Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five(incomplete)

writing on Kurt Vonnegut's 'Shape of story' lecture
Slaughterhouse Five, or the Children's Crusade

1. writing on Kurt Vonnegut's 'Shape of story' lecture

"A story can be summarized onto a x-y Cartesian graph: with time(Beginnint-End)on the horizontal, and the protagonist's state of affairs(Good fortune-Ill fortune) on the vertical."
Just as the audience was, I was marvelled by the ups and downs in his narrative, roaming through Cinderella, Don Quixote, Kafka's Metamorphosis, as well as the quelled yet untouchable sense of when he moved onto Hamlet.
My final astonishment came when I came across another lecture of the same title, with old fuzzy texture, perhaps from 1980's or so. And the same exact lines he put forth!
His lecture few decades later mimicked his older with indiscernible deviation, only filled in the gaps with humorous laughters.

2. Slaughterhouse Five, or the Children's Crusade

reading a critical guide to this novel retells Vonnegut's story, as background needed for reading Slaughterhouse Five. It tells of Vonnegut as POW in German camp in Dresden, on February 13th, 1945, when massacre bombing was dropped, killing 135,000 people, when Vonnegut with his peer captives survived, unaware of the raid's scale, in a underground meatlocker which turned out to be the only effective raid shelter in the city.(captives in a meatlocker, huh)

His own account says that watching the enormous firestorm caused by Allies' high explosives mixed with incendiaries raining down flame on the city captured his later thoughts of the hypocrisy of his state, which claimed to be the 'good one'against evil Nazism, burning down a city of civilians with no tactical value.