is
really I mean, there's certainly science fiction elements to it,
but it is so so, so much more. And I
am also going to argue that the way that Vonnegut
uses science fiction and metafiction for that matter, the way
he is doing it, the way that he uses it
as a tool, is absolutely breathtaking. So those of you

(01:29):
who like an agenda, we are going to do a
very very quick Vonnegut bio. Then we're going to dive
into the book and we're going to look very carefully
at the title and some of the frontist matter, meaning
like the dedication, and we're going to look at the
structure of the book because it's extremely important. We're going
to touch on the humor. The jacket blurbs of my
copy call him hilarious but also our finest black humorist

(01:51):
and also the laughing prophet of doom. And honestly, that
last one seems like kind of the best description from
my experience this time reading through the book, I needed
the humor so badly because it was so dark in
so many ways. And that is in many ways the
genius of Vonnegut, that there is this leavening with humor.
So we're going to talk about why the humor works
so well. We're then going to really dig into this

(02:13):
idea of metafiction, and along with that comes the idea
of postmodernism, which those sound like really like lectury kind
of things. But what is so astounding about Kurt Vonnegut
is this book is very metafictive, but it is not
an intellectual exercise and it is not just an example
of like formalist experimentation in literature. This is like he

(02:35):
is again using metafiction in a way that is so
profound and I think unusual to make an incredibly important
statement about war, also about death and mortality and time
and religion. I mean, he is really tackling some very
very large things in this book, and we're going to
take a look at those. We are going to at
that and talk about the end of the book. So

(02:56):
there are spoilers. You could use this I think as
like a like a primer to read before you dive
into the novel. But I'm definitely going to be well,
it's funny, I can't even really say that I'm going
to be like spoiling the plot because a lot of
the plot is announced very early on because of the
incredible structure of the book. But if you're someone who's
worried about, you know, finding out what is going to

(03:17):
happen in this novel, you should probably maybe read it
first and then come back. Okay, we're going to dive
in with this very brief biography of Kurt Vonnegut. He
was born in nineteen twenty two and died in twenty
oh seven, so he's ninety five years old when he died.
He was born in the Midwest, very much in fact,
like the characters in this novel. He enlisted in the

(03:37):
Second World War, and this is very important. He was
captured by the Germans. He was in Dresden during the firebombing,
He did survive in a slaughterhouse, and he did wait,
you know, twenty years or so to write this novel.
So what's important there, of course, is that the entire
novel is playing with this idea of how he is
going to talk about his experience of the Second World War.

(04:00):
What is the form that would even begin to describe
the horror of his experience of being in that fire
bombing of Dresden. Slaughterhouse five was published in nineteen sixty nine,
excellent year year of my birth. It's really interesting, though,
to think about it as an anti war novel that
is coming out right during the Vietnam era, just because
if you think about it being published at that moment,

(04:23):
it's even more first of all, even more powerful, but
in many ways kind of more inflammatory, and part of
me wonders, you know, it took Vanagaet a long time
after the ending of the war to be able to
articulate this, and part of me wonders if there was
some urgency that was developing in the late nineteen sixties
which kind of forced his hand a bit. The book
itself was immediately a success. It's been banned widely for

(04:46):
many different reasons, which is ridiculous. Obviously, it was like
spent I don't know, seventeen weeks on the New York
Times bestseller list right when it came out in nineteen
sixty nine. It won a whole bunch of awards. It's
in Time Magazine's Top one hundred books. It is also
number eighteen on the Modern Library one hundred Best Novels.

(05:06):
So this is a novel that is not only just
an incredible piece of prose fiction and a very experimental
and very effective structured novel, but it's also one that
was extremely popular, and we're going to talk about that.
It has a lot to do with the simplicity of
the prose. It's incredible how his shorter sentences, his very
plain diction, all of that allows the reader to enter

(05:27):
into it really easily, and then he gets to kind
of slip in all of this experimental stuff, also all
of these very important messages while the reader is kind
of lulled by the plainness of the prose and also
by the humor. I will say I am with a
bunch of twenty year olds right now, and my niece
mentioned that she had read it in high school, and

(05:47):
I was like, what, because part of me is like,
I just don't understand that as part of the high
school curriculum in twenty twenty. I mean, I am all
for people reading this book at all ages. She did
say that no one liked it, which that is the
risk that you run when you have young people read
a book that is in fact a very adult in
many ways, and also, you know, pretty difficult, and I
think it can be difficult. She said, everyone was so

(06:09):
confused and no one knew what was happening. I actually though,
I was kind of shocked that no one liked it,
And I also just like, wonder, what is happening to
the youth? Are they no longer reading? It's a crisis
for me, but I just try to pretend. Like many
other crises, I just try to block it out. Speaking
of gender, though, I will say that they are a
bunch of twenty year olds who I've talked to about Vonnegut.
These are these young lads in the book club in

(06:31):
New York City. They love Vonnegut. I suggested this book
when they were thinking about reading some other things, and
they all were like, oh, obviously we already read that book,
and they're huge fans. So perhaps the people that my
niece was talking about in her class who didn't like it,
maybe it was the young women. We're now going to
dive into the text. So anyone who's listening to the
fox page in order to become a better reader, you

(06:52):
all know that I resist the idea of anybody needing
to learn to read better. But I do understand the
idea of wanting to read more richly and wanting to
get the most out of what you are reading. The
simple advice of course, is to slow down and pay attention.
If you are reading writing that is worth its salt,
it will really really pay dividends to just focus a
bit more on smaller details. The title of the book,

(07:13):
of course, is not a small detail, but there are
details about it that I think get lost and that
are very much worth our while. So on the cover
of my paperback edition it simply says Slaughterhouse five. But
if you open the book, you have the title page,
and on that title page, if you're on the YouTube,
I'm holding it up for you with all of my
weird marks all over it. It's actually very lovely looking

(07:35):
the way that it is printed on the page. But
what we have is this Slaughterhouse five or the Children's Crusade,
a duty dance with death. So we're going to parse
this just a tiny bit. Of course, Slaughterhouse five stands
for the American's address when they are taken prisoners of
war by the Germans at the end of World War II,

(07:58):
So this would be a time in the war the
Germans were pushing. It was their final push, and they
were all at the front, but they were sending all
of the prisoners back into the center of Germany. I
did not realize that the bombing of Dresden was particularly
horrible because it didn't have any munitions and it wasn't
like a place where they were manufacturing a lot of
war goods. It was really very much just like this

(08:19):
beautiful city, which obviously makes the whole thing more harrowing.
So one of the most important things about the main title,
Slaughterhouse five is that we do know it is in
the history records that in fact Kurt Vonnegut, our author,
survived the fire bombing in a slaughterhouse, as did Billy Pilgrim.
So this is one of these places where we have

(08:40):
this congruence between the author and our protagonist that really
adds to the urgency and the profundity of this novel.
And it's really striking that we have it right at
the beginning. Any title of any novel obviously is going
to focus your attention, and there are many reasons why
it's important here, in part because a slaughterhouse obviously is
speaking about senseless slaughter. It's also this real perversion of domesticity,

(09:04):
like a house is somewhere that you should be safe,
so a slaughterhouse is really a place that should be
safe and absolutely is not. It's also ironic, and it
really speaks to the illogic nature of war that these
prisoners of war would be saved because they are in
fact in a slaughterhouse. But the part of the title
that's a little bit less clear is this idea of

(09:24):
the children's Crusade. It is one that doesn't get talked about.
When my niece mentioned it, she did not say, oh,
Slaughterhouse five or the Children's Crusade. And it's a little sad.
Although lots of subtitles do not get full billing. But
what I do like about it is we have some
very clear mentions of why the book is called the
Children's Crusade. So I want to look very quickly at

(09:45):
pages eighteen and nineteen. This is in the beginning of
the book when we have our narrator visiting with his
friend who was someone he had served within the war.
He's with his friend O'Hair at O'Hare's house. It's very
interesting to me that he always re first to miss O'Hara.
It seems like very like military kind of thing. But
his wife, Mary gets very angry and finally tells them

(10:07):
why she is upset. And here's what she says. Then
she turned to me, let me see how angry she was,
and that anger was for me. She had been talking
to herself, so what she said was fragments of a
much larger conversation. You were just babies. Then she said
what I said, you were just babies in the war,
like the ones upstairs. I nodded that this was true.

(10:29):
We had been foolish virgins in the war right at
the end of childhood. But you're not going to write
it that way, are you. This wasn't a question, it
was an accusation. I don't know, I said, well, I know.
She said, you'll pretend you were men instead of babies,
and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra
or John Wayne or some of those other glamorous war loving,

(10:50):
dirty old men, and war will look just wonderful. So
we'll have a lot more of them, and they'll be
fought by babies like the babies upstairs. And here's a
very crucial I mean, we are on page eighteen of
the book and we're having clearly this very anti war message.
So then I understood it was war that made her
so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's

(11:11):
babies killed in wars, and she thought wars were partly
encouraged by books and movies. I'm going to interject right
there and say that I'm very happy that I think
these days a lot of movies that we see are
not in fact celebratory of war, and in fact really
speak to the horror of it. But then what we
have here is this really excellent kind of metafictive moment
which reads this. So I held up my right hand

(11:34):
and I made a promise Mary. I said, I don't
think this book of mine is ever going to be finished.
I must have written five thousand pages by now and
thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it,
though I give you my word of honor, there won't
be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne. I'll
tell you what I said. I'll call it the Children's Crusade.
She was my friend after that. So what we have

(11:58):
here is this like punctuation of the text of the novel.
We're reading a chapter of the novel. This is not
a preface, it's not a forward. It's the first chapter
of the novel. And yet we have this vision of
the author of the novel. Talking about the title of
the book. We're going to talk a little later about metafiction,
but what this is doing is already playing with this
idea of how is it that an author is going

(12:21):
to represent war in a way that is horrible enough
to be I mean, it's not an accurate representation of
his experience, but maybe like an emotionally accurate one. Obviously,
this book is very anti war, and it's bigger than
that in lots of ways. Again, it talks about mortality,
it talks about fate, it talks about religion, talks about love,
all sorts of different things. But this subtitle is very important.

(12:44):
So we haven't mentioned there in that first chapter when
we have our stand in for Kurt Vonnegut, the author
of the book, but it also comes up in the
text of the novel itself. So on page one thirty five,
this is when we have Derby, the character Derby, who's
one of the people who Billy Pilgrim is in the
war with. And this Derby guy is much older. He's

(13:04):
forty five years old, and all the rest of them
are like eighteen. And when Derby first sees them all,
this is what he says. This is Derby talking to
an English colonel. Derby told him he was forty five,
which was two years older than the colonel. The colonel
said that the other Americans had all shaved now that
Billy and Derby were the only two still with beards,
And he said, you know, we've had to imagine the

(13:27):
war here, and we've imagined that it was being fought
by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars
were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces,
it was a shock. My god, my god, I said
to myself. It's the Children's Crusade. So here we have
this beautiful echo of this subtitle. We also have like

(13:47):
a long digression at one point about the actual crusades,
the Christian Crusades, and about the Children's Crusade. But it
is very deftly woven not only into the title, like
not only is our I mean hopefully not only is
our attention focused on it because of the title, but
again because we have this whole backstory with Mary O'Hare
and we know why in fact it's called that. And

(14:08):
then we have this other idea that the title of
the book is a really accurate reflection of these babies
of these young young men who were actually fighting the
Second World War. And just when you thought we were
going to dive further into the text, I want to
talk about the rest of this really involved and very
kind of fruitful title page here. So we have Slaughterhouse

(14:29):
five or The Children's Crusade, A Duty Dance with Death.
I have to say that I did not dive into
that fully and I actually didn't see any resonances. I mean,
obviously the duty Dance with Death that describes the whole
entire thing, but I did not see it written verbatim
in the rest of the text. But then we have
by Kurt Vonnegut Junior. And this is the interesting part.

(14:53):
To me. This is highly unusual. I mean, usually when
you have the biography of the author, it's set apart
with a little photo and it's kind of a little
blurby kind of paragraph and it basically says like maybe
where they live, and maybe a bunch of awards that
they have won or whatever. But in this case we
have it folded into the title. It's really if we
are paying attention, it really should be standing out in

(15:14):
a very different way, and in fact, a very important
way that is really talking about the positionality of this author.
The author, Kurt Vonnegut, is really wanting us to know
a bunch of stuff about him, because it does make
the way that he involves himself in the book way
more resonant. So what we have is this by Kurt Vonnegut, Junior,
a fourth generation German American now living in easy circumstances

(15:37):
on Cape cod and smoking too much, who, as an
American infantry scout or to combat as a prisoner of war,
witnessed the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, the Florence of the
Elbe a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale.
This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic, schizophrenic manner

(15:58):
of Tales of the planet trel Falmador, where flying saucers
come from. Peace. Okay, I mean obviously I cannot get
enough of the fact that he ends with that word peace.
We have this whole description period and then peace. And
for those of you on the YouTube, you can even
see that it's set off in a way that makes
it very powerful. It's the last word we are expected

(16:19):
to read on this page. But one of the things
that was really striking to me here is that he's
talking about being a German American, which really struck me
in this read, because I think he's really trying to
erode all of these differences. I mean, I think we
can all agree, especially with all of the global conflict
that's happening these days, that people are not that different.
I mean, culturally people can be very different, but that

(16:41):
we are all human beings, and that national lions are
often very arbitrary. It's also very interesting and important that
we have this kind of detail here that he was
in fact in the fire bombing of Dresden, and he
reiterates the fact that it's in Germany. And then this
idea that is the Florence of the Elbe speaks to
the idea of it being a very important and sort

(17:03):
of artistic and very culturally beautiful city and not one
that's like producing all of the munitions for the war.
And then lastly we have the part about the telegraphic
schizophrenic style of the Trelfamadorians. And this is a hugely
important thing. We're going to talk about the structure of
the book. Very famously, Billy Pilgrim is loose in time.
He is going back and forth in time, and one

(17:25):
of the things that happens in his life that we
learn about, you know, sort of ind not random, definitely
not random, but we in seemingly random chunks throughout the
novel is we realize that he has been held captive
on the planet of Trelfamidor Trelfalmidor. And actually a bunch
of these characters appear again in other works by Kurt Vonnegut.

(17:46):
And I mentioned before that I'm not like a huge
sci fi person, but this was so clear to me,
and it's very effective. I think that what he is doing,
in part with the idea of Trelfamidor and this idea
of this other planet, this alien planet, is to provide
us a totally different cosmology and a totally different philosophy,
and a totally different sense of time and sexuality and

(18:09):
violence and death. So if you're going to sit down
and you're going to write a book about a horrible,
unimaginable war experience, and you are a very generous writer,
you might in fact try to provide some kind of
solace and maybe some kind of alternative way to look
at the horror of the war. So one of the
things that Chile Fahmador does is it gives us a

(18:31):
vision of a different way to live, which obviously throws
into contrast all of the ways that the way that
Americans live, and it's really asking us to look at
some of the things that we really take for granted.
And so right from the start we have this introduction
of this science fiction element that I would argue is crucial,
not because of the sort of daring nature of the

(18:52):
speculative part or the shock value of it, but just
because of this idea of a place that believes in
different things that might be helpful for humans also to
think about. Okay, very briefly, we have the dedication for
Mary O'Hare and Gerhard Mueller. And this is very interesting
too because here we have the dedication, and I think
we can all agree that when an author is dedicating

(19:14):
a book to someone, that person is a real person.
And so what Vonnugut is doing here is very subtle,
but it's actually very important. When we dive into that
very first paragraph where we are invited to conflate our
narrator and our author, we are very much invited to
see Kurt Vonnegut as our author and our narrator in
that first chapter and the inclusion here of Mary O'Hare,

(19:35):
the idea that he is going to dedicate this book
to a real person, is a way that we can
confirm in fact that the first chapter of the novel
is like a true story. We also have Gerhard Mueller,
who was the taxi driver who drove them around in Dresden,
which is to my mind slightly less significant, also because
obviously Mary O'Hare is one of the main kind of

(19:58):
anti war voices in the book. Then we move on
and we have this kind of gut wrenching and actually
very christmasy epigraph. The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes,
but the little Lord Jesus no crying, he makes So
there is a lot of religion in this book in
many ways. I think you can read Billy Pilgrim, who

(20:19):
is a pilgrim who is making a pilgrimage. Again, you
just got to pay attention, hear people and things jump
out at you when you have a writer as good
as Vonnegut. So we have this guy who is a pilgrim,
but we also have this idea of being somewhat unable
to emote significantly. The only time that Billy Pilgrim does

(20:39):
cry is when he sees the suffering of the horses.
But right at the beginning we have this very important
inclusion of religion. I mean, gosh, I am sure that
there are people who've written like gigantic dissertations about religion.
In this book, I think we are invited to see
Billy Pilgrim as a Jesus figure, but we are also
invited to see him as someone who has experienced alien travel.

(20:59):
Perhaps that is one of the statements that he is
trying to make, that we have a certain cosmology that
has to do with sacrifice and mortality and death and
heaven and hell versus this chilth fomad Orian vision of death.
So one of the things we do here at the
Fox Page in order to really understand a text better
is to take a close look at like the first
line or the first paragraph, because if especially in a

(21:21):
challenging text, the first paragraph or the first line will
really help you understand where you want to focus your attention,
what kind of narrator you're dealing with, what kind of
registers are going to be employed. And I would argue
that the first chapter, because it is this kind of
nonfiction thing it's kind of like a preface in many ways.
In some ways it acts as a frame. This is
when we have Kurt Vonnegut visiting Bernardo Hair. So in

(21:44):
some ways we have this beginning to the first chapter,
and then the second through ninth chapters are all told
from are all removed a little bit more. I mean,
you would argue, in fact that it is still Kurt Vonnegut,
and that our author has sort of become this narrator.
And in fact, there are lots of intrusions throughout where
Kurt Vonnuguet will say that was me. There'll be another

(22:05):
soldier near Billy Pilgrim, and that other soldier will be
doing something, notably shitting his brains out, which is one
of the things that happens, and then we will have
these incredible intrusions where the narrator will say that was me.
So we have our narrator author introducing himself and giving
us the frame in the first chapter, and then that
narrator takes a bit of a step back and really

(22:27):
is telling the story of Billy Pilgrim. I think there's
some people who want to conflate Kurt Vonnugut and Billy
Pilgrim he has spoken in fact about how Billy Pilgrim
is modeled on someone that he knew in the war.
And I think also, if you're a careful reader and
you have these little intrusions, and you note the fact that,
like Kurt Vonnugut slash, our narrator is intruding, you can

(22:48):
see that Vonnegut is in fact trying to create some distance.
I think that very firmly, Billy Pilgrim is our protagonist,
and I like the distance between the two. I think
it's one of the reasons why things work so well.
So on page one, at the very beginning of the
first chapter, we have this very meta kind of beginning
to the book. All this happened more or less. The

(23:10):
war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I
knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot
that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten
to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after
the war, and so on. I've changed all the names
so that one thing that I really love about the

(23:31):
beginning here is this idea that it is true all
this happened. And then there's this qualifier. All this happened
more or less, and then we say, the war parts,
anyway are pretty much true. So he's speaking in the
beginning in this way that I really love about the
impossibility of having things be like true. I mean, I think,
for everyone's intents and purposes, these things are true. These

(23:53):
are facts that happened to him. But we also know
that the human memory is fallible. But obviously from this
we get the sense that he is wanting us to
understand that this stuff is true. And when he says
the war parts are true, they really, in many ways
are the most crucial part. We have lots of stuff
about Billy Pilgrim's life after the war, his life before
the war, his life on Chreal Falmador. But I think

(24:15):
the things that are most affecting and most crucial in
the book are the war parts. So we have these
two examples, the guy who was shot in Dresden, and
then the other guy who's going to hire the gunman
after the war, and then we have this and so on.
So what he's inviting us to do there is to
think of all the other things that are like these
other horrible things that happened in the war. So we

(24:37):
have this way that he's kind of dilating. He's giving
us two examples and then dilating the moment so that
we are invited to think of all of the other
things that are terrible that might have happened, which is
this huge thing, and then masterfully he brings it right
back down by saying, I've changed all the names. So
we have this very like big kind of way that

(24:58):
the book is expanding. And then he and this is
so vulnugant because then he brings it back down in
this very clear, very sparse and very practical kind of way.
I've changed all the names. So I want to move
from there to the opening of the second chapter, which
in some ways is like a second opening of the novel.
So on page twenty nine we have this listen, Billy

(25:23):
Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. So this is so crucial.
First of all, we have this listen, and that is
this idea. Well, it's so masterful. That's direct address. So
this is our narrator directly addressing the reader and saying,
like you listen. And anytime we have direct address, this
could be a very subconscious thing for most readers. What

(25:43):
we have there is ourselves being brought into the novel.
So when a narrator says something like hey, listen, you
really do have a sense that they are speaking directly
and intimately to you. And then we have this really
intriguing beginning. Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. So
one of the things that's happening that's important there is

(26:05):
that's the present progressive. So this is something that is
still happening. It's not Billy Pilgrim was unstuck in time.
It is Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. So
that idea that it is still happening is important because
the book is really playing with the idea of time.
And of course, if you are paying attention to the
treelthalmidor parts, you know in fact that time that every

(26:28):
single thing that is happening is still in fact happening.
And then we have a paragraph that's going to really
I mean again, if you're really wanting to understand something
and get the most out of it, a paragraph like
this third one at the beginning of chapter two, which
is really I think in some ways the beginning of
the novel. He's going to tell us what is happening
and how we are supposed to read this book that
is not structured in the way most novels are. So

(26:50):
we have this third paragraph. Billy has gone to sleep,
a seen now widower, and awakened on his wedding day.
He was walked through a door in nineteen fifty five
and come out another in nineteen forty one. He has
gone back through that door to find himself in nineteen
sixty three. He has seen his birth and death many times,
he says, and pays random visits to all the events

(27:13):
in between. He says, I find this so moving. There's
something about the tentative nature of this, like all of
the things that are being presented to us in this
novel have these kind of qualifiers. And I think, again,
when I consider the science fiction element of this book,
one of the ways that it's most interesting for me

(27:33):
to think about is it's kind of a metaphor. So
this idea of becoming loose in time and moving around
in time the way that he does. In many ways,
it's just sort of a way to conceive of how
humans think about the past. I mean, in many ways,
our past lives and even people who have died, those
things are still very vivid for us, and they are
in fact, constantly intruding on our present moment. There's also

(27:58):
a way that Vonnagut here when he's saying he says,
is aligning a little bit with the reader and saying like, Okay,
this is what this guy, Billy Pilgrim says about his experience,
and you and I narrator and reader are in it together,
and we're both sort of like, Okay, that's what he's saying,
but we're going to have to think a little bit
about how to understand it all. So now that we've

(28:19):
read these opening paragraphs, I want to talk for a
minute about the structure of the book. We're not going
to dive into this too deeply, but what he is
doing is crucial. So I want to briefly talk about postmodernism.
So in literature, we have realism, which was the latter
half of the nineteenth century, so sort of eighteen fifteen
to nineteen ten. That is, I mean, most novels today

(28:39):
that we read are in the realist tradition. You have
an omniscient narrator, Things are chronological, You are looking at
things mostly from the outside. Things are being reported to you.
This happened and then that happened, and the way that
the world functions in these novels is relatively similar to
the way that our world actually functions. So after World
War One, famously, a bunch of people T. S. Eliot,

(29:03):
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf. They had this very strong literary reaction,
which was this idea that they needed to find a
new way to talk about reality because in some ways
it had been shattered. So what you had was this
focus on the interiority, a focus on feelings, a focus
on how people were perceiving things, not this kind of
realist idea of looking at things from the outside. All

(29:26):
of a sudden, things got very fragmentary. And I think
if you just think about all of that modernist literature
as being like a little difficult to understand and a
little opaque and a little demanding, that's because the idea
of conceiving of what was happening in the world was
also all of those things. So then we have postmodernism,
and in terms of literature, it's mostly in the sixties

(29:47):
and seventies, so there's a little bit of a gap there.
I think we kind of just basically went back to
realism but the postmodernist novel does share some things with modernism. One,
you have this idea of formal experimentation. So in much
the same way that Virginia Wolf would play with time,
we have this idea of things being fragmented and nonlinear

(30:07):
in time. We also have a real focus on the
interior perception. And one thing that postmodernism does that we
don't have as much of in modernism is we have
this idea of thinking about the thing that we are reading.
This is that meta part. So meta anything just means
that it is self referential. It is something that is
referring to itself. So when we are holding this book

(30:29):
and we have this conversation of a character who is
in the book in chapter one, when he is having
a conversation with Mary O'Hare and he's like, Okay, when
I write my book, I'm going to call it the
Children's Crusade, And the book you are holding in your
hand is called the Children's Crusade. That is an example
of self referential literature because the creation of the thing
is being described in the thing. And one of the

(30:51):
main ways that we see it in Vonnegut is all
throughout you have the narrator who we are invited to
conflate with, Kurt Vonnegut. We have him popping up and
reminding us every time he appears next to Billy Pilgrim
that someone is writing this, that there is someone who
is a real person who experienced many of the same
things that Billy Pilgrim also experienced. So if you take

(31:14):
one thing away from this lecture, I hope it would
maybe be this thing, which is that a lot of
times postmodernist literature and a lot of times like metafictive literature,
can just be kind of like an intellectual exercise, And frankly,
I really like that in a lot of ways. Sometimes
it's just like a puzzle, and it can be very
satisfying to think about it and to be forced to
kind of understand it. But what Vonnegutt is doing here,

(31:37):
I think is so much more important. What he is
doing is taking this idea of metafiction, this idea of
the intrusion of the author and the fragmentation and all
of the ways that this book is not just a
straightforward linear novel, and almost at every single turn we
are reminded that this horrific experience that Billy Pilgrim is
having is very much the same, if not exactly this

(32:00):
as someone named Kurt Vonnegut. So every single time we
have you know, it's a novel, it's a piece of fiction,
and yet the savvy reader is going to see that
it really, truly is not that emotionally, all of these
things are true because they were experienced by our author.
So instead of just having those intrusions feel kind of

(32:20):
like experimental and interesting, they're reinforcing the idea that this
war is real and that was experienced by someone who
is you know, walking the earth and someone who really
had to struggle to find a way to talk about
something that was so terrible. Okay, I want to make
one last comment about the structure before we move on.
So we have this very important way that the first

(32:43):
chapter of the book, because they are told by our narrator,
but because they are woven into the text, they're inviting
us to see Kurt Vonnegut, who is a real person.
They're inviting us to see that this experience is one
that he had. It's a novel, but it's real. So
that is interesting enough. But then this idea of Billy
Pilgrim as being unstuck in time and this idea of

(33:03):
the novel itself as being super fragmented and as being
not at all like the normal novel is also crucial
because this idea of this structure has been kind of
absurd and kind of senseless and kind of unmored and
kind of like upsetting in some ways. All of the
jarring nature and all of the confusion of it really

(33:24):
ought to signal to you as a reader that this
is the experience of what it's like to be in
a war. So this idea of using formal experimentation. When
I say formal experimentation, I just mean they're experimenting with form.
It's an author who is writing not again just sort
of a linear novel, but is writing something different. The
idea here of having this being kind of disorienting, little confusing,

(33:46):
all of that is to say that this is the
experience not only of someone in the war, but also
of someone after the war. So structurally it's just an
incredible feat. And before we move on to humor, I
just want to weigh in on this big debate. So
there's this very robust debate. I mean, it's not quite
so robust anymore, probably, but a lot of people have
put a lot of time into this question of like,

(34:07):
is the experience of being unstuck in time, the experience
with charl falmandor all of the science fiction elements of
the book. Is that all a hallucination on the part
of Billy Pilgrim, or is it in fact that Billy
Pilgrim is actually having these experiences. So of course people
argue this in all sorts of different ways. The people

(34:27):
who are arguing that this is all, you know, a
PTSD thing, and that Billy Pilgrim is just hallucinating these experiences,
they speak to the fact that at one point Billy
Pilgrim puts himself into a hospital so like a mental
breakdown situation. They would have called it shell shock or
battle fatigue or whatever back in the day, but the
sense that he would have been in a position where

(34:49):
he might have kind of like dreamed up this whole
experience of going to another planet. People also argue that
because there are a bunch of elements that are in
like the real part of the story, Like we see
Montana wild Hack, who's the sex worker that he ends
up with on trelfamidor there's one of her tapes I
think is in one of the pornography shops off of

(35:11):
Times Square. We have a bunch of different elements that
are in like Billie Pilgrim's real actual life on Earth,
and so people argue that those things are all woven
into this idea of his life on Trelfamador, essentially the
life that being on the other planet never happened, but
that he just dreamed it up and weaved in all
of these different elements that we see in the normal

(35:33):
part of the narration. And then there are people, all
the sci fi people who argue that like his experience
on Trelfamodor actually happened within the scope of the novel.
And I find this debate so silly, because honestly, both
of those things are happening. I mean, you, you as
the reader, are experiencing him on Trelfamador with Montana wild Hack.
You are also experiencing him, you know, in the pornography

(35:56):
shop seeing one of her tapes. So really both of
those things, I mean, you can are you it in
both ways essentially, And furthermore, it's just not important. I mean,
this persing of the mechanics of this trip to Trelfalmidor
and whether or not we are meant to believe that
it's actually part of what happens to Billy Pilgrim in
the novel does not matter. I think that what we

(36:16):
should be focusing on more is what it is that
Trelfalmidor is representing, whether it is a hallucination or an
actual experience. And I'm not going to repeat everything I
said at the beginning, but I think in many ways
it is meant to provide a completely different blueprint for
how we can think about life and suffering and love
and sexuality and time. So it really doesn't matter to

(36:38):
me whether in fact it was a hallucination or an
actual trip into space. So we're going to move on
and talk a little bit about the humor in the book.
And part of the reason I want to do this
is just because it's such a joy to dip into
the prose and to see how smart and how complicated
and yet very simple all of the work is. So
on page one thirty four, this is when Bill is

(37:00):
he's taken. He's a prisoner of war at this point.
Now the head Englishman came into the hospital to check
on Billy. He was an infantry colonel captured at Dunkirk.
It was he who had given Billy morphine. There wasn't
a real doctor in the compound, so the doctoring was
up to him. How's the patient, he asked Derby dead

(37:21):
to the world, but not actually dead no, which I
honestly just thought that was so funny. It's so dark,
and it also is doing all kinds of work. So
we have this idea of just the kind of desperate
nature of the war. I mean, this is someone who's like,
he's not a doctor and yet he's giving people morphine
and he's having to do all the doctoring. And then

(37:41):
we have, of course, what he means there when he
says dead to the world is this expression that he's
like passed out, like he's asleep, and then this very
very dead pan reaction to that when Derby says dead
to the world but not actually dead no. So we
have this exchange that's very dry, and that's kind of
trafficking both in death but also in humor, and also
actually kind of makes you think a little bit about

(38:03):
sleep and death. It's one of these things that slightly
thought provoking. And this is the kind of humor I mean,
it's not like haha, laugh out loud funny. It's not slapstick.
It's not just like over the top. It's very clever,
and it's almost always very dark. But these are points
that I really needed some leavening and was very happy
that we had these these clever moments that are very funny.
So on page one forty eight, so this is actually

(38:25):
when Billy is on Trialfalmidor, and there's a long paragraph
of Billy saying all of these different things, and the
very last line of that paragraph, I'm going to read
that and then the following part. So tell me the
secret so I can take it back to Earth and
save us all. How can a planet live at peace?
Billy felt that he had spoken soaringly. He was baffled

(38:45):
when he saw the trial Falmadorians close their little hands
on their eyes. He knew from past experience what this meant.
He was being stupid. So in many ways this is
very sad, but there is something about and again this
is like my favorite kind of speculative fiction, This idea
that they're that the Trelfalmadorians are shaped like plumbers helpers,

(39:06):
and that they have like a little hand at the top,
and that the eye in the middle you can see
them like closing their little fingers over their eyes, just like,
oh my gosh, like shaking their heads kind of, but
they don't have heads. This reminded me so much of
George Saunders. If you have not read The Brief and
Frightening Rain of phil you absolutely must read that. But
folded into this kind of like light and kind of
humorous little description of these aliens is this idea, like

(39:29):
he has this very it's the most important question in
the whole entire book. How can a planet live in peace?
It's it's huge, it's like the whole crux of the novel.
And then we have these little aliens just being like what,
like we can't tell you that humans on Earth will
never be able to do that. And then we have
this kind of the kicker at the end, like he
thinks he's spoken soaringly. They do their like little eye

(39:51):
closing thing, and then he was being stupid, which is
both like so sad and so kind of defeated, but
also funny because it is so plain and in some
ways kind of juvenile and excellent. This next example of
humor that I'm gonna read is like a little bit
crude on a little bit part of why I think
of this as kind of like a dude book in
some ways, but it's doing a bunch of really important work. Okay.

(40:15):
So on one sixty eight, this is when the treelfa
Medorians have brought Montana wild Hack to live with Billy
Pilgrim in the zoo. On the alien planet. Montana was
under heavy sedation. Trelfamadorians, wearing gas masks, brought her in,
put her on Billy's yellow lounge chair withdrew through the airlock.

(40:36):
The vast crowd outside was delighted. All attendance records for
the zoo were broken. Everybody on the planet wanted to
see the Earthlings mate. Montana was naked, and so was Billy.
Of course he had a tremendous whang. Incidentally, you never
know who'll get one, so I thought that was funny.
But I also want to speak about the important things

(40:57):
that are happening here. So part of the reason why
this book is so charming is because it is so
grounded in reality. This idea of the yellow lounge chair
really speaks in many ways to kind of the mundane
nature of everything that is happening, both in terms of
all of these incredibly important details of the war that

(41:18):
Billy is experiencing also the details of his regular life.
The fact that he's an optometrist. I mean, on one hand,
that seems just like kind of like a very like
mundane thing to be. But if you are a careful
reader and you step back, you will think about the
fact that an optometrist is someone who helps people see
It's someone who clarifies things for people. I mean, it

(41:38):
is the perfect thing if you're writing an anti war
book to have someone who's like the protagonist who's had
this horrible experience, you know, actually cannot articulate it, but
having him trying to help people see reality. It's so
I mean, there is nothing in this book that is
not well thought through. So the other thing that's interesting
to me here is this speaks to the prose styling

(42:01):
of Kurt Vonnegut. He's unbelievably good just at writing. So
here's the sentence. Quickly, trelf Allmadorian's wearing gas masks, brought
her in, put her on Billy's yellow lounge chair with
drew through his airlock. So what we have here this
is not a run on sentence, even though it kind
of sounded just like three phrases all stuck together. We

(42:22):
have a semi coolon between the second and third phrases,
they put her on Billy's yellow lounge chair, semiicalon withdrew
through the airlock. I mean it is a fragment because
there is no subject in that second part. But normally
you would have like an ant here they did this,
they did that, and they withdrew through the airlock. But
he is taking it out in part to make us

(42:43):
pay a little more attention and to see that these
things are kind of very mechanized. On the part, they're
just like doing their things. It's very much like they
have this list of how they're going to handle these people.
But in other parts of the book we have something
called polysyndaton. There's a lot of it where he uses
extra ants. So it would be that Billy Pilgrim did
this and did that and did the next thing, and

(43:03):
what that does he does it with or too. It's
so I mean, it seems like a minor thing, but
this is an example of I mean, I could talk
for hours and hours about the quality of the prose
when you have polysyndatin like that, that repetition of and
instead of using commas, it slows everything down. It also
makes everything feel on par with everything else. You don't

(43:25):
have a sense of like one of those things being
more important than the others. It's a really very subtle, obviously,
but very effective way to convey what it is he
is trying to get across. I wasn't going to read
this last example of humor, but I'm going to because
it rests largely on the fact that Vonaguet is using
excellent italicized italicization. You can't say that he's using excellent italics.

(43:48):
So this is when we have Paul Lazarro, who is
a very important character in many ways. He is in
fact the person who is responsible for Billy Pilgrim's death.
He also is this very important link between Billy Pilgrim's
future and that terrible moment when they're in the car
when the other soldier whose name is totally escaping me,
when he is dying, and he's the one who wants

(44:10):
the revenge. So paul A Czarrow is just like a
really tough guy, and we have this conversation between him
and Billy. So importantly, I'm going to interject this right now.
Billy is he's so he's he's been called an innocent
and a lot of different literature about this book, and
he absolutely is that he's not armed. He comes as
like the chaplain's assistant, like he's just so so much

(44:33):
kind of sacrificing himself, and the whole time when they're
when they're trying to escape, he basically just keeps trying
to give up and give up and give up. So
the idea of this of this very innocent person in
contrast to someone like Paula Czarro is striking. So paul
A Czarro starts speaking, I went past where they had
the dog tied up. He wanted to bite me again.

(44:53):
I said to him, come on, doggie, let's be friends.
Let's not be enemies anymore. I'm not mad he believed me.
He did, So that's the he did part is an
italics that did part. And there are many things that
are important here, obviously, this discussion of enemies and how
Paul Lazarro is trying to sort of not be enemies,
even with a dog. But then this idea that the
dog believed him, and the fact that Billy Pilgrim is

(45:15):
so kind of baldly saying like he did be what
he's saying, of course, is that Paul Alzzarrow is a
really terrible dude, but we see a certain boldness here
with Billy Pilgrim. It's also so important because he is
having this conversation with the man who is ultimately going
to be responsible for his death, which importantly happens outside
the scope of the novel. So we have that italics

(45:36):
right there, and then two pages later, on one seventy nine,
we have excellent other we have another set of excellent italics.
This is when Derby is talking to Lazarro. Lazarro said
that he could have anybody in the world killed for
one thousand dollars plus traveling expenses. He had a list
in his head. He said, it's so funny, the thousand
dollars plus traveling expenses. The mundane nature of that and

(45:59):
the kind of pragmat pragmatic part is so funny to me.
And then Derby asked him who all was on the list,
and Lazaro said, just make fucking sure you don't get
on it. You there is italicized. Just don't cross me,
that's all. There was a silence, and then he added,
and don't cross my friends. You have friends. Derby wanted

(46:21):
to know which that is part is so funny too,
again because Derby's being so upfront about it, but like
it's unexpected in this case because we already had a beat.
So he's like, don't cross me, that's all. Then there's
kind of a beat and then he says and don't
cross my friends. And then the comedic timing there is
so good because you're expecting that to be the end,
the way the cadence works, and then we have Derby

(46:42):
saying you have friends. It's just so it's a funny
and kind of light way to speak to just like
the horror of this guy Paul Lazaro, who truly who
just the page before literally said that revenge is the
best thing in life. This humor is working so hard.
So I want to talk about this idea of fatal
and this idea of how freeing fatalism can be, and

(47:04):
then we're going to talk about the close of the novel.
So one of the things that the structure does is
show us that Billy Pilgrim has no control. He is
totally not in control of what is going to happen
to him next, and that, to the careful reader, should
be a metaphor for life in general, if you are
someone who is very fatalistic, and when I say fatalistic,
I simply mean that it's like with fate, like that

(47:27):
the way that your life is going to go is
the way it's going to go, and that essentially you
don't really have free will, You don't have any way
to actually affect what is coming at you. And if
you think for one second about a young person being
in a war, you can certainly imagine how you would
get to have that sense that you do not have control,
you have no idea what's going to happen next, you
really can't do anything about it, and that people will

(47:50):
make up all sorts of different ways to sort of
handle the idea that you don't, in fact have a
lot of control. So we have the structure mimicking that,
but we also have this it's very cool way in
which the Trilfalmadorians take that idea of this fate thing,
like this fatalistic thing, this idea that we don't have
any free will, we don't have any control to change

(48:11):
our circumstances or our futures, and they actually make it
sort of positive. There's this idea of being kind of
free if you accept the fact that you don't really
have any control. So at one point they're talking about
the end of the Earth that they already know how
the Earth is going to end. So what happens is
this guy presses the button and that leads to the
end of the Earth. On page one point nine, the
Tilfalmadorians are explaining to him why, in fact they aren't

(48:34):
going to do anything to save Earth. It reads, he
has always pressed it, and he always will. We always
let him, and we always will let him. The moment
is structured that way. So because they can see time,
they talk about time as like looking at the Rocky Mountains.
And I did this weird thing where I was looking
at the Rocky Mountains in my mind as if they

(48:56):
were moving forward, like I was kind of like looking
like I was kind of perpendicular to the Rocky Mountains,
and I was looking at them, probably because of how
I would conceive of time as moving away from me
in a linear line, like if I were up in
Canada looking down at the rockies. But what he means,
I now I'm fairly certain, is that if you look
at them from the side, so you can sort of

(49:18):
see all of the different peaks at the same time,
if they are kind of in a plane in front
of you instead of you looking down at like a line,
you have this sense that, again that everything is always happening.
And this extends to the idea of death, that no
one's actually dead because everything that has come before them
is still happening, which I honestly have some questions philosophically
about like what happens moving forward, but I guess there

(49:40):
is no forward. I don't know. But on page one fifty,
this is just one page later, they actually articulate this
idea of like how freeing it feels to sort of
accept that we have no free will. So they say this,
ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones, which, honestly,
I mean that is great advice. So one of the
things that's so remarkable about the book is it's really entertaining.

(50:03):
It's really dark, but it's also funny. It's deeply pacifist,
anti war certainly, but it's also making this very very
large statement about literally how we conceive of our fate
and of human will. It's incredible that such a large,
so many very large questions are being explored so deeply

(50:24):
in a novel that is funny and that has very
clear prose. It's definitely fragmented and structured in a unique
and sometimes challenging way. But I love the idea of
all of these very large questions being explored within it.
And before we move away from this idea of like
these deeply philosophical things that are happening in the novel,
I've been talking about them in like pretty wide scope,

(50:45):
things like the structure, things that kind of run through
the whole thing. But one of the things that Vonnegut
does so well is he has these kind of small
comments that he makes small in the sense that they're
like packaged in a beautiful, single small paragraph, but they
really speak to much large things in ways that are
so profound. It's also, honestly just such a joy to

(51:05):
think about this prose and to read it out loud.
On page forty nine, we have this description of Billy
Pilgrim's mother. She, I mean, there's again a lot of
stuff about religion, and she always said that once she
found the right religion, she would join that church. She
never did decide. She didn't develop a terrific hankering for
a crucifix, though, and she bought one from a Santa

(51:26):
Fe gift shop during a trip the little family made
out west during the Great Depression. Like so many Americans,
she was trying to construct a life that made sense
from things she found in gift shops. I mean, unbelievable,
it's so true. Then on page ninety we have this
example of just sort of like humans and how humanity functions.

(51:46):
This is dark and it's just so so beautiful. This
is when they're all in the train car being transported,
all the soldiers together. Human beings in there were screening
into steel helmets which were past to the people at
the ventilators who dumped them. Billy was a dumper. I mean, honestly,
there we have a little bit of that levity and

(52:07):
that kind of like homespun feel, the repetition of dumped
and dumper, and the idea of Billy was a dumper.
It's just there's something about the actual word itself that
is so that works so well to bring this like
very difficult moment kind of down to earth. The human
beings also passed canteens, which guards would fill with water

(52:28):
when food came in. The human beings were quiet and
trusting and beautiful, they shared, it's so beautiful in a
book that is so difficult and dark. In many ways,
it's such a beautiful thing when we have these examples
of human beings as really showing like a lot of
compassion and a lot of humanity. Before we look at
the very end of the book, I just wanted to

(52:49):
read two little passages. And the reason I wanted to
look at them is because of the evergreen nature of
this book. Again, it's published in nineteen sixty nine, it's
fifty almost fifty six years old. In many ways, it
feels like it is speaking directly to the present moment.
On one sixty four, we have a very distressing description
of Americans. This is all in italics, and this is

(53:12):
one of the many times when our narrator has included
other texts. There's parts about the children's crusade, crusades in general.
This is a monograph that is published by this guy,
Howard W. Campbell Junior, who he literally is an American
who becomes a Nazi, which kind of fits in fact
with his description here of American people. America is the

(53:34):
wealthiest nation on earth, but its people are mainly poor,
and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote
the American humorist Ken Hubbard, it ain't no disgrace to
be poor, but it might as well be. It is,
in fact a crime for an American to be poor.
Even though America is a nation of poor, every other
nation has folk traditions of men who are poor but

(53:57):
extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more esteemable than anyone
with power and gold. No such tales are told by
the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.
The meanest eating or drinking establishment owned by a man
who is himself poor is very likely to have a
sign on its wall asking this cruel question, if you're

(54:19):
so smart, why ain't you rich? There will also be
an American flag no larger than a child's hand, glued
to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register. So,
as someone who has thought a lot about the American dream,
this really spoke to me, and the idea that we
have made very little progress from nineteen sixty nine to
twenty twenty five was the kind of dispiriting thing that

(54:43):
really does in fact come from this book, but also
adds to its gravitas and its urgency to close Today
I want to take a look at the very end
of the book. This is the last kind of page
and a half. It's really really dark, but it's very important.
And one of the reasons why it it feels so
important to me is this is one of these descriptions

(55:03):
of the Dresden fire bombings that you can imagine that
maybe Kurt Vonna get experienced. This is one of the
war elements that he says, in fact is true. And
I think for an anti war novel and one that
is structurally very innovative, it's important to end with something
that is just very clearly a description of the horror
of war. So on page two seventy one, they're describing

(55:25):
how the prisoners of war, once they realized that they
were alive and they came out and saw the rubble
that used to be Dressden, they were made to start
shoveling to see what they might be able to find,
certainly looking for bodies. Many holes were dug at once
nobody knew yet what there was to find. Most holes
came to nothing. And then a little further down Billy

(55:48):
and the Maori, the Mayori, I mean, happily, this is
one of those ways that we would say like a
man from New Zealand or something we wouldn't say the Mayori,
or maybe you would like the equivalent of like the Spaniard.
This is a native per from New Zealand. And it continues.
Billy and the Mayori and others helping them with their
particular hole came at last to a membrane of timbers

(56:09):
laced over rocks which had wedged together to form an
accidental dome. They made a hole in the membrane. There
was darkness and space under there. A German soldier with
a flashlight went down into the darkness, was gone a
long time. When he finally came back, he told the
superior on the rim of the hole that there were
dozens of bodies down there. They were sitting on benches.

(56:31):
They were unmarked. So it goes a couple of important
things here, This idea of them sitting on benches. That
is the kind of detail that is absolutely crucial and
also excruciating. There is an adage in writing that what
the best writers will do is give you the detail
that you wouldn't have come up with yourself. So if
someone said, imagine a bombed out city and imagine young

(56:53):
prisoners of war. Digging in that rubble, you will imagine
all sorts of things. What you might not imagine is
the fact that when they find all of these corpses
that they would be sitting. It is the unexpected detail
that really makes things vivid and also gives real credibility
and real verisimilitude to the text. Also, this idea of

(57:14):
so it goes is crucial. So this so it goes
is something that the Trilfolmadorians say about death, and every
time there is a death in the book, we have
this phrase, so it goes. And in many ways it's
kind of an optimistic thing because it's going. If you
have this idea of so it goes, I mean it's
also very fatalistic, like this is just how it goes.
But I also love the fact that throughout Vonnegut uses

(57:36):
that phrase so it goes for all kinds of deaths,
whether it's the death of a horse or like at
one point the champagne bottle opened and then it loses
its bubbles, and we have this idea of that being
a sort of death, and so we have so it goes,
And I think in some ways it's very like a
Trilfalmadorian thing, to have us be thinking about death and
thinking about death more broadly, not just humans. This is

(57:57):
like a very early posthumanist thing, the idea that all
sorts of things, not just humans, are experiencing death and
deserve our compassion. Okay, they find these bodies and we have,
so it goes. The superior said that the opening in
the membrane should be enlarged, and that a ladder should
be put in the hole so that the bodies could
be carried out. Thus began the first corpse mine in Dresden.

(58:21):
There were hundreds of corpse mines operating by and by.
They didn't smell about at first, were wax museums. But
then the bodies rotted and liquefied, and the stink was
like roses and mustard gas. Roses and mustard gas is
a type of refrain that we see verbatim that comes up.
There are many of them throughout the book. Okay, so

(58:41):
it goes. The Mayori Billy had worked with dyed of
the dry heaves. After having been ordered to go down
in that stink and work, he tore himself to pieces,
throwing up and throwing up. So it goes, So a
new technique was devised. Bodies weren't brought up anymore. They
were creamated by soldiers with flame throwers right where they were.

(59:03):
The soldiers stood outside the shelters simply sent the fire in.
Somewhere in there, the poor old high school teacher edgar
Derby was caught with a teapot he had taken from
the catacombs. He was arrested for plundering. He was tried
and shot. So it goes, And somewhere in there was springtime.
The corpse mines were closed down, the soldiers all left

(59:26):
to fight the Russians in the suburbs. The women and
children dug rifle pits. Billy and the rest of his
group were locked up in the stable in the suburbs,
and then one morning they got up to discover that
the door was unlocked. World War II in Europe was over.
Such a good example of how anticlimactic that would be,

(59:48):
even just in terms of prose. It's anticlimactic. Billy and
the rest wandered out onto the shady street. The trees
were leafing out. There was nothing going on out there,
no traffic of any kind. There was only one vehicle,
an abandoned wagon drawn by two horses. The wagon was
green and coffin shaped. Birds were talking. One bird said

(01:00:10):
to Billie Pilgrim, pooh to Wheet, that's it. That's it,
you guys. So I'm not going to dig too deeply
into that. I'm just going to let that incredible prose stand.
It has been such a privilege to dive back into
this book. I honestly just feel like there is nothing
like it. I will also tell you that this is
a really interesting book to reread if this is one

(01:00:32):
that you loved but you haven't read it in a
long time. It doesn't take long to read. There's lots
of white space on the page. It really moves along,
but it is incredibly resonant, and in some ways it
feels like exactly the book that we should all be
reading right now. So thank you so much for tuning in.
Happy reading,