Chapter Ten: Situational Irony

Situational irony is defined as taking place when there is a discrepancy between what is expected to happen, or what would be appropriate to happen, and what really does happen. Situational irony occurs when Edgar Derby, the schoolteacher from Indianapolis, "...was caught with a teapot he had taken from the catacombs. He was arrested for plundering. He was tried and shot. So it goes." It is ironic that Derby would be executed for an item so insignificant. He paid the ultimate price for a meaningless teapot.

Chapter Nine: Ambiguity

Ambiguity is defined as something that deliberately suggests two or more different, and sometimes conflicting, meanings in a work; an event or situation that may be interpreted in more than one way, but done so in a way that contributes to the meaning of the work. An example of this in chapter nine is when Vonnegut is describing the locket on Montana Wildhack's neck. He says that it contained "...a picture of her alcoholic mother-a grainy thing, soot and chalk. It could have been anybody."

I believe this has two meanings. The first meaning is that the picture is in a decrepit state, and the details of her mother have faded away. The second meaning is that because the picture was unclear, anyone could have been that mother. No one is impervious to a swift downfall, and anyone could end up as a photograph with a tragic memory attached.

                                                                                                                                                                          

Chapter Eight: Antihero

Howard W. Campbell, Jr. is an excellent example of an antihero. Campbell was "an American who had become a Nazi." An antihero is defined as a central who lacks the qualities traditionally associated with heroes such as courage, grace, intelligence, or morality.

Campbell's radical conversion into Nazism, a party that massacres individuals who do not fit into the "perfect" Aryan race, shows he lacks all positive qualities associated with being a hero. This means that he must be an antihero.

Chapter Seven: A Quatrain to End All Quatrains!

A quatrain is a poem consisting of four lines, or four lines of a poem that can be considered a unit. The quatrain in chapter seven occurs when a group of optometrists called the Four-eyed Bastards sing for Billy Pilgrim's father-in-law. They sing the following:

"Me and Mike, ve vork in mine.
Holy shit, ve have good time.
Vunce a veek ve get our pay.
Holy shit, no vork next day."

Chapter Six: Allusion

In chapter six, Billy is awoken by "animal magnetism" and discovers two small lumps in the lining of his overcoat. He is told to "...be content with knowing that they could work miracles for him, provided he did not insist on learning their nature."


This reminds me of a biblical story Vonnegut mentioned in chapter one: the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. While Lot and his wife were fleeing, Lot's wife is overcome with the irresistible temptation to look back. She knew it would immobilize her, but she could not resist and paid the consequences.

Billy knows that he has been instructed not to investigate the mysterious lumps, but his curiosity is piqued. He has to try his absolute hardest to curb his desire to find out in order to avoid any negative ramifications that may occur.

Chapter Five: Dramatic Irony

Chapter 5 has an excellent example of dramatic irony. A German guard in the Dresden prisoner of war camp knocks down an American prisoner for seemingly no reason at all. The man was perplexed by the guard's action, so he asks "Why me?" The guard responds with a stereotypical German accent "Vy you? Vy anybody?"

If you remember in chapter four, Billy asks his Tralfamadorian captors why he was being captured.This shows dramatic irony because the reader knows that the responses were the same (minus the accent), and the characters do not.

Chapter Four: Explication

Chapter four has an interesting moment where one could use explication. While rummaging through his daughter's former room, her phone rings. "Billy answered. There was a drunk on the other end. Billy could almost smell his breath—mustard gas and roses. It was a wrong number. Billy hung up." After finishing the chapter, I realized that the drunk was actually Kurt Vonnegut himself. Vonnegut mentioned that he had a habit of becoming inebriated and calling former girlfriends.



In addition, the use of roses, symbolic of romance, and mustard gas, a deadly chemical weapon, seems strange. However, I think it shows how deeply the war affected Vonnegut, and that he can no longer appreciate normal things (roses) without remembering the horrors of war (mustard gas).

Chapter Three: Metaphor

In chapter three, Billy Pilgrim mentions that he saw "...corpses with bare feet that were blue and ivory." Although the colors seems to be menial details surrounding frozen corpses, they actually represent something much more profound. If you would kindly look at the color chart I "borrowed" from Color Wheel Pro (http://www.color-wheel-pro.com/color-meaning.html).




 

Color Meaning

  Blue

Blue is the color of the sky and sea. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven.
Blue is considered beneficial to the mind and body. It slows human metabolism and produces a calming effect. Blue is strongly associated with tranquility and calmness. In heraldry, blue is used to symbolize piety and sincerity.
You can use blue to promote products and services related to cleanliness (water purification filters, cleaning liquids, vodka), air and sky (airlines, airports, air conditioners), water and sea (sea voyages, mineral water). As opposed to emotionally warm colors like red, orange, and yellow; blue is linked to consciousness and intellect. Use blue to suggest precision when promoting high-tech products.
Blue is a masculine color; according to studies, it is highly accepted among males. Dark blue is associated with depth, expertise, and stability; it is a preferred color for corporate America.
Avoid using blue when promoting food and cooking, because blue suppresses appetite. When used together with warm colors like yellow or red, blue can create high-impact, vibrant designs; for example, blue-yellow-red is a perfect color scheme for a superhero.

Light blue is associated with health, healing, tranquility, understanding, and softness.
Dark blue represents knowledge, power, integrity, and seriousness.

  White

White is associated with light, goodness, innocence, purity, and virginity. It is considered to be the color of perfection.
White means safety, purity, and cleanliness. As opposed to black, white usually has a positive connotation. White can represent a successful beginning. In heraldry, white depicts faith and purity.
In advertising, white is associated with coolness and cleanliness because it's the color of snow. You can use white to suggest simplicity in high-tech products. White is an appropriate color for charitable organizations; angels are usually imagined wearing white clothes. White is associated with hospitals, doctors, and sterility, so you can use white to suggest safety when promoting medical products. White is often associated with low weight, low-fat food, and dairy products.

The corpses having blue and ivory feet can mean a couple of things:
1) Fragility between light (could be life) and dark (could be death). Think of the Ying-Yang principle.
2) Both colors have positive connotations. Vonnegut might be suggesting that death is a good thing.

Chapter Two: Style

The feeling you get when you try to figure out Slaughterhouse Five's narrative style.

In chapter two, Billy Pilgrim jumps around time a lot. For example, Billy is trying to leave a party and drive away. However, the very intoxicated Billy cannot locate his car's steering wheel. Since he was in the backseat, he obviously was not going to find a steering wheel. In his inebriated state, he concluded that the steering wheel was stolen, and promptly passed out. In the next paragraph, Billy "... still felt drunk, was still angered by the stolen steering wheel. He was back in World War Two again, behind the German lines." This "time jumping" causes the narrative to have a disjointed and almost broken quality to it. However, Vonnegut used this in order to prove a point. The point of a narrative is to explicitly tell a coherent story. Narratives (well, good ones at least) make sense of their subjects, providing the reader with a deeper understanding of it. This is the reason why Vonnegut makes the novel disjointed. He did not want to simply make a narrative about Dresden because that would entail him making sense of the events. As the bird in chapter one demonstrated, it is impossible to make sense of a massacre or any other large-scale destruction.

Chapter One: Irony

In chapter one, Vonnegut was talking to an old war buddy named Bernard V. O'Hare. Vonnegut discusses a particular scene which he wants to be the climax. Vonnegut enthusiastically states "I think the climax of the story will be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby. The irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And he's given a regular trial, and then he's shot by a firing squad." This scene not only demonstrates the extreme irony in Edgar Derby's trial and subsequent execution, but it also shows the irony of the war. Derby's theft of the teapot was a trivial offense and should have been treated as such. However, Derby was forced to pay the ultimate price for an inconsequential act. The war in which this took place, World War II, also pertains to the irony of paying the ultimate price for a small thing. When Hitler began to set the "Final Solution" into motion, Jewish denizens were forced to pay the ultimate price for a trivial matter: their religion. Vonnegut's description of Derby's unfortunate end could symbolize a much larger tragedy; moreover, the irony certainly describes the course of World War II.