Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five
Vs.
George Roy Hill's Movie Adaptation
For the most part, the movie adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut novel Slaughterhouse Five is a faithfully adapted version that does not veer horribly far away from Vonnegut's own vision. It is no secret that Vonnegut displayed some extremely obsessive tendencies in this novel due to his own experiences as a prisoner of war. For this reason, I did not believe that the movie would be able to accurately display Vonnegut's own personal feelings regarding these issues. However, I felt that the film did a good job of keeping with what Vonnegut had intended to be seen and felt in his novel.
I was extremely surprised by the way in which Hill's movie managed to successfully portray the ideas of the novel which I believed would be nearly impossible to visualize on screen. I had a hard time imagining how it would be possible to show abstract topics such as "being unstuck in time" on a movie screen. However, I came away extremely impressed with the way that Billy managed to travel around different points in his life as seamlessly as he did in the novel. Throughout the novel I actually had a harder time following Billy's travel through time. I came away surprised by this as I imagined it to be much tougher to follow in the movie.
I think that Hill was able to make the time traveling easier to follow by incorporating an aspect that Vonnegut did not use in the novel. In the novel Billy's travels seemed to be completely at random, with him at the mercy of time itself. Hill's tactic for disguising what seemed to completely random and without any rhyme or reason was by making it so that whenever Billy traveled to a different portion of his life, it alwa...
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...hotic man, hell bent on making people thinking he is far superior to them, when in reality he is no better at all then even a chaplain's assistant as helpless as Billy.
Generally, the movie adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut novel Slaughterhouse Five is a faithfully adapted version that does not veer horribly far away from Vonnegut's own vision. Both mediums tell the story of a teenager stuck in war in his past, in a zoo on a planet for aliens in his future, and of a hapless middle-aged optometrist in his present. I loved the novel, and therefore I was skeptical of the movie before watching, because I have never seen a movie adapted from a book that I have read that I felt did the novel justice. However, this case was different. Thanks to the director staying loyal to the novel which he based his movie on, I enjoyed seeing Billy, as much as reading about him.
“Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived.” Stated Abraham Lincoln. That quotes applies to Slaughterhouse-Five because even when you think you have conquered something and achieve the victory doesn’t mean that it will last long. Billy Pilgrim is the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim is non-heroic in the anti-war novel which makes the theme of the book Slaughterhouse-Five a man who is “unstuck” in time.
Billy Pilgrim is a chaplain’s assistant. A chaplain in the war’s job is to minister to military personnel, and families working for the military.. Billy Pilgrim’s past comes back for them to relive. As Billy is trying to “reinvent himself” he finds himself frolicking in his childhood at the Grand Canyon (Vonnegut 112). Billy was twelve years old when his mother and father took him on vacation to the Grand Canyon. Billy hated the Grand Canyon is was for certain that he would fall into the Bright Angel Point (Vonnegut 12). Approximately ten days after visiting the Grand Canyon, Billy visited Carlsbad Caverns. “The Caverns had been discovered by a cowboy who saw a huge cloud of bats come out of a hole in the ground” (Vonnegut 113). When
Billy tries to live a normal life, but is traveling in time between his years in the military and traveling to the Tralfamadorians world.
will always end up with the same results- no matter what. Billy could have began to
Billy Pilgrim time travels to various moments in his life at random, which suggests he has no power over his mind and the memories that haunt him. He “is spastic in time, (and) has no control over where he is going next” (Vonnegut 43), as he struggles to make sense of his past. Billy’s ability to remember events in an erratic sequence, mirrors the happenings of war. War is sudden, fast paced, and filled with unexpected twists and turns. Billy cannot forget what he experienced during his time as a soldier, and in turn his mind subconsciously imitates this hectic quality of war. This behavior proves that although the war is over, “psychologically, Billy has never fully left” (Vees-Gulani). For many soldiers, especially those who were prisoners of war (POW), it is inevitable that their mind will not be like it once was (Vees-Gulani).
The book, Slaughter House-Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut, is based on the main character named Billy Pilgrim who is a little "lost" in the head. Billy is always traveling to different parts of his life and rarely in the present state. Throughout the book Billy mainly travels back and forth to three big times in his life. In each different time period of Billy's life he is in a different place; his present state is in a town called Illium and his "travels" are to Dresden and Tralfamadore. When Billy is in Illium he is suppose to have a "normal" life; he is married, has two children, and works as an optometrist. Then Billy travels back to Dresden where he was stationed in the last years of WWII and witnessed the horrible bombing. When Billy travels to Tralfamadore he is in an "imaginary" state, everything that happens to him is more like a dream. Through Billy's travels in time he shows that he is striving to find meaning in the events that happened in his life that he is afraid to acknowledge. As Billy says himself, "All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist," (1) this just proves even further that fact that Billy cannot ever forget any event in his life.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut tries to make sense of a seemingly meaningless world by creating a novel whose narrative is more a conjunction of events instead of a linear story. Vonnegut beings his novel with a confession about why he wrote this book, he starts, “all this happened more or less” (Vonnegut 1). As a reader it is alarms are signaled when the author themselves makes an omission about the reality of the tale about to be told. He spends the first chapter giving an autobiographical view into what shaped his life and how this book needed to be written. Vonnegut says he thought he would have a lot to say about the bombing in Dresden that “all [he] would have to do would be to report what [he] had seen” (2). But instead “not many words about Dresden came from [his] mind then—not enough of them to make a book, anyway” (2). So here Vonnegut makes it clear this novel is not explicitly an anti-war book but rather an attempt at making sense of how life
In the novel Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, he talks about World War II and the bombing of Dresden. He writes about this historical event through the character Billy Pilgrim, Billy is drafted into the army at age twenty-one during World War II. He is captured and sent to Luxembourg and then later Dresden as a prisoner. Throughout the novel, Vonnegut constantly ridiculous Billy. He describes Billy as a character that has no individualism and no choice in anything that happens in his life.
Slaughterhouse Five is not a book that should be glanced over and discarded away like a dirty rag. Slaughterhouse Five is a book that should be carefully analyzed and be seen as an inspiration to further improve the well-being of mankind. Vonnegut makes it clear that an easy way to improve mankind is to see war not as a place where legends are born, but rather, an event to be avoided. Intelligent readers and critics alike should recognize Vonnegut’s work and see to it that they make an effort to understand the complexities behind the human condition that lead us to war.
In Slaughterhouse Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut, the plot focuses on a man who tends to regress back to his childhood, and earlier life, using three important themes. These important themes are the destructiveness of war, the illusion of free will, and the importance of sight. In this novel, Kurt Vonnegut reflects on his experiences in the war in 1945 as a prisoner of war. This man is named Billy Pilgrim. Billy Pilgrim is a former prisoner of war who tends to be stuck in the same mindset as before.
Slaughterhouse-Five is a story of Billy Pilgrim 's capture by the Nazi Germans during the last years of World War II. Throughout the narrative, excerpts of Billy’s life are portrayed from his pre-war self to his post-war insanity. Billy is able to move both forward and backwards through his life in a random cycle of events. Living the dull life of a 1950s optometrist in Ilium, New York, he is the lover of a provocative woman on the planet Tralfamadore, and simultaneously an American prisoner of war in Nazi Germany. While I agree with Christopher Lehmann-Haupt that Slaughterhouse-Five effectively combines fact and fiction, I argue that the book is more centralized around coping.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck” in time. The question here is, why? The fact of the matter is that he does not actually begin to time-travel. Billy “becomes unstuck” as a coping mechanism to deal with his traumatic experiences during the war. Billy attempts to reorganize his life’s events and cope with a disorder known as post traumatic stress (PTSD).
Though he was able to escape war unharmed, Billy seems to be mentally unstable. In fact, his nightmares in the German boxcar at the prisoners of war (POW) camp indicate that he is experiencing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): “And now there was an acrimonious madrigal, with parts sung in all quarters of the car. Nearly everybody, seemingly, had an atrocity story of something Billy Pilgrim had done to him in his sleep. Everybody told Billy Pilgrim to keep the hell away” (79). Billy’s PTSD is also previously hinted when he panics at the sound of sirens: “A siren went off, scared the hell out of him. He was expecting World War III at any time. The siren was simply announcing high noon” (57). The most prominent symptom of PTSD, however, is reliving disturbing past experiences which is done to an even more extreme extent with Billy as Slaughterhouse-Five’s chronology itself correlates with this symptom. Billy’s “abduction” and conformity to Tralfamadorian beliefs seem to be his method of managing his insecurity and PTSD. He uses the Tralfamadorian motto “so it goes” as a coping mechanism each time he relives a tragic event. As Billy struggles with the conflict of PTSD, the work’s chronological order is altered, he starts to believe
Kurt Vonnegut, the author of Slaughterhouse Five, provides a powerful first-hand account describing the horrific events of WWII. Vonnegut recounted the events and wrote about himself through the novel's protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. He was pessimistic regarding the novel because he wrote, “It is so short and jumbled and jangled, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre” (Vonnegut 22). However, on the other spectrum critics considered it to be “one of the worlds greatest antiwar books”(Vonnegut Back cover). The controversial novel was published in 1969, which was over two decades after WWII.
Although Slaughterhouse-Five may not be filled with delightful satire and comical scenes, there are accounts which the force the reader to laugh. In one instance, an extremely drunk Billy Pilgrim is searching desperately for the steering wheel of his car: "He was in the backseat of his car, which is why he couldn't find the steering wheel," Vonnegut writes (47). In another episode, Billy becomes "unstuck" in time while watching television, so that he sees a war film backwards and then forwards. The most humorous sequence takes place when Billy travels from the zoo on Tralfamadore to his wedding night with his wife, Valencia. He wakes up to find himself in the German prison camp. He then finds himself back with Valencia after returning from the bathroom. He goes to sleep, then wakes up on a train on the way to his father's funeral.