From the start of the book,
Vonnegut constantly reminded us that the killing of Edgar Derby was coming,
that it was going to the climactic point of the book. However, the scene itself
was pretty anti-climactic. It was one page before the book ended and the entire
thing took one short paragraph to describe.
“Somewhere in there the poor old high school teacher, Edgar Derby, was caught with a teapot he had taken from the catacombs. He was arrested for plundering. He was tried and shot."
Campbell got to speak for much longer
than the entire scene of the supposed climactic point. How does that make
sense?
Something that seems much more like
the climactic point is the bombing of Dresden. The book had been building up to
the point where Vonnegut could finally tell us what happened in Dresden, but
not in a way that told us exactly what was going to happen. It had an entire
scene with some follow-up, leaving more than a page for the end of the novel.
So what is the point of Vonnegut to be contradictory in this way? It’s not that
Derby’s death was not important, it just wasn’t presented in a way that made it
seem like the big climactic point. I guess if Vonnegut is going to announce the
beginning, end, and climactic point of his book he might want to through the
reader off guard a little bit, but I don’t know. We did have more details given about Derby's death throughout the book, but the overall way it was presented did not leave much drama as to what was going to happen. So why tell the reader these details ahead of time anyway? It does fit in with tralfamadorian ideas and the novel is supposed to be formatted like the tralfamadorian novels. So does that mean the climax in tralfamadorian novels are pretty anti-climatic? I mean, I would believe it with how their ideology is. What effect does this have on the novel? Do you have any ideas as to why Vonnegut
would do this?
The main goal Vonnegut has throughout Slaughterhouse-Five is subverting the classic war novel. Spoiling the entire plot is a simple but effective way to do that -- part of the thrill of war stories is not knowing what's coming next and if the characters will survive in such drastic life and death situations. Another part of Vonnegut's subversion is not spending time on those situations. So he doesn't spend time on his advertised "climax" because he's not writing a war novel, he's writing an anti-war novel.
ReplyDeleteI'd agree with Elizabeth, simply by not spending time on it, Vonnegut messes up your expectations of the scene. Sure he can talk about how much of a climax Edgar Derby stealing the teapot will be or how horrible the bombing of Dresden is. But Vonnegut treats them like any other event in the novel. He briefly talks about them happening, and then the book moves on with a swift "So it goes" and before you know it we're back in 1968 or Tralfamadore. If he hadn't been building up to the events the whole novel, you wouldn't even notice them as out of the ordinary.
ReplyDeleteI agree with everything everybody else has said so far, and would like to add that Derby's death is also a great irony - despite the terrible war atrocities just committed, despite the terrible act Derby survived, and despite all his earlier credit for being the most capable soldier and his inspirational, patriotic speech - he gets tried for the tiny feat of stealing a teapot and gets shot for it. It's like the punchline in a terrible, dark joke, rather than the climax of the novel. Vonnegut doesn't need to describe the moment in great detail for the point to come across.
ReplyDeleteI think because Vonnegut kept mentioning Edgar Derby's death, that the reader (us!) got so used knowing he was going to die, and when he did there was no surprise. In my opinion what makes a climax so interesting is the intensity of now knowing what's coming next, and Vonnegut completely gets rid of that by constantly reminding us exactly what happens with Edgar Derby.
ReplyDeleteI think the anti-climatic style of the book plays a big part in the point of the book. It's made to be pretty anti-war. He's trying to show that despite all these build-up or whatever, you can get killed for no reason. War isn't exciting or glorious. It's meaningless and a waste of potential excitement that could happen in the human life.
ReplyDeleteI think it's very deliberate that the theoretical climax of the book isn't climactic at all. It fits in with everything else that Vonnegut does in his novel. He leaves only the framework of the traditional war novel, or really any form of the traditional novel, which allows him to comment on it. One can envision a radically different writing of the scene of Edgar Derby's death, maybe even multiple, one where Edgar Derby, the American Hero who Stood Up to Campbell is unfairly shot by the scheming Hun, or the anti-war variation where Edgar Derby, the American Hero, is shot in an ultimately senseless act of violence, but one which perhaps preserves his nature as the sort of "character" that Vonnegut appears to dislike.
ReplyDeleteI think Vonnegut purposefully downplayed Derby's death because that was, what he considered, the climax of the novel. He spoiled it ahead of time to eliminate any aura of mystery, and when it finally happened, he brushed over it like a minor detail. the point of this is to stray from the classic war novel and eliminate any ways that war may be glorified or made more exciting
ReplyDelete