Sky-High Fires

The first chapter of Slaughterhouse-5 from Kurt Vonnegut introduces, from his perspective, what his book will be about and how it came to be the way it is. The way Vonnegut narrates this chapter is very confusing because you don’t actually know if it is him or his character who is talking. It works in a similar way to Dante’s Inferno how there was Dante the poet and Dante the character. The book tells the story of an American private in Dresden, Germany, in World War II. In order to write his book, Vonnegut went back to Germany while it was under the communist regime and visited Berlin, Dresden, Helsinki and other cities. He asked his war “buddy” as he called him, to help him remember Dresden because he wanted to write his book, and he did. He even went with him back to Germany. The coming chapters (and the book itself) will probably be about a massacre during World War II because besides what is told about Dresden, the author claims his book is short because there’s nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.

I don’t really know much about Dresden and its bombings but I infer one of the reasons Vonnegut writes the book is to make the world know about this terrible things. When the air force told him or the narrator that the stories he wanted to know about the war were “top secret” and he sarcastically asked his wife that from whom, leads me to my inference beforehand. I want to keep on reading Vonnegut’s book because this first chapter really gripped my attention and I want to see what comes up next. The book seems to have an astonishing story from WWII coming and the way this is told to the readers is great. “The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot for taking a teapot that wasn’t his” are just some words from the narrator that make me think of the bloodbath that is coming. Besides from how the plot has “called” me, I really like the history behind it. Its great reading a book about World War II when you just arrived one month ago from Germany. I hope recently learning about it and everything that happened in World War II up to the nineties’ help me understand better the story that is coming.