Anyway, Kurt Vonnegut is one of those literary names you hear thrown around relatively often, like Hemingway or Virginia Woolf, and I hadn't read any of his work yet. Also, I figured it was time for a small break from all the autobiographies.
I went to the library and picked up Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, which I'd heard of and read was a good book of his to start with.
Leave it to me to take a break from reading autobiographies by reading what amounted to a personal historical fiction.
Vonnegut had taken a major event in his life, the bombing of Dresden, Germany, during WWII, and placed a fictional character in it. Vonnegut shows up in his own story, multiple times, and at the beginning admits that much of the story is true. So it's a historical fiction ... off a memoir.
I didn't even know people did that. Then again, I'm learning that there are many styles of autobiography. So far:
Alan Alda -- Scenes and stories from life focused on a set of themes, written out of order.
Malala Yousafzai -- Scenes and stories from life set in detailed backdrop of a culture's history
Anna Quindlen -- A reflection on a generation and how it has changed and grown
Kurt Vonnegut -- Making a fictional character go through your life instead
... But giving him adventures that are much more exciting, I'm sure, because he is kidnapped by aliens and does an awful lot of time travelling within his own lifetime. The character relives portions of his life over and over, in whatever order fate throws him into them. He has even experienced his own death a number of times.
A couple criticisms, though, need to be thrown in. First, and it's a style choice, but I wasn't fond of how often Vonnegut said "So it goes." It was his comment after every death, or mention of death (a fur coat, for instance), in the book. It got too repetitive for me and lost its profundity. That does tell you that there is a lot of death in this book, though. Also a lot of crudity. For the record.
My second criticism is that Vonnegut's first chapter reads like a forward, or an introduction, and that's what it should have been. The book actually begins in Chapter Two. Perhaps he wanted to make absolutely sure his introduction was read? Chapter One gives a background to the book itself and says that the story starts with the sentence that opens Chapter Two.
It also gives away the last line, interestingly enough. A bird gets the final say with the sound "poo-tee-weet?"
What's also interesting about that bird is that Vonnegut says after a massacre of Dresden's magnitude, no one is supposed to be alive to say anything about it, and indeed, there isn't much at all to be said. Birds say the only thing that can be said, "poo-tee-weet."
 |
| Vonnegut. I didn't imagine the curly hair, personally, but that really doesn't matter. |
Maybe it's a reminder of that concept? Maybe he gives the bird the last word because he thinks that, after it all, that is really the best last word.
How do you choose to end an autobiography? Alda and Quindlen both wrote more than one autobiography, making it less of an issue for them. Malala is only 20 right now, so I'm betting she'll come out with a sequel at some point, too.
Is one's gravestone really the last word in their autobiography? Perhaps not, since most people don't write the text for their own gravestones, but I think there is some poetry in ending an autobiography with your name and dates. People who know and love you see your name and it encapsulates everything you are. It means you. As for the dates, those are for the strangers who stop by and wonder what was going on in your lifetime. It's a kind of marker, placing you in history. My name is Elizabeth, and my place began in 1991.
No comments:
Post a Comment