...sittin' in a tree.. no, just kidding.
ANYWAY. This post is about my first impressions of Slaughterhouse Five, and let me just say that they are very favorable. I really enjoy this book so far, and one of the main reasons is that Vonnegut's writing style reminds me of Hemingway's style which I hold so dear.
I might just be lazy, but I really enjoy a simple writing style. When I read novels, or read anything for that matter, I don't like to have to work hard to figure out the content of what is being said. (I leave that for poetry, and I don't mean that in a disparaging way. I find that sometimes, the beauty of the words masking their meaning so that it's not readily apparent is neat, but that "sometimes" does not include novels. Just poetry.)
In novels, I really appreciate a simple writing style that is conversational and explains things. I like a writing style that doesn't try to do to much, or "try" to do anything at all; it just is. It's something written down in a way that you could imagine the author speaking to you, and what's really important is the content of what is being told to you.
Hemingway does that; he has very sparse prose to which I once likened the writing of an intermediate-level foreign language speaker. Let me explain that: when we have a rudimentary knowledge of another language, we kind of sound like children when we speak. The grammatical structure is very simple, and could be something along the lines of "The blanket is red." In that example, the sentence is simple but so is the content, thus sounding like a kid. Hemingway, however, sounds like an adult foreign language speaker because his grammatical structure is simple but his ideas are complex; for example, "Love is confusing." A kid could understand what that sentence means, but they're not likely to grasp the content.
Anyway I should probably stop talking about Hemingway and start talking about Vonnegut, and the reason I'm talking about them in the same post is that Vonnegut has this simple sentence structure as well, though he's not quite as spartan as Hemingway. I like that in this book, I can focus purely on the story and immerse myself in what is happening to Billy Pilgrim. I also like that Vonnegut is not trying to play any tricks on us, or make things complicated for us. If anything, he's deliberately making things easier for us to understand. He not only tells us what happened, but then goes on to explain it, or give his interpretation of it.
One example I just came across was on page 60 in my edition where the narrator is talking about Billy Pilgrim not being able to find his steering wheel and thinking that someone had stolen it. After Billy passes out, Vonnegut writes, "He was in the backseat of his car, which was why he couldn't find the steering wheel." I like how simple and frank this is. It's like, "Hey, I'm just going to flat out tell you exactly why he couldn't find it. It's cause he was in the backseat!" This tone and okay-ness with just saying what you actually mean is not lost on me. I am a big fan.
In any event, I think I'm going to like this book a lot; since the writing style is so uncomplicated, and the plot seems to be at least somewhat character-based, I think I can really connect to what's going on in a way that I couldn't with Ragtime and Mumbo Jumbo.
2 comments:
I am really enjoying Vonnegut's writing a style as well. I realize sometimes using big words and complicated sentence structure can make things "sound good", but they really don't help anything. It's a really nice change from Mumbo Jumbo where everything had to be so random and complicated.
I definitely see the connection. Vonnegut's simple sentences are often more in the service of humor than Hemingway's (the bit about the steering wheel basically functions as a punchline; for Hemingway, a *punch*line means something quite different!), but there is a similar "deadpan" quality to both. It should be pointed out, though, that Vonnegut introduces his own "complications"--his story is defiantly nonlinear, far more "jumbled" than Reed's.
The comparison to Hemingway--the great "war writer" of the preceding generation--might be surprising in other ways, though. When Vonnegut laments, in chapter 1, that he'd assumed writing this book would be "easy," "since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen." This is almost a direct response to Hemingway's famous approach to writing: just put it on paper the way it happened. Vonnegut, as he depicts himself in chap. 1, has a far more tentative approach to "reporting what I had seen," and the often confusing mesh of sci-fi and comical farce that follows reflects this anxiety.
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