American Literature

Written Tasks

I. How do you read the epigraph on the front cover of Vonneguts

book Slaughterhouse-Five? This is a Novel/ Somewhat in the
Telegraphic Schizophrenic/ Manner of Tales/ of the Planet
Trafalmadore, / Where the Flying Saucers/ Come from. / Peace.
(Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five)(one paragraph)

I consider that Vonneguts writings have clearly the

imprint of the wry joker and worried fantasist,whose tone of
bitter-sweet satire, tells us that he wishes for reform but he
cannot escape the powers of history and system.
The resigned, anxious voice of Vonneguts fiction cant be but
his own, as he showed in his most remarkable book
Slaughterhouse-Five or, The Childrens Crusade (1969). This
novel was written, as he notes folksily on the title page, by a
fourth-generation German-American now living in easy
circumstances on Cape Cod (and smoking too much), who, as
an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of
war, witnessed the
firebombing of Dresden, Germany, the Florence of the Elbe, a
long time ago, and survives to tell the tale.'
Although the result of twenty-three years of searching for the right
form, tone, and voice, the writers appalling experience seems to
have found its form out of space, or reality and realism into the
fantastic, summoned to make sense of the senseless. The book turns
to be a monologue of the authors own ironic resignation; so it goes,
he tells us 99 times, with detached Trafalmadorian wisdom, as he
sees the horrors of the holocaust.
The authors alter ego Billy Pilgrim, the childlike, good-natured
optometrist from Ilium, New York, will take over the task of telling
what cannot be told. Significantly enough, Pilgrims job in life is
making corrective lenses until he is captured in war and imprisoned
in the Dresden abattoir, to become witness to the hideous fireball that
destroyed the city and 135,000 civilians. The series of displacements
 continues with Billys kidnapping and sending to Trafalmadore, both a
pathological location for a disturbed mind and a place of alternative
knowledge, and alternative fiction-making. In Trafalmadorian novels
there is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no
causes, no effects, and so all messages are synchronic, but, seen
all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and
surprising and deep.
M. Bradbury considers the above description best suited for
Vonneguts manifesto for postmodernist fiction, or black humour. It
certainly describes Vonneguts own methods for both representing
and deconstructing the world of the actual, in order to create new
harmless untruths that attempt to produce an image of life that is
surprising and deep (1992: 216).
The book is a multi-dimensional narrative with three focuses: (1) the
person who actually experienced these events in history; (2) the
person who has struggled to write about them for over twenty years
until finding a way to create the narrative of Billy Pilgrim; (3) the
person who now finally completes the book, a work that joins the
history of human achievement that now, as its final typescript page is
completed, also includes the fresh news of Robert Kennedys death.

II.What does Poe want to prove by writing The Philosophy of

Composition? (two paragraphs)

There is a radical error, I think, in the usual mode of constructing a 3

story. Either history affords a thesisor one is suggested by an
incident of the dayor, at best, the author sets himself to work in
the combination of striking events to form merely the basis of his
narrativedesigning, generally, to fill in with description, dialogue,
or autorial comment, whatever crevices of fact, or action, may, from
page to page, render themselves apparent.
I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping
originality always in viewfor he is false to himself who ventures to
dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of
interestI say to myself, in the first place, Of the innumerable
effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more
generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present
occasion, select? Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid
effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or tone
whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse,
or by peculiarity both of incident and toneafterward looking about
me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as
shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.
The initial consideration was that of extent. If any literary work
is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense
with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of
impressionfor, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world
interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed. But since,
ceteris paribus, no poet can afford to dispense with anything that may
advance his design, it but remains to be seen whether there is, in
extent, any advantage to counterbalance the loss of unity which
attends it. Here I say no, at once. What we term a long poem is, in
fact, merely a succession of brief onesthat is to say, of brief
poetical effects. It is needless to demonstrate that a poem is such,
only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating, the soul; and all
intense excitements are, through a psychal necessity, brief. For this
reason, at least one-half of the Paradise Lost is essentially prosea
succession of poetical excitements interspersed, inevitably, with
corresponding depressionsthe whole being deprived, through the
extremeness of its length, of the vastly important artistic element,
totality, or unity, of effect.