Slaughtercast 5 - Episode 2

““Slaughterhouse-Five” at 50.” NPR.org, www.npr.org/2019/07/06/739154414/slaughterhouse-five-at-50.

This article was about reflecting on Slaughterhouse 5 years later and included snippets of an interview with Vonnegut about the book. One of the main focuses of the interview was why it took so long to write the book and other things that aren’t quite as important for what I want to look at, but through it all you can see lots of Vonnegut’s purpose in the way the book is written and why certain choices are made. Vonnegut really wanted the book to be the truth, despite being a work of fiction, about the war, not something glamorized or anything like that. It also gives a bit more context about when the book was written, including the time period of the Vietnam War, which can offer new insight into the writing.

Roston, Tom, and The Writer’s Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five. “What Drafts of Slaughterhouse-Five Say about Kurt Vonnegut.” Time, Time, 11 Nov. 2021, https://time.com/6116467/kurt-vonnegut-slaughterhouse-five-struggles/.

This article is fairly interesting because it goes over Vonnegut’s 23 years worth of manuscripts that never made it to the final product, with approximately 5,000 pages being scrapped by Vonnegut. I think Vonnegut’s mentality towards some of the historical claims he made about the bombing really fits the New Historicist lens well. He says that 135,000 germans died in the bombing, but that number has been discredited for quite some time, with the modern estimate being about 25,000 people. When Vonnegut was confronted about this he asked why is was important, meaning why did it matter how many people died. Which I do agree with in part, the fire bombing of a city is terrible whether 25,000 or 134,000 people died or not. No matter the number it’s still too many. It’s also interesting how the world-historical events around him influenced how he could write, with the start of the Vietnam war and people being generally angry at the war allowing him to decry how poorly Americans had treated germans in World War 2.

Tonguette, Peter, et al. “Reading Kurt Vonnegut While Social Distancing.” The National Endowment for the Humanities, The National Endowment for the Humanities, 29 Apr. 2020, https://www.neh.gov/article/reading-kurt-vonnegut-while-social-distancing.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Novels focus heavily on the connections and interactions between humans, and the world that all of them inhibit. During his life he saw long distant, instant communication get easier and easier, which in his view actually made people less connected. This source goes in depth on one of his books that demonstrates that view the most clearly, but also questions artificial connections to other people like distant familial relations. He talks about lonliness and it relates to his time and his life and its very present in Slaughterhouse-Five.

Remembering Author Kurt Vonnegut, Who Would Have Turned 100 on Friday.” NPR. NPR, November 11, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/11/11/1135984054/remembering-author-kurt-vonnegut-who-would-have-turned-100-on-friday.

My article give plenty of insight inside the often difficult to read mind of Vonnegut this especially pertains to slaughterhouse 5 as the article gives insight to his untreated PTSD which we see the main character of slaughterhouse 5 suffer from. This also affects the neo historicist lens as seeing Vonnegut’s backstory and youth helps us understand many of his views, especially those that pertain to war and pacifism. Vonnegut speaks a lot about how the lens of history is shaped by those in power which perfectly encapsulates the neo historict lens.