The Parallel Plot Lines in Slaughterhouse-Five :: Slaughterhouse-Five Essays

The Parallel Plot Lines in Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut is and will always in my eyes and in the eyesof many others the writer who made the science-fiction musical style safefor not only mainstream appeal, but also critical harbinger andintellectual contemplation. Even though Arthur C. Clarkes 2001A Space Odyssey and Douglas Adams Hitchhiker series werereleased in roughly the same termframe as Kurt VonnegutsSlaughterhouse-Five, none has held the same aura of measure andsignificance to the literary zeitgeist as Vonneguts monumentalmasterpiece. The respect Slaughterhouse-Five garnishes amongbookworms and the intellectual elite alike is no accident. KurtVonneguts universal acclaim and appeal surely comes in no smallpart from his gift for connecting, almost unnoticiably, seemingly orthogonal objects and events to give them deeper meaning,creating a phenomenon known within Jungian circles assynchronicity. By making his novel so multi-layered by drawingthese comparisons, such as in being transported from a train elevator carinto a prisoner of war camp to an extraterrestrial spaceship that hums likea melodious beak, human race beings being trapped within each moment intime like an insect in amber, and the writers own repetition ofhis current run across to a jokey old song, the writer gives usa deeper insight into the legitimate multi-layeredness of space andtime. When Billy Pilgrim and his fellow POWs are transported outof their train car and toward the POW camp, Vonnegut compares thecalm peeking-in and speech of the Axis power guards to thebehavior of an owl. The owl had been mentioned earlier in thenovel, more specifically in the persona of a clock hanging inBillys office, and is brought up again here to depict Billysantagonists The guards peeked in Billys car owlishly, cooedcalmingly. By using the owl already mentioned in the novel asa metaphor, Vo nnegut makes an otherwise uncomfortable and tense circumstance more familiar. The writer uses this metaphor againwhile telling of the vogue of the POWs out of the train car