I really enjoyed the panel presentations done yesterday by Simeon, Vivian, Claire, and Rodney. I thought they worked well together and helped me go into the mind of Vonnegut. I thought the things about post traumatic stress disorder were very interesting. I really did see the symptoms of PTSD in the writing style of Vonnegut, my Dad suffered with mild PTSD after he was parlayed in a motorcycle accident he says he often had reoccurring dreams about the accident and random flashbacks when he was sick which I found to really seem to be a like lot Billy.
I also found the quote Claire read from an interview of with Vonnegut to be quite striking that he would say he believed his own novel, which was amazingly popular, to be a failure on his part. I think we could easily have a long discussion as to why this novel was a failure for Vonnegut. I think Vonnegut's reasoning could have gone many ways and it is difficult to understand why Vonnegut may have said such a thing, but I am interested in exploring why. Vonnegut may have learned the true number of casualties that occurred at dresden. Maybe people didn't quite interpret his novel as they were meant to, maybe Vonnegut was trying to create an anti-war novel that was also not an anti-war novel. Vonnegut may have been going for a more neutral portrayal of war, given the prospective of the Tralfalmadoreans that we see saying that war and conflict are inevitable and unavoidable, they are merely part of the life cycle. I think this quote was a very interesting one and I would like to hear other opinions on in the future. I would also like to have a little more background on the context of the quote.
I don't quite remember the quote you're referring to from Claire and Rodney's presentation, but Vonnegut "himself" (i.e. the first-person narrator/author in chap. 1) declared the novel to be a "failure" as he "presents" it to his editor. The testimony of thousands of readers over the last 40+ years suggests otherwise, so how could it be called a "failure"? Well, what would "success" have looked like? Measured by the standards for "a good war novel" (action, excitement, emotional intensity, etc.), it would appear to be a rather *deliberate* failure--Vonnegut is refusing to write that kind of book. But as an "antiwar novel" (or an anti-warnovel), many would disagree with the author's own modest assessment.
ReplyDelete(The "failure" idea also maybe refers to the idea that "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre"--which is why the bird gets the last word. In that view, any attempt to say something "intelligent" will "fail.")