So It Goes: The Landscape of Memory in Slaughterhouse-Five (Pt. 2)

Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five has been pegged as fatalistic, an interpretation supported by a direct reading of the Tralfamadorians’ description of the nature of space-time. If time is non-linear, it follows that causality is an absurdity and all events are set. Geller’s reading is more subjective: that Pilgrim is convinced of these ‘facts’ as a way of …

So It Goes: The Landscape of Memory in Slaughterhouse-Five (Pt. 1)

This doesn’t start in Dresden, 1944. Its beginning is nowhere near Ilium in 1968 or on the planet Tralfamadore at any given moment – since they all coalesce for the Tralfamadorians anyway. We begin our story – most of which is true, maybe, certainly – in the mind of screenwriter Stephen Geller somewhere between 1969 and 1972. The …