[ad_1]
In the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 anti-war masterpiece about a hapless American soldier who becomes “unstuck in time,” the author indicates that he wrote more than five thousand pages by 1965. But he threw all of those pages out, before arriving at his final draft. At his archive in the Lilly library in Indiana, there are at least five hundred pages that appear to come from Slaughterhouse-Five drafts. In tracing Vonnegut’s 23-year crusade to write his most famous novel, I sought to pair his literary struggle with his personal development from his experiences as a soldier during World War II.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
It is difficult to determine the sequence of these early versions, but, as a whole, they demonstrate Vonnegut’s creative progress toward writing about his experience in Dresden (where he was a prisoner of war after being captured by German forces during the Battle of the Bulge), a subject he, for the first time, put in the first person in one of his novels when he added an introduction for the 1966 reissue of Mother Night. “135,000 Hansels and Gretels had been baked like gingerbread men,” he writes darkly of the firebombing. (Vonnegut never revised his reliance on disgraced historian David Irving’s discredited tally despite the number being corrected to approximately 25,000 killed by more authoritative sources. “Does it matter?” That’s what Vonnegut told Marc Leeds, author of The Vonnegut Encyclopedia.) “If I had been born in Germany, I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and Poles around, leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my secretly virtuous insides. So it goes.” This is also the first time he used the famous tagline he would go on to repeat throughout Slaughterhouse-Five.
The introduction addresses Mother Night’s general subject of ambiguity and its tone of absurdity, but the author’s first-person reflections on his connection to the material is incongruous…
[ad_2]
Source : time
