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125-408: The novel's first chapter begins with "All this happened, more or less"; this introduction implies an unreliable narrator tells the story. Vonnegut utilizes a non-linear, non-chronological description of events to reflect Billy Pilgrim's psychological state. Events become clear through flashbacks and descriptions of time travel experiences. In the first chapter, the narrator describes his writing of

250-704: A Veterans Affairs hospital in Lake Placid . During Billy's stay at the hospital, Eliot Rosewater introduces him to the work of an obscure science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout . After his release, Billy marries Valencia Merble, whose father owns the Ilium School of Optometry that Billy later attends. Billy becomes a successful and wealthy optometrist . In 1947, Billy and Valencia conceive their first child, Robert, on their honeymoon in Cape Ann, Massachusetts . Two years later, their second child, Barbara,

375-451: A . The pulse is reflected from a mirror situated a distance a from the light source (event Q), and returns to the light source at x ′ = 0,  ct ′ =  a (event R). The same events P, Q, R are plotted in Fig. 2-3b in the frame of observer O. The light paths have slopes = 1 and −1, so that △PQR forms a right triangle with PQ and QR both at 45 degrees to

500-560: A Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes." The significance of postmodernism is a reoccurring theme in Kurt Vonnegut's works. Postmodernism arose as

625-509: A child together. Billy is instantaneously sent back to Earth in a time warp to re-live past or future moments of his life. In 1968, Billy and a co-pilot are the only survivors of a plane crash in Vermont. While driving to visit Billy in the hospital, Valencia crashes her car and dies of carbon monoxide poisoning . Billy shares a hospital room with Bertram Rumfoord, a Harvard University history professor researching an official war history of

750-482: A classic anti-war novel, and has appeared in Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. Slaughterhouse-Five has been the subject of many attempts at censorship due to its irreverent tone, purportedly obscene content and depictions of sex, American soldiers' use of profanity, and perceived heresy. It was one of the first literary acknowledgments that homosexual men , referred to in

875-418: A classification of unreliable narrators. William Riggan analysed in a 1981 study four discernible types of unreliable narrators, focusing on the first-person narrator as this is the most common kind of unreliable narration. Riggan provides the following definitions and examples to illustrate his classifications: It remains a matter of debate whether and how a non-first-person narrator can be unreliable, though

1000-441: A first-come, first-served basis. In an effort to comply with a new 2024 Tennessee state law which added to the 2022 Age Appropriate Materials Act, Slaughterhouse-Five was banned - along with nearly 400 other titles - at the discretion of middle and high school librarians serving Wilson County Schools , a public school district in the greater metropolitan Nashville area. It has also been recently banned from school libraries in

1125-445: A fourth dimension, it is treated differently than the spatial dimensions. Minkowski space hence differs in important respects from four-dimensional Euclidean space . The fundamental reason for merging space and time into spacetime is that space and time are separately not invariant, which is to say that, under the proper conditions, different observers will disagree on the length of time between two events (because of time dilation ) or

1250-484: A furnace. In a letter to McCarthy in 1973, Vonnegut defended his credibility, his character, and his work. In the letter, entitled "I Am Very Real", Vonnegut wrote that his books "beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are". He contended that his work should not be censored based on the general message in the novel. The U.S. Supreme Court considered the First Amendment implications of

1375-420: A geometric interpretation of special relativity that fused time and the three spatial dimensions into a single four-dimensional continuum now known as Minkowski space . This interpretation proved vital to the general theory of relativity , wherein spacetime is curved by mass and energy . Non-relativistic classical mechanics treats time as a universal quantity of measurement that is uniform throughout,

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1500-453: A great shock when Einstein published his paper in which the equivalence of the different local times of observers moving relative to each other was pronounced; for he had reached the same conclusions independently but did not publish them because he wished first to work out the mathematical structure in all its splendor. He never made a priority claim and always gave Einstein his full share in the great discovery. Minkowski had been concerned with

1625-574: A light signal in that same time interval Δ t {\displaystyle \Delta t} . If the event separation is due to a light signal, then this difference vanishes and Δ s = 0 {\displaystyle \Delta s=0} . When the event considered is infinitesimally close to each other, then we may write In a different inertial frame, say with coordinates ( t ′ , x ′ , y ′ , z ′ ) {\displaystyle (t',x',y',z')} ,

1750-434: A location. In Fig. 1-1, imagine that the frame under consideration is equipped with a dense lattice of clocks, synchronized within this reference frame, that extends indefinitely throughout the three dimensions of space. Any specific location within the lattice is not important. The latticework of clocks is used to determine the time and position of events taking place within the whole frame. The term observer refers to

1875-416: A mental disorder yet, the establishment fails Billy by neither providing an accurate diagnosis nor proposing any coping mechanisms." Billy found life meaningless due to his experiences in the war, which desensitized and forever changed him. Vonnegut was in the city of Dresden when it was bombed; he came home traumatized and unable to properly communicate the horror of what happened there. Slaughterhouse-Five

2000-442: A mere shadow, and only some sort of union of the two shall preserve independence." Space and Time included the first public presentation of spacetime diagrams (Fig. 1-4), and included a remarkable demonstration that the concept of the invariant interval ( discussed below ), along with the empirical observation that the speed of light is finite, allows derivation of the entirety of special relativity. The spacetime concept and

2125-501: A narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author 's norms), unreliable when he does not." Peter J. Rabinowitz criticized Booth's definition for relying too much on facts external to the narrative, such as norms and ethics, which must necessarily be tainted by personal opinion. He consequently modified the approach to unreliable narration. There are unreliable narrators (c.f. Booth). An unreliable narrator however,

2250-574: A number of signs that constitute or at least hint at a narrator's unreliability. Nünning has suggested to divide these signals into three broad categories. Space-time continuum In physics , spacetime , also called the space-time continuum , is a mathematical model that fuses the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional continuum . Spacetime diagrams are useful in visualizing and understanding relativistic effects, such as how different observers perceive where and when events occur. Until

2375-419: A person moving with respect to the first observer will see the two events occurring at different places, because the moving point of view sees itself as stationary, and the position of the event as receding or approaching. Thus, a different measure must be used to measure the effective "distance" between two events. In four-dimensional spacetime, the analog to distance is the interval. Although time comes in as

2500-511: A real-life campaign by the far-right John Birch Society . The Serenity Prayer appears twice. Critic Tony Tanner suggested that it is employed to illustrate the contrast between Billy Pilgrim's and the Tralfamadorians' views of fatalism . Richard Hinchcliffe contends that Billy Pilgrim could be seen at first as typifying the Protestant work ethic , but he ultimately converts to evangelicalism . In 1995, Vonnegut said that Billy Pilgrim

2625-479: A rejection of modernist narratives and structures. According to one critic, Tralfamadorianism is a restatement of Christian teleology: There is no purpose to life, effects do not have causes; the only reason for anything is that God has ordained it. This juxtaposition is displayed throughout the book, rather directly asking the reader to confront the logical absurdities inherent in both Christian faith and Tralfamadorianism. The rigid and dogmatic approach of Christianity

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2750-445: A science fiction novel titled The Big Board at the bookstore . The novel is about a couple abducted by extraterrestrials. The aliens trick the abductees into thinking they are managing investments on Earth, which excites the humans and, in turn, sparks interest in the observers. He also finds some magazine covers that mention Montana Wildhack's disappearance. While Billy surveys the bookstore, one of Montana's pornographic films plays in

2875-413: A single point in spacetime. Although it is possible to be in motion relative to the popping of a firecracker or a spark, it is not possible for an observer to be in motion relative to an event. The path of a particle through spacetime can be considered to be a sequence of events. The series of events can be linked together to form a curve that represents the particle's progress through spacetime. That path

3000-433: A spacetime diagram illustrating the world lines (i.e. paths in spacetime) of two photons, A and B, originating from the same event and going in opposite directions. In addition, C illustrates the world line of a slower-than-light-speed object. The vertical time coordinate is scaled by c {\displaystyle c} so that it has the same units (meters) as the horizontal space coordinate. Since photons travel at

3125-490: A spatial distance Δ x . {\displaystyle \Delta x.} Then the squared spacetime interval ( Δ s ) 2 {\displaystyle (\Delta {s})^{2}} between the two events that are separated by a distance Δ x {\displaystyle \Delta {x}} in space and by Δ c t = c Δ t {\displaystyle \Delta {ct}=c\Delta t} in

3250-643: A year before his death), Minkowski introduced his geometric interpretation of spacetime in a lecture to the Göttingen Mathematical society with the title, The Relativity Principle ( Das Relativitätsprinzip ). On 21 September 1908, Minkowski presented his talk, Space and Time ( Raum und Zeit ), to the German Society of Scientists and Physicians. The opening words of Space and Time include Minkowski's statement that "Henceforth, space for itself, and time for itself shall completely reduce to

3375-408: Is "invariant". In special relativity, however, the distance between two points is no longer the same if measured by two different observers, when one of the observers is moving, because of Lorentz contraction . The situation is even more complicated if the two points are separated in time as well as in space. For example, if one observer sees two events occur at the same place, but at different times,

3500-497: Is "so it goes." The Tralfamadorians transport Billy to Tralfamadore and place him inside a transparent geodesic dome exhibit in a zoo; the inside resembles a house on planet Earth. The Tralfamadorians later abduct a pornographic film star named Montana Wildhack, who had disappeared on Earth and supposedly drowned in San Pedro Bay . The Tralfamadorians intend to have her mate with Billy. Montana and Billy fall in love and have

3625-460: Is a narrator who cannot be trusted, one whose credibility is compromised. They can be found in fiction and film, and range from children to mature characters. While unreliable narrators are almost by definition first-person narrators , arguments have been made for the existence of unreliable second- and third-person narrators , especially within the context of film and television, but sometimes also in literature. The term “unreliable narrator”

3750-415: Is a measure of separation between events A and B that are time separated and in addition space separated either because there are two separate objects undergoing events, or because a single object in space is moving inertially between its events. The separation interval is the difference between the square of the spatial distance separating event B from event A and the square of the spatial distance traveled by

3875-854: Is a social commentator and a friend to Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five . In one case, he is the only non- optometrist at a party; therefore, he is the odd man out. He ridicules everything the Ideal American Family holds true, such as Heaven, Hell, and Sin. In Trout's opinion, people do not know if the things they do turn out to be good or bad, and if they turn out to be bad, they go to Hell, where "the burning never stops hurting." Other crossover characters are Eliot Rosewater , from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater ; Howard W. Campbell Jr., from Mother Night ; and Bertram Copeland Rumfoord, relative of Winston Niles Rumfoord, from The Sirens of Titan . While Vonnegut re-uses characters,

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4000-407: Is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I've said." Billy soon after is shot with a laser gun by an assassin commissioned by the elderly Lazzaro. In keeping with Vonnegut's signature style, the novel's syntax and sentence structure are simple, and irony , sentimentality , black humor , and didacticism are prevalent throughout the work. Like much of his oeuvre, Slaughterhouse-Five

4125-419: Is actually what is indicated by moving clocks by applying an explicitly operational definition of clock synchronization assuming constant light speed. In 1900 and 1904, he suggested the inherent undetectability of the aether by emphasizing the validity of what he called the principle of relativity . In 1905/1906 he mathematically perfected Lorentz's theory of electrons in order to bring it into accordance with

4250-459: Is broken into small pieces, and in this case, into brief experiences, each focused on a specific point in time. Vonnegut has noted that his books "are essentially mosaics made up of a whole bunch of tiny little chips...and each chip is a joke." Vonnegut also includes hand-drawn illustrations in Slaughterhouse-Five , and also in his next novel, Breakfast of Champions (1973). Characteristically, Vonnegut makes heavy use of repetition, frequently using

4375-408: Is called an event , and requires four numbers to be specified: the three-dimensional location in space, plus the position in time (Fig. 1). An event is represented by a set of coordinates x , y , z and t . Spacetime is thus four-dimensional . Unlike the analogies used in popular writings to explain events, such as firecrackers or sparks, mathematical events have zero duration and represent

4500-550: Is called the particle's world line . Mathematically, spacetime is a manifold , which is to say, it appears locally "flat" near each point in the same way that, at small enough scales, the surface of a globe appears to be flat. A scale factor, c {\displaystyle c} (conventionally called the speed-of-light ) relates distances measured in space to distances measured in time. The magnitude of this scale factor (nearly 300,000 kilometres or 190,000 miles in space being equivalent to one second in time), along with

4625-404: Is dismissed, while determinism is critiqued. Some have argued that Vonnegut is speaking out for veterans, many of whose post-war states are untreatable. Pilgrim's symptoms have been identified as what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder , which didn't exist as a term when the novel was written. In the words of one writer, "perhaps due to the fact that PTSD was not officially recognized as

4750-399: Is dying in a rail car full of prisoners, he convinces a fellow soldier, Paul Lazzaro, that Billy is to blame for his death. Lazzaro vows to avenge Weary's death by killing Billy, because revenge is "the sweetest thing in life." At this exact time, Billy becomes "unstuck in time"; Billy travels through time to moments from his past and future. The novel describes the transportation of Billy and

4875-464: Is found throughout The Vonnegut Statement , a book of original essays written and collected by Vonnegut's most loyal academic fans. When confronted with the question of how the desire to improve the world fits with the notion of time presented in Slaughterhouse-Five , Vonnegut responded "you understand, of course, that everything I say is horseshit." Unreliable narrator In literature , film , and other such arts , an unreliable narrator

5000-528: Is mostly linear; and a description of his discontinuous pre-war and post-war lives. A main idea is that Billy's existential perspective had been compromised by his having witnessed Dresden's destruction (although he had come "unstuck in time" before arriving in Dresden). Slaughterhouse-Five is told in short, declarative sentences, which create the impression that one is reading a factual report. The first sentence says, "All this happened, more or less." (In 2010,

5125-568: Is no preferred origin, single coordinate values have no essential meaning. The equation above is similar to the Pythagorean theorem, except with a minus sign between the ( c t ) 2 {\displaystyle (ct)^{2}} and the x 2 {\displaystyle x^{2}} terms. The spacetime interval is the quantity s 2 , {\displaystyle s^{2},} not s {\displaystyle s} itself. The reason

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5250-513: Is not simply a narrator who 'does not tell the truth' – what fictional narrator ever tells the literal truth? Rather an unreliable narrator is one who tells lies, conceals information, misjudges with respect to the narrative audience – that is, one whose statements are untrue not by the standards of the real world or of the authorial audience but by the standards of his own narrative audience. ... In other words, all fictional narrators are false in that they are imitations. But some are imitations who tell

5375-514: Is positive, the spacetime interval is referred to as timelike . Since spatial distance traversed by any massive object is always less than distance traveled by the light for the same time interval, positive intervals are always timelike. If s 2 {\displaystyle s^{2}} is negative, the spacetime interval is said to be spacelike . Spacetime intervals are equal to zero when x = ± c t . {\displaystyle x=\pm ct.} In other words,

5500-645: Is present in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five ; however, it is not very well-regarded. When God and Christianity is brought up in the work, it is mentioned in a bitter or disregarding tone. One only has to look at how the soldiers react to the mention of it. Though Billy Pilgrim had adopted some part of Christianity, he did not ascribe to all of it. JC Justus summarizes it the best when he mentions that, "'Tralfamadorian determinism and passivity' that Pilgrim later adopts as well as Christian fatalism wherein God himself has ordained

5625-412: Is separate from space, and is agreed on by all observers. Classical mechanics assumes that time has a constant rate of passage, independent of the observer's state of motion , or anything external. It assumes that space is Euclidean : it assumes that space follows the geometry of common sense. In the context of special relativity , time cannot be separated from the three dimensions of space, because

5750-456: Is something that happens fairly often in Slaughterhouse-Five. When a death occurs in the novel, Vonnegut marks the occasion with the saying "so it goes." Bergenholtz and Clark write about what Vonnegut actually means when he uses that saying: "Presumably, readers who have not embraced Tralfamadorian determinism will be both amused and disturbed by this indiscriminate use of 'So it goes.' Such humor is, of course, black humor." Christian philosophy

5875-599: Is that unlike distances in Euclidean geometry, intervals in Minkowski spacetime can be negative. Rather than deal with square roots of negative numbers, physicists customarily regard s 2 {\displaystyle s^{2}} as a distinct symbol in itself, rather than the square of something. In general s 2 {\displaystyle s^{2}} can assume any real number value. If s 2 {\displaystyle s^{2}}

6000-494: Is the product of the twenty years of work it took for him to articulate the experience in a way that satisfied him. William Allen says, "Precisely because the story was so hard to tell, and because Vonnegut was willing to take two decades necessary to tell it – to speak the unspeakable – Slaughterhouse-Five is a great novel, a masterpiece sure to remain a permanent part of American literature." Billy Pilgrim ended up owning "half of three Tastee-Freeze stands. Tastee-Freeze

6125-669: Is the sixty-seventh entry to the American Library Association 's list of the "Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–1999" and number forty-six on the ALA's "Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009". In August 2011, the novel was banned at the Republic High School in Missouri . The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library countered by offering 150 free copies of the novel to Republic High School students on

6250-594: Is there any talk of free will." Using the Tralfamadorian passivity of fate, Billy Pilgrim learns to overlook death and the shock involved with death. Pilgrim claims the Tralfamadorian philosophy on death to be his most important lesson: The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. ... When

6375-579: Is to soothe   ... Finally, food also functions as a status symbol, a sign of wealth. For instance, en route to the German prisoner-of-war camp, Billy gets a glimpse of the guards' boxcar and is impressed by its contents   ... In sharp contrast, the Americans' boxcar proclaims their dependent prisoner-of-war status." Throughout the novel, the bird sings "Poo-tee-weet?" After the Dresden firebombing,

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6500-400: The c t {\displaystyle ct} -coordinate is: or for three space dimensions, The constant c , {\displaystyle c,} the speed of light, converts time t {\displaystyle t} units (like seconds) into space units (like meters). The squared interval Δ s 2 {\displaystyle \Delta s^{2}}

6625-461: The distance Δ d {\displaystyle \Delta {d}} between two points can be defined using the Pythagorean theorem : Although two viewers may measure the x , y , and z position of the two points using different coordinate systems, the distance between the points will be the same for both, assuming that they are measuring using the same units. The distance

6750-595: The Battle of the Bulge . He narrowly escapes death as the result of a string of events. He also meets Roland Weary, a patriot, warmonger, and sadistic bully who derides Billy's cowardice. The two of them are captured in 1944 by the Germans, who confiscate all of Weary's belongings and force him to wear wooden clogs that cut painfully into his feet; the resulting wounds become gangrenous , which eventually kills him. While Weary

6875-591: The USAAF in World War II. They discuss the bombing of Dresden, which the professor initially refuses to believe Billy witnessed. Despite the significant loss of civilian life and the destruction of Dresden, they both regard the bombing as a justifiable act. Billy's daughter takes him home to Ilium. He escapes and flees to New York City . In Times Square he visits a pornographic book store, where he discovers books written by Kilgore Trout and reads them. He discovers

7000-547: The bombing of Dresden in World War II , and refers to the Battle of the Bulge , the Vietnam War , and the civil rights protests in American cities during the 1960s. Billy's wife, Valencia, has a "Reagan for President!" bumper sticker on her Cadillac , referring to Ronald Reagan 's failed 1968 Republican presidential nomination campaign. Another bumper sticker is mentioned, reading "Impeach Earl Warren ," referencing

7125-429: The ct ′ axis is tilted with respect to the ct axis by an angle θ given by The x ′ axis is also tilted with respect to the x axis. To determine the angle of this tilt, we recall that the slope of the world line of a light pulse is always ±1. Fig. 2-3c presents a spacetime diagram from the viewpoint of observer O′. Event P represents the emission of a light pulse at x ′ = 0, ct ′ = −

7250-587: The data reduction following an experiment, the time when a signal is received will be corrected to reflect its actual time were it to have been recorded by an idealized lattice of clocks. In many books on special relativity, especially older ones, the word "observer" is used in the more ordinary sense of the word. It is usually clear from context which meaning has been adopted. Physicists distinguish between what one measures or observes , after one has factored out signal propagation delays, versus what one visually sees without such corrections. Failing to understand

7375-477: The "unreliability" of the main character (Mr Stevens) as a narrator to work, we need to believe that he describes events reliably, while interpreting them in an unreliable way. Wayne C. Booth was among the first critics to formulate a reader-centered approach to unreliable narration and to distinguish between a reliable and unreliable narrator on the grounds of whether the narrator's speech violates or conforms with general norms and values. He writes, "I have called

7500-585: The Lorentz group are closely connected to certain types of sphere , hyperbolic , or conformal geometries and their transformation groups already developed in the 19th century, in which invariant intervals analogous to the spacetime interval are used. Einstein, for his part, was initially dismissive of Minkowski's geometric interpretation of special relativity, regarding it as überflüssige Gelehrsamkeit (superfluous learnedness). However, in order to complete his search for general relativity that started in 1907,

7625-584: The March 31, 1969 review in the New York Times stated: "you'll either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner." It was Vonnegut's first novel to become a bestseller, staying on the New York Times bestseller list for sixteen weeks and peaking at No. 4. In 1970, Slaughterhouse-Five was nominated for best-novel Nebula and Hugo Awards. It lost both to The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin . It has since been widely regarded as

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7750-534: The Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is." After this particular conversation on seeing time, Billy makes the statement that this philosophy does not seem to evoke any sense of free will. To this, the Tralfamadorian reply that free will is a concept that, out of the "visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe" and "studied reports on one hundred more," "only on Earth

7875-401: The Tralfamadorian is not one in which free will exists. Things happen because they were always destined to be happening. The narrator of the story explains that the Tralfamadorians see time all at once. This concept of time is best explained by the Tralfamadorians themselves, as they speak to Billy Pilgrim on the matter stating, "I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of

8000-513: The Tralfamadorians, he learns a different viewpoint concerning fate and free will. While Christianity may state that fate and free will are matters of God's divine choice and human interaction, Tralfamadorianism would disagree. According to Tralfamadorian philosophy, things are and always will be, and there is nothing that can change them. When Billy asks why they had chosen him , the Tralfamadorians reply, "Why you ? Why us for that matter? Why anything ? Because this moment simply is." The mindset of

8125-503: The atrocities of war...". Following Justus's argument, Pilgrim was a character that had been through war and traveled through time. Having experienced all of these horrors in his lifetime, Pilgrim ended up adopting the Christian ideal that God had everything planned and he had given his approval for the war to happen. As Billy Pilgrim becomes "unstuck in time", he is faced with a new type of philosophy. When Pilgrim becomes acquainted with

8250-413: The background. Later in the evening, when he discusses his time travels to Tralfamadore on a radio talk show , he is ejected from the studio. He returns to his hotel room, falls asleep, and time-travels back to 1945 in Dresden. Billy and his fellow prisoners are tasked with locating and burying the dead. After a Maori New Zealand soldier working with Billy dies of dry heaves the Germans begin cremating

8375-435: The best suited to the description of our world". Even as late as 1909, Poincaré continued to describe the dynamical interpretation of the Lorentz transform. In 1905, Albert Einstein analyzed special relativity in terms of kinematics (the study of moving bodies without reference to forces) rather than dynamics. His results were mathematically equivalent to those of Lorentz and Poincaré. He obtained them by recognizing that

8500-465: The bird breaks out in song. The bird also sings outside of Billy's hospital window. The song has been interpreted as symbolizing a loss of words, or the inadequacy of words to describe traumatic situations. As in other novels by Vonnegut, certain characters cross over from other stories , making cameo appearances and connecting the discrete novels to a greater opus. Fictional novelist Kilgore Trout , often an important character in other Vonnegut novels,

8625-463: The bodies en masse with flamethrowers . German soldiers execute Billy's friend Edgar Derby for stealing a teapot. Eventually all of the German soldiers leave to fight on the Eastern Front , leaving Billy and the other prisoners alone with tweeting birds as the war ends. Through non-chronological storytelling, other parts of Billy's life are told throughout the book. After Billy is evicted from

8750-504: The book, his experiences as a University of Chicago anthropology student and a Chicago City News Bureau correspondent, his research on the Children's Crusade and the history of Dresden, and his visit to Cold War –era Europe with his wartime friend Bernard V. O'Hare. In the second chapter, Vonnegut introduces Billy Pilgrim, an American man from the fictional town of Ilium, New York . Billy believes that an extraterrestrial species from

8875-474: The characters are frequently rebooted and do not necessarily maintain the same biographical details from appearance to appearance. Trout in particular is palpably a different person (although with distinct, consistent character traits) in each of his appearances in Vonnegut's work. In the Twayne's United States Authors series volume on Kurt Vonnegut, about the protagonist's name, Stanley Schatt says: By naming

9000-418: The context of frame theory and of readers' cognitive strategies. ... to determine a narrator's unreliability one need not rely merely on intuitive judgments. It is neither the reader's intuitions nor the implied author's norms and values that provide the clue to a narrator's unreliability, but a broad range of definable signals. These include both textual data and the reader's preexisting conceptual knowledge of

9125-507: The deliberate restriction of information to the audience can provide instances of unreliable narrative , even if not necessarily of an unreliable narrator . For example, in the three interweaving plays of Alan Ayckbourn 's The Norman Conquests , each confines the action to one of three locations during the course of a weekend. Kathleen Wall argues that in The Remains of the Day , for

9250-419: The device of unreliability can best be considered along a spectrum of fallibility that begins with trustworthiness and ends with unreliability. This model allows for all shades of grey in between the poles of trustworthiness and unreliability. It is consequently up to each individual reader to determine the credibility of a narrator in a fictional text. Whichever definition of unreliability one follows, there are

9375-450: The difference between what one measures and what one sees is the source of much confusion among students of relativity. By the mid-1800s, various experiments such as the observation of the Arago spot and differential measurements of the speed of light in air versus water were considered to have proven the wave nature of light as opposed to a corpuscular theory . Propagation of waves

9500-457: The distance between the two events (because of length contraction ). Special relativity provides a new invariant, called the spacetime interval , which combines distances in space and in time. All observers who measure the time and distance between any two events will end up computing the same spacetime interval. Suppose an observer measures two events as being separated in time by Δ t {\displaystyle \Delta t} and

9625-422: The entire theory can be built upon two postulates: the principle of relativity and the principle of the constancy of light speed. His work was filled with vivid imagery involving the exchange of light signals between clocks in motion, careful measurements of the lengths of moving rods, and other such examples. Einstein in 1905 superseded previous attempts of an electromagnetic mass –energy relation by introducing

9750-615: The fact that spacetime is a manifold, implies that at ordinary, non-relativistic speeds and at ordinary, human-scale distances, there is little that humans might observe that is noticeably different from what they might observe if the world were Euclidean. It was only with the advent of sensitive scientific measurements in the mid-1800s, such as the Fizeau experiment and the Michelson–Morley experiment , that puzzling discrepancies began to be noted between observation versus predictions based on

9875-478: The first chapter is not also fiction. This technique is common in postmodern meta-fiction. The narrator explains that Billy Pilgrim experiences his life discontinuously, so that he randomly lives (and re-lives) his birth, youth, old age and death, rather than experiencing them in the normal linear order. There are two main narrative threads: a description of Billy's World War II experience, which, though interrupted by episodes from other periods and places in his life,

10000-556: The further development of general relativity, Einstein fully incorporated the spacetime formalism. When Einstein published in 1905, another of his competitors, his former mathematics professor Hermann Minkowski , had also arrived at most of the basic elements of special relativity. Max Born recounted a meeting he had made with Minkowski, seeking to be Minkowski's student/collaborator: I went to Cologne, met Minkowski and heard his celebrated lecture 'Space and Time' delivered on 2 September 1908. [...] He told me later that it came to him as

10125-497: The general equivalence of mass and energy , which was instrumental for his subsequent formulation of the equivalence principle in 1907, which declares the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass. By using the mass–energy equivalence, Einstein showed that the gravitational mass of a body is proportional to its energy content, which was one of the early results in developing general relativity . While it would appear that he did not at first think geometrically about spacetime, in

10250-408: The geometric interpretation of relativity proved to be vital. In 1916, Einstein fully acknowledged his indebtedness to Minkowski, whose interpretation greatly facilitated the transition to general relativity. Since there are other types of spacetime, such as the curved spacetime of general relativity, the spacetime of special relativity is today known as Minkowski spacetime. In three dimensions,

10375-506: The horror of the Dresden bombing, and everything it implies, up to a level of fantasy..." For Charles Harris, "The main idea emerging from Slaughterhouse-Five seems to be that the proper response to life is one of resigned acceptance." For Alfred Kazin , "Vonnegut deprecates any attempt to see tragedy, that day, in Dresden...He likes to say, with arch fatalism, citing one horror after another, 'So it goes.'" For Tanner, "Vonnegut has...total sympathy with such quietistic impulses." The same notion

10500-418: The hypothetical aether on the speed of light, and the most likely explanation, complete aether dragging, was in conflict with the observation of stellar aberration . George Francis FitzGerald in 1889, and Hendrik Lorentz in 1892, independently proposed that material bodies traveling through the fixed aether were physically affected by their passage, contracting in the direction of motion by an amount that

10625-419: The implicit assumption of Euclidean space. In special relativity, an observer will, in most cases, mean a frame of reference from which a set of objects or events is being measured. This usage differs significantly from the ordinary English meaning of the term. Reference frames are inherently nonlocal constructs, and according to this usage of the term, it does not make sense to speak of an observer as having

10750-644: The line was ranked No. 38 on the American Book Review ' s list of "100 Best First Lines from Novels".) The opening sentences of the novel have been said to contain the aesthetic "method statement" of the entire novel. In Slaughterhouse-Five , Vonnegut attempts to come to terms with war through the narrator's eyes, Billy Pilgrim. An example within the novel, showing Vonnegut's aim to accept his past war experiences, occurs in chapter one, when he states that "All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really

10875-438: The math with no loss of generality in the conclusions that are reached. In Fig. 2-2, two Galilean reference frames (i.e. conventional 3-space frames) are displayed in relative motion. Frame S belongs to a first observer O, and frame S′ (pronounced "S prime") belongs to a second observer O′. Fig. 2-3a redraws Fig. 2-2 in a different orientation. Fig. 2-3b illustrates a relativistic spacetime diagram from

11000-431: The narrator's account (c.f. signals of unreliable narration ). Nünning thus effectively eliminates the reliance on value judgments and moral codes which are always tainted by personal outlook and taste. Greta Olson recently debated both Nünning's and Booth's models, revealing discrepancies in their respective views. Booth's text-immanent model of narrator unreliability has been criticized by Ansgar Nünning for disregarding

11125-423: The narrator's unreliability is made immediately evident. For instance, a story may open with the narrator making a plainly false or delusional claim or admitting to being severely mentally ill, or the story itself may have a frame in which the narrator appears as a character, with clues to the character's unreliability. A more dramatic use of the device delays the revelation until near the story's end. In some cases,

11250-647: The novel as "fairies", were among the victims of the Holocaust . In the United States it has at times been banned from literature classes, removed from school libraries , and struck from literary curricula. In 1972, following the ruling of Todd v. Rochester Community Schools , it was banned from Rochester Community Schools in Oakland County, Michigan . The circuit judge described the book as "depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar and anti-Christian." It

11375-517: The observed rate at which time passes for an object depends on the object's velocity relative to the observer. General relativity provides an explanation of how gravitational fields can slow the passage of time for an object as seen by an observer outside the field. In ordinary space, a position is specified by three numbers, known as dimensions . In the Cartesian coordinate system , these are often called x , y and z . A point in spacetime

11500-461: The other prisoners into Germany. The German soldiers held their prisoners in the German city of Dresden ; the prisoners had to work in "contract labor" (forced labor); these events occurred in 1945. The Germans detained Billy and his fellow prisoners in an empty slaughterhouse called Schlachthof-fünf ("slaughterhouse five"). During the Allied bombing of Dresden , German guards hid their captives in

11625-585: The partially underground setting of the slaughterhouse; this protected those captives from complete annihilation.  As a result, they are among the few survivors of the firestorm that raged in the city between February 13 and 15, 1945. After V-E Day in May 1945, Billy was transferred to the United States and received an honorable discharge in July 1945. Billy is hospitalized with symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder and placed under psychiatric care at

11750-399: The phrase, "So it goes". He uses it as a refrain when events of death, dying, and mortality occur or are mentioned; as a narrative transition to another subject; as a memento mori ; as comic relief ; and to explain the unexplained. The phrase appears 106 times. The book has been categorized as a postmodern , meta-fictional novel. The first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five is written in

11875-471: The physical constituents of matter. Lorentz's equations predicted a quantity that he called local time , with which he could explain the aberration of light , the Fizeau experiment and other phenomena. Henri Poincaré was the first to combine space and time into spacetime. He argued in 1898 that the simultaneity of two events is a matter of convention. In 1900, he recognized that Lorentz's "local time"

12000-589: The planet Tralfamadore held him captive in an alien zoo and that he has experienced time travel. As a chaplain's assistant in the United States Army during World War II, Billy is an ill-trained, disoriented and fatalistic American soldier who discovers that he does not like war and refuses to fight. He is transferred from a base in South Carolina to the front line in Luxembourg during

12125-486: The postulate of relativity. While discussing various hypotheses on Lorentz invariant gravitation, he introduced the innovative concept of a 4-dimensional spacetime by defining various four vectors , namely four-position , four-velocity , and four-force . He did not pursue the 4-dimensional formalism in subsequent papers, however, stating that this line of research seemed to "entail great pain for limited profit", ultimately concluding "that three-dimensional language seems

12250-532: The radio studio, Barbara treats Billy as a child and often monitors him. Robert becomes starkly anti-communist , enlists as a Green Beret and fights in the Vietnam War . Billy is eventually killed in 1976, at which point the United States has been partitioned into twenty separate countries and attacked by China with thermonuclear weapons . He gives a speech in a baseball stadium in Chicago in which he predicts his own death and proclaims that "if you think death

12375-460: The reader discovers that in the foregoing narrative, the narrator had concealed or greatly misrepresented vital pieces of information. Such a twist ending forces readers to reconsider their point of view and experience of the story. In some cases the narrator's unreliability is never fully revealed but only hinted at, leaving readers to wonder how much the narrator should be trusted and how the story should be interpreted. Attempts have been made at

12500-715: The reader's role in the perception of reliability and for relying on the insufficiently defined concept of the implied author. Nünning updates Booth's work with a cognitive theory of unreliability that rests on the reader's values and her sense that a discrepancy exists between the narrator's statements and perceptions and other information given by the text. and offers "an update of Booth's model by making his implicit differentiation between fallible and untrustworthy narrators explicit". Olson then argues "that these two types of narrators elicit different responses in readers and are best described using scales for fallibility and untrustworthiness." She proffers that all fictional texts that employ

12625-463: The removal of the book, among others, from public school libraries in the case of Island Trees School District v. Pico , 457 U.S. 853 (1982) and concluded that "local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to 'prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.'" Slaughterhouse-Five

12750-463: The same time. Although there are many ways to understand this duality, I propose to analyze the four audiences which it generates." Similarly, Tamar Yacobi has proposed a model of five criteria ('integrating mechanisms') which determine if a narrator is unreliable. Instead of relying on the device of the implied author and a text-centered analysis of unreliable narration, Ansgar Nünning gives evidence that narrative unreliability can be reconceptualized in

12875-733: The spacetime interval d s ′ {\displaystyle ds'} can be written in a same form as above. Because of the constancy of speed of light, the light events in all inertial frames belong to zero interval, d s = d s ′ = 0 {\displaystyle ds=ds'=0} . For any other infinitesimal event where d s ≠ 0 {\displaystyle ds\neq 0} , one can prove that d s 2 = d s ′ 2 {\displaystyle ds^{2}=ds'^{2}} which in turn upon integration leads to s = s ′ {\displaystyle s=s'} . The invariance of

13000-584: The spacetime interval between the same events for all inertial frames of reference is one of the fundamental results of special theory of relativity. Although for brevity, one frequently sees interval expressions expressed without deltas, including in most of the following discussion, it should be understood that in general, x {\displaystyle x} means Δ x {\displaystyle \Delta {x}} , etc. We are always concerned with differences of spatial or temporal coordinate values belonging to two events, and since there

13125-416: The spacetime interval between two events on the world line of something moving at the speed of light is zero. Such an interval is termed lightlike or null . A photon arriving in our eye from a distant star will not have aged, despite having (from our perspective) spent years in its passage. A spacetime diagram is typically drawn with only a single space and a single time coordinate. Fig. 2-1 presents

13250-436: The speed of light, their world lines have a slope of ±1. In other words, every meter that a photon travels to the left or right requires approximately 3.3 nanoseconds of time. To gain insight in how spacetime coordinates measured by observers in different reference frames compare with each other, it is useful to work with a simplified setup with frames in a standard configuration. With care, this allows simplification of

13375-531: The state of Florida. Slaughterhouse-Five has been described as a quietist work, because Billy Pilgrim believes that the notion of free will is a quaint Earthling illusion. According to Robert Merrill and Peter A. Scholl, "Vonnegut's critics seem to think that he is saying the same thing [as the Tralfamadorians]." For Anthony Burgess , " Slaughterhouse is a kind of evasion—in a sense, like J. M. Barrie 's Peter Pan —in which we're being told to carry

13500-402: The state of electrodynamics after Michelson's disruptive experiments at least since the summer of 1905, when Minkowski and David Hilbert led an advanced seminar attended by notable physicists of the time to study the papers of Lorentz, Poincaré et al. Minkowski saw Einstein's work as an extension of Lorentz's, and was most directly influenced by Poincaré. On 5 November 1907 (a little more than

13625-468: The story of Billy Pilgrim: "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time", thus the transition from the writer's perspective to that of the third-person, omniscient narrator. (The use of "Listen" as an opening interjection has been said to mimic the opening "Hwaet!" of the medieval epic poem Beowulf .) The fictional "story" appears to begin in Chapter Two, although there is no reason to presume that

13750-413: The style of an author's preface about how he came to write the novel. The narrator introduces the novel's genesis by telling of his connection to the Dresden bombing, and why he is recording it. He provides a description of himself and of the book, saying that it is a desperate attempt at creating a scholarly work. He ends the first chapter by discussing the beginning and end of the novel. He then segues to

13875-402: The truth, some of people who lie. Rabinowitz's main focus is the status of fictional discourse in opposition to factuality. He debates the issues of truth in fiction, bringing forward four types of audience who serve as receptors of any given literary work: Rabinowitz suggests that "In the proper reading of a novel, then, events which are portrayed must be treated as both 'true' and 'untrue' at

14000-475: The turn of the 20th century, the assumption had been that the three-dimensional geometry of the universe (its description in terms of locations, shapes, distances, and directions) was distinct from time (the measurement of when events occur within the universe). However, space and time took on new meanings with the Lorentz transformation and special theory of relativity . In 1908, Hermann Minkowski presented

14125-481: The unheroic hero Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut contrasts John Bunyan 's " Pilgrim's Progress " with Billy's story. As Wilfrid Sheed has pointed out, Billy's solution to the problems of the modern world is to "invent a heaven, out of 20th century materials, where Good Technology triumphs over Bad Technology. His scripture is Science Fiction, Man's last, good fantasy". Slaughterhouse-Five makes numerous cultural, historical, geographical, and philosophical allusions. It tells of

14250-447: The viewpoint of observer O. Since S and S′ are in standard configuration, their origins coincide at times t  = 0 in frame S and t ′ = 0 in frame S′. The ct ′ axis passes through the events in frame S′ which have x ′ = 0. But the points with x ′ = 0 are moving in the x -direction of frame S with velocity v , so that they are not coincident with the ct axis at any time other than zero. Therefore,

14375-406: The whole ensemble of clocks associated with one inertial frame of reference. In this idealized case, every point in space has a clock associated with it, and thus the clocks register each event instantly, with no time delay between an event and its recording. A real observer, will see a delay between the emission of a signal and its detection due to the speed of light. To synchronize the clocks, in

14500-440: The world. In sum whether a narrator is called unreliable or not does not depend on the distance between the norms and values of the narrator and those of the implied author but between the distance that separates the narrator's view of the world from the reader's world-model and standards of normality. Unreliable narration in this view becomes purely a reader's strategy of making sense of a text, i.e., of reconciling discrepancies in

14625-463: Was a sort of frozen custard. It gave all the pleasure that ice cream could give, without the stiffness and bitter coldness of ice cream" (61). Throughout Slaughterhouse-Five , when Billy is eating or near food, he thinks of food in positive terms. This is partly because food is both a status symbol and comforting to people in Billy's situation. "Food may provide nourishment, but its more important function

14750-418: Was born. On Barbara's wedding night, Billy is abducted by a flying saucer and taken to a planet many light-years away from Earth called Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians have the power to see in four dimensions ; they simultaneously observe all points in the space-time continuum . They universally adopt a fatalistic worldview: death means nothing to them, and their typical response to hearing about death

14875-401: Was coined by Wayne C. Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction . James Phelan expands on Booth’s concept by offering the term “bonding unreliability” to describe situations in which the unreliable narration ultimately serves to approach the narrator to the work’s envisioned audience, creating a bonding communication between the implied author and this “authorial audience.” Sometimes

15000-555: Was exactly what was necessary to explain the negative results of the Michelson–Morley experiment. No length changes occur in directions transverse to the direction of motion. By 1904, Lorentz had expanded his theory such that he had arrived at equations formally identical with those that Einstein was to derive later, i.e. the Lorentz transformation . As a theory of dynamics (the study of forces and torques and their effect on motion), his theory assumed actual physical deformations of

15125-465: Was later reinstated. In 1973, Vonnegut learned of a school district in North Dakota that was antagonistic towards Slaughterhouse-Five . An English teacher at a high school in the district wanted to read the novel with their class. Charles McCarthy, the head of the school board, declared the novel inappropriate because of obscene language. All copies of Vonnegut's novel in the school were burned in

15250-536: Was less than the sum of the speed of light in air plus the speed of the water by an amount dependent on the water's index of refraction. Among other issues, the dependence of the partial aether-dragging implied by this experiment on the index of refraction (which is dependent on wavelength) led to the unpalatable conclusion that aether simultaneously flows at different speeds for different colors of light. The Michelson–Morley experiment of 1887 (Fig. 1-2) showed no differential influence of Earth's motions through

15375-498: Was modeled on Edward "Joe" Crone, a thin soldier who died in Dresden. Vonnegut had told this to friends earlier, but waited until after he learned that both of Crone's parents were deceased to publicly disclose this information. Edgar Derby, killed for looting a teapot, was modeled on Vonnegut's fellow prisoner Mike Palaia, who was executed for plundering a jar of food (variously described as beans, fruit, or cherries). The reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five have been largely positive since

15500-431: Was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names." As the novel continues, it is relevant that the reality is death. Slaughterhouse-Five focuses on human imagination while interrogating the novel's overall theme, which is the catastrophic impact that war leaves behind. Death

15625-414: Was then assumed to require the existence of a waving medium; in the case of light waves, this was considered to be a hypothetical luminiferous aether . The various attempts to establish the properties of this hypothetical medium yielded contradictory results. For example, the Fizeau experiment of 1851, conducted by French physicist Hippolyte Fizeau , demonstrated that the speed of light in flowing water

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