Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007)

Slaughterhouse-Five is a book forged deep in the soul. Perhaps it’s not a book so much as it is a memory: a love-letter to a tragedy, a break-up letter with happiness. It is death, regretful but expectant. So it goes.

Every sentence of this memory-love-breakup-death makes me want to cry. Some did. Some do. It's the story of Billy Pilgrim, a man who survives, and in some ways does not survive, the military action known as the fire-bombing of Dresden. Along with this he becomes unstuck in show more time, and jumps between moments of his life from birth to final death. Death is white noise. So it goes.

When he's painfully washed by the Germans after becoming a prisoner of war, he is suddenly a baby, being washed by his mother. It's as involuntary as a human may experience a memory. Once Billy is returned to America, he is captured several years later by an alien race that lives in four dimensions. The race, the Tralfamadorians, experience time not as a continuum but all moments at once. Birth is not a starting point, it’s only a point. All things continue to exist somewhere, not even death is the end, because there is no end. So it goes.

I read this book around 2008 and gave it three stars because I hadn’t lived enough. I haven’t seen death up close and personal, perhaps this will affect me even more when I do. As is befitting the idea of time, it’s rare for anything to be told in older, but this is how humans operate. We live in order, but we don’t think in order. We’re impossibly bad at remembering orders of details: we become Tralfamadorians in our minds. But our memories allow life beyond death. So it goes. We exist as nine, or as twenty-one, we exist at times when our fathers are aliveC or that girl still loves us. Slaughter-house Five is anti-war, yes, but also, and more so, it’s about memory, and it’s about death. So it goes.

So it goes, so it goes, so it goes —

- "We'll meet again... If the accident will" [the concept of meeting someone in the future if God allows it]
- He never got mad at anything. He was wonderful that way.
- "How did I get so old?"
- Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past , the present, and the future.
- Every so often, for no apparent reason, Billy Pilgrim would find himself weeping. Nobody had ever caught Billy doing it. Only the doctor knew. It was an extremely quiet thing Billy did, and not very moist.
- "What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."
- He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov by Feodor Dostoevsky. "But that isn't enough anymore."
- “I look at you sometimes and I get a funny feeling that you’re just full of secrets.” “I’m not,” said Billy. This was a lie, of course.
- Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.
- They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.
- Now he closes his speech as he closes every speech—with these words: “Farewell, hello, farewell, hello.”
- They covered themselves with their hands and turned their backs and so on, and made themselves utterly beautiful.
- Later on in life, the Tralfamadorians would advise Billy to concentrate on the happy moments of life, and to ignore the unhappy ones—to stare only at pretty things as eternity failed to go by.
- The woman was softly beautiful, transparent... show less

YAŞAMA
VE ÖLÜME
TERSTEN BİR BAKIŞ.

Bizi durdurabilecek hiçbir şey yok. Tavşanlar gibi çoğalmaya devam edeceğiz. Öngörülemeyen korkunç yan etkileri olan teknolojik aptallıklarla uğraşmaya devam edeceğiz. Artık yıkılmakta olan kentlerimizde sadece göstermelik tamirler yapacağız. Bizim eserimiz olan zehirli pisliğin çoğunu temizlemeyeceğiz.

Yenilikçi ve muzip yazar Kurt Vonnegut, kendi yaşamından karelerle birleştirdiği bu “kolaj”da kaleminin sivri ucunu bu show more kez modern topluma ve kültüre dokunduruyor. İntihardan sansüre, dünya barışından depresyona, dünyayı bekleyen olaylardan müziğe, her konuda Vonnegut’un eğlenceli üslubunu ve iyimser nihilizmini bulmak mümkün.

“İyi kalpli bir hiciv ustası, osuruk torbasıyla ahlak dersi veren bir eğitmen.”
JAY MCINERNEY show less

I am just going to come out and say it: I am pretty sure that Kurt Vonnegut is my spirit animal. When I read his works, I feel like he is talking to a darkness that has lived inside of me that has been protected by comedic outbursts and nurtured by the sorrows of the world. Vonnegut’s books are strange, fantastical, and confronting. They make me question my values, my beliefs, and what way is really up. Cat’s Cradle is no exception. The opening lines read:

Nothing in this book is true.

show more ‘Live by the foma* that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.’

The Book of Bokonon. 1:5

*Harmless untruths

Bokononism is a religion found on an island republic in the Caribbean, San Lorenzo. Their catchphrase is: “Busy, busy, busy,” which is used whenever there are lots of things afoot. The Bokononist life is simple and blunt.They believe:

Everything is a lie.

Nothing can be true.

Love the people around you.

Give into your karass* and the kan-kan* that takes you there.

(*”We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God’s Will without every discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a Karass by Bokonon, and the instrument, the kan-kan…”)

There is a lot of beauty in this. It might seem rather bleak to think that everything is a lie. However, the concept is not uncommon in philosophy. It stems from the notion that there are no origins because everything is essentially made up of everything else. Theorists like Jaques Derrida, and Michel Foucault explore this concept. So if there are no true origins, where do we centre ourselves? This comes from the idea that our perception of reality, what we think to be true, is only a subjective interpretation. Reality can only exist in multiplicity: multiple subjective perspectives that we interpret and represent through speech, art, actions, and everyday life. Interpretation and representation as ways to understand the world, stem from extremely old concepts that come from Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics from Ancient Greece.

Love the people around you (I guess you don’t always had to rub feet). This is simple. And while it is rooted in all religions it often interpreted, I believe, wrongly. There is usually a catch. Love the people around, as long as they… Love the people around you, provided they… Too many times I see this love turned into a moral high ground. I love you because you do not know what you do, really means, what I think you do is wrong, but I am going to sit here smugly and judge you through the lens of my own subjective perceptions of religion and life. Whether there is such a thing as pure love, and unbiased love, I don’t know. But it isn’t a bad thing to strive for?

Your karass and your kan-kan. While this might seem fatalistic-you have no control over your destiny so just give into it- I like to think of it as give into your own desires and follow where they take you (as long as your desires don’t involve mass murder). Too many times we have a voice inside ourselves that whispers, “What if…” and this voice is policed by our internalised cultural and social expectations: “Don’t do that… People will think your a fool/wrong/stupid/strange.” Life is short, and as the Bokononists say: those who rise from the mud will return to it.

I’m not sure Bokononism is for me, but it has taught me some great life lessons with sharp irony and blackest of humours around. Thank you Kurt. show less

It's been said that young people don't read novels for their plots or their themes, they read them so that they might inhabit a universe they find comfortable and sympathetic. I read a whole lot of Kurt Vonnegut in my younger days, though I haven't revisited him since I was seventeen or so. Rereading "Slaughterhouse-Five," I'm a little mystefied as to why I liked him so much, though there is something in his dry, detached humor that still strikes a chord with me, however faint. Time passes: show more I think I understand Vonnegut much better now than I did then, but I think I like him much less. So it goes.

These days, I'd call "Slaughterhouse-Five" a fine, accessible example of a postmodern novel: in this literary universe, both sequential time and grand narrative have more or less been disposed of. In true Transfalmadorian style, everything happens simultaneously and one's experience depends more or less on one's position: you're either inside the slaughterhouse, and, paradoxically, safe, or outside of it, and dead. You're either in the prisoners' railcar and starving to death or in the guards' car and living it up. Things are, those little green beings might say, structured that way. "Slaughterhouse-Five" is, of course, the author's best attempt to process his experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden and explain why he survived an inferno in which more than a hundred thousand others perished. In true postmodernist fashion, he's pretty much unable to come up with any good reason why he made it through and other, nobler people he knew did not. Vonnegut seems to posit that in Dresden, and, by extension, in most places, life and death are the products for random chance and unforseeable, capricious fate. I get the feeling that some readers, particulalrly those attached to more traditional concepts of heroism, might have found this sort of war story shocking and discomfiting when it was published, and Vonnegut makes it clear in the book's first chapter that he's writing a both an anti-war book and an anti-epic, but that doesn't make "Slaughterhouse-Five" particularly enjoyable, or, some might say, particularly insightful. Vonnegut seems to struggle with Dresden's very barbarity and meaninglessness, and both of these elements seem to overwhelm the text. Still, when one considers the horrors that "Slaughterhouse-Five" describes, it's possible that the sort of gallows humor that the author displays is the only really honest human reaction one can have. I did not, I admit, find this a particularly enjoyable read, and I found Vonnegut's aformentioned dry detachment less than charming this time around, but I also have to concede that it might be impossible to write about surviving tragedies of this magnitude in any other way. Sometimes life presents us with circumstances that makes the mind boggle and the soul quail, and traditional literatury structures, adaptable as they are, struggle to fill the gap. "Slaugherhouse-Five" might be, for good or ill, the best novel that a survivor of the Dresden firebombing could possibly produce. Some might say that it's the only sort of novel a survivor of such an event could produce. show less