Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.Īnd what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like ‘ Poo-tee-weet?’ (19)ĥ This statement is likely close to the real author’s sensibility, as suggested by the book as a whole.
Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. He describes his trouble with writing a “war book”: This is the view put forward by the author’s fictional persona in the first chapter, in an aside to Seymour Lawrence, who was Vonnegut’s real-life publisher. As the preceding description makes clear, other questions were at the forefront, and this conspicuous sonic example is easily understood as a statement about the inadequacy of language in the face of horror. Billy is not a heroic figure or flattering example of his species but this fact makes him representative, for better or worse, of humanity and, perhaps, the perfect interlocutor for the question: “ Poo-tee-weet?”ĤIt would be misplaced to argue that Vonnegut was primarily interested in pastoral or pastoral sounds. The fact that the book highlighted a war crime by the victors, and that it was published in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, influenced the novel’s early reception (Biddle 120) still, the overall tone of the book is less one of protest than of perplexity at human folly, or even resignation, as expressed by the narrator’s repeated refrain at every mention of death: “so it goes.” 2 Some readers have classified the book as quietistic (Tanner 198 Merrill and Scholl 65-76), though Vonnegut addresses a wide range of concerns in a variety of settings including wartime Germany, Cold War America and also, in a science fiction twist, the Planet of Tralfamadore, to which the protagonist Billy time travels and lives naked under a bubble as a specimen of the human race in an extra-terrestrial zoo. 1 The real-life Vonnegut was a young American GI captured by the Germans he had the misfortune to be brought to Dresden shortly before its destruction, as well as the bizarre good luck to survive because he and some other prisoners had been herded into an underground slaughterhouse meat locker, Schlachthof Fünf, the source of the novel’s title. Later h (.)ģ Slaughterhouse-Five is usually interpreted, reasonably enough, as a metafictional meditation on time and human violence by a writer trying to come to grips with his war experience. 2 Vonnegut’s narrator, citing David Irving, refers to 135,000 dead in the bombing of Dresden.1 The merits of a metafictional approach to history stirred debate from the time of the book’s releas (.).
#SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5 POO TEE WEET PLUS#
Cette perception peut entraîner le risque de se complaire dans la pastorale sentimentale, mais peut aussi être constitutive d’un « mode d’écoute dialogique » et déboucher sur une appréciation plus nuancée de la place de notre espèce dans la nature. La nature a, dans ce cas, non seulement quelque chose à nous dire mais, de façon séduisante, elle parle notre langue et nous dit quelque chose que nous voulons entendre. L’article montrera que le « son pastoral » se présente souvent comme une sous-catégorie de la personnification.
S’il existe un locus amoenus aural, quelles sont les modalités de son encodage ? En s’appuyant, entre autres, sur des œuvres de Kurt Vonnegut, William Blake et Allan Ginsberg, cet article souligne la distinction élémentaire mais cruciale entre le son et le sens, et la capacité de la représentation du son à suggérer des significations pastorales. Il ne s’agit pas, en effet, de réduire le sujet à une approche thématique en considérant un échantillon de sons associés à la vie pastorale, mais de s’interroger sur ce qui constitue un « son pastoral ». Envisager l’existence de sons pastoraux dans la littérature soulève des problèmes spécifiques.
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