I don't know exactly what to make of this book. It feels weird to call it an anti-war book, because writing such a book in the world of slaughter house five would really be just an anti-glacier book. But war is still portrayed as a horrible thing in the book.
I began thinking about this, why I couldn't just label slaughter house five as an anti-war novel. And I believe it is a result of the reality of Vonnegut's writing, he writes so earnestly it is hard to see him as having a message he wants to get across that's more than just his story. If war comes off as awful its because war for him was awful not because he wants it to be awful.
It this honesty that I believe is the best aspects of Vonnegut's writing he's writing about the world not about war. This has left me dumbfounded and made Slaughter-House Five one of the most memorable books I've ever read. Everything from the humor to the imagery to the font is done flawlessly. Why he would see the book as a failure in the traditional sense is astounding to me.
But when I began thinking about why Vonnegut saw the book as a failure I began to think I could see what he meant. We're strapped to rail car staring out a tube and Vonnegut wants to unstrap us and free our vision. But in writing Slaughter House Five I believe he came to think that there was no way off the rail car, projecting the dissapointment onto his book.
We touched on this in class, but in some ways I think Vonnegut himself viewed his task as inevitably destined to "fail," in that there "is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." As you describe, he doesn't "say something intelligent" so much as present a compelling picture of experience that adamantly *refuses* to make any particular "statement." If the novel is "antiwar," it isn't in the sense of transforming the course of history or helping prevent the next war (although how many among the millions who protested the invasion of Iraq had read the novel and been influenced by it? and yet, those millions weren't enough to stop the machine from rolling). The novel itself remains skeptical about the potential for any such "change." But its picture of war is in no way *positive*, and it works against the "mythology of war" at every level. If the typical war novel is implicitly "pro-war" simply by dramatizing it and giving it meaning, then this novel is "anti" that kind of novel.
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