Slaughterhouse Five Analysis

1578 Words7 Pages
No art is possible without a dance with death, he wrote. The truth is death, he wrote. I’ve fought nicely against it as long as I could … danced with it, festooned it, waltzed it around … decorated it with streamers, titillated it …(21) ‘A dance’ becomes a symbolical description of the non-linear narrative mode, with the Billy and the author himself occasionally appearing as one of the dancers. He jumps from one scene to another, from earth to distant planet, from present to past, he even wears some shoes that make him look like his dancing: Billy had lost a heel, which made him bob up-and-down-up-and-down. The involuntary dancing, up-and-down, up-and-down, made his hip joints sore. (45) The Americans had no choice but to leave trails in the snow as unambiguous as diagrams in a novel on ballroom dancing - step, slide, rest - step, slide, and rest. (51) The story of Slaughterhouse-Five is not narrated in a linear mode from the first chapter till the last one, the novel consists of ten chapters that make the readers jump back and forth in the author’s life- from his return to Dresden on a Guggenheim grant to his return home from the war two decades earlier, from a conversation on the telephone with his…show more content…
Billy’s time travels show that he exists in two places at the same time for example in the second chapter Billy was leaning against a tree with his eyes closed in the German forest he began to experience a number of other events in his life such as when he was a little boy taking a shower with his hairy father at the Illium Y.M.C.A. He smelled the ‘chlorine from the pool next door. He experienced terror in both
Open Document