Before Oryx and Crake came… Slaughter-House Five

Since there are so many blogs about comparisons to Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I thought I would introduce a new discussion topic. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, which we are all familiar with at this point in time, has a distinct resemblance to the war related novel Slaughter-House Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut.

Incase you haven’t stumbled upon it yet, Slaughter-House Five is a novel about a war soldier who was present during the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany and survived this historical period, and trying to re-tell his story in an antiwar novel.

Just like Oryx and Crake, the book is written in the first person point of view.

In Slaughter-House Five, we are introduced to the author, Vonnegut who witnessed the war, yet because he cannot seem to write up anything about his memory, he makes up a fictitious character, Billy Pilgrim to fulfill his empty spaces. Billy reminds me a lot of Jimmy from Oryx and Crake for many reasons. They are both put in situations where they have to act like heroes or soldiers, yet they have the complete opposite characteristic of a hero. They also inhabit an unknown place.

There is a sense of fantasy in both these novels; “The Crakers” which are a scientific creating of Crake “each one naked, each one perfect, each one different skin color […] but each with green eyes”(8) and “the Trafalmadoriens”, aliens shaped like toilet plungers, each with one hand containing an eye in its palm. Both these imaginative creations are a possibility of an “improved” society, and when these protagonist travel back to these worlds, they become a different person. Jimmy is now Snowman and Vonnegut is now Billy.

There is also a similarity in the structure of writing; there is no beginning, middle or end. The story unfolds at a random time, without a given ending. Vonnegut foreshadows and exposes the beginning and ending of the story in the first chapter “it begins like this: Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. It ends like this: Poo-tee-weet?” (22) While Atwood begins like this: “Snowman wakes before dawn” and ends like this: “Zero hour, Snowman thinks. Time to go.” Both novels unleash no particular information in the end of the story, as if it has not really ended.

Although there are many differences in the moral of these two novels, the ideas bore similarities hard to ignore. They both depict a place in time where the end of the world is a possibility, and they both theorize scientific creations. Do you believe we are driving our world to an apocalypse or world war? If so, is there any way to stop it? It seems we are so caught up in our own lives we do not take the time to look around and acknowledge what is going on around us. I would love to hear your opinions!