FREE ESSAY ON PENIS AND IT'S TRANSPARENCY

PENIS AND IT'S TRANSPARENCY

This first chapter, a preface, is insistent on the fact that the book is based on real
events. Vonnegut, like our narrator, is a veteran of World War II, a former prisoner of
war, and a witness to a great massacre, and that fact lends a certain authority to what
follows.
Vonnegut shares with us his enduring inability to render in writing the horror of
Dresden. There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre, yet he feels the need to
say something. The book unabashedly charts the author's struggle to find a way to write
about what he saw in a way that neither belittles nor glorifies it. This struggle we keep
in the back of our minds as we proceed to read of Billy Pilgrim's life.
The author also irrevocably creates himself as a character in the narrative. It is Kurt
Vonnegut, the writer, the former POW, who speaks of the many times he has tried and
failed to write this book. It is Kurt Vonnegut, too, who utters the first So it goes
after relating that the mother of his taxi driver during his visit to Dresden in 1967 was
incinerated in the Dresden attack. So it goes is repeated after every report of every
death. It becomes a mantra of resignation, of acceptance, of a supremely Tralfamadorian
philosophy (something we will be introduced to later). But because the phrase is first
uttered by Vonnegut writing as Vonnegut, each So it goes seems to come directly from the
author and from the world outside the fiction of the text.
Chapter One also hints that time will be an important part of the fiction to follow. The
author was going around and around in circles trying to create a linear narrative. He
felt like he was stuck inside a children's song that continued indefinitely, its last
line maddeningly serving as also as its first. Only when he begins to think about static
time, about returning endlessly to the events of one's life, about moments existing for
eternity in no particular order, is he able to break through twenty years of frustration
and write Slaughterhouse Five.
Bibliography
Slaughter house five