Slaughterhouse Five, What’s Been Said

“There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.”

Your task: Defend, challenge, or qualify a given claim with well-reasoned evidence from the text.

Directions:

Part 1 –Evidence -- Today

  • Choose one of the claims below.
  • Decide if you will defend (back up), challenge (argue with/oppose), or qualify (revise/modify/accept with limitations).
  • Find three or more of the best quotes you can find to support your position. Copy them down on the back and cite the page number.
  1. It is very tough and very funny; it is sad and delightful; and it works. 1969, NYT
  1. [Slaughterhouse Five is] a fantastic last-ditch effort to make sense of a lunatic universe. 1969, NYT
  1. [Slaughterhouse Five is] “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar, and anti-Christian.” Circuit Judge, Oakland County, Michigan, 1972
  1. What he is obligated to in Slaughterhouse-Five is death. This isn't a very easy thing for a fatalist to be obligated to Fatalism (that is, the belief that the "reasons" why things happen to us are a series of random events beyond our control) serves us particularly well as a transition--to, for example, move us philosophically from event to event in our existence. Harvard Crimson, 1969
  1. LISTEN: the most fascinating thing about this book is the way Vonnegut uses the Tralfamadorian understanding of time to deal with the importance of death.Harvard Crimson, 1969
  1. Vonnegut is one of the few writers able to lift the lid of the garbage can, and dispassionately examine the contents. Michael Crichton for The New Republic, 2013
  1. The short, flat sentences of which the novel is composed convey shock and despair better than an array of facts or effusive mourning. The New Yorker, 1969
  1. The significance of the Dresden firestorm, then, is weighed on the scale of time, from Sodom and Gomorrah down to Hiroshima, and on the scale of human response, from the collective, public view of the official history to the personal nightmare of Billy Pilgrim. Bloom’s Guide to…
  1. Slaughterhouse-Five is proof that Vonnegut kept his promise to write a war novel that does not glorify or glamorize killing. Bloom’s Guide to…
  1. Tony Tanner argues that the novel leads to quietism, which springs from a sense of hopelessness. Sharon Seiber appears to associate that hopelessness with predestination and fatalism. James Lundquist connects that hopelessness to black humor and argues that such humor is, in effect, an expression of human inadequacy in the face of the complexities of the universe. Bloom’s Guide to…

Part 2 – Commentary -- Tomorrow

Claim: