Slaughterhouse Five & Frankenstein

Both Shelley and Vonnegut create stories that explore ultimate human consequences of humanity's attachment to progress and technology. Frankenstein is profoundly personal inasmuch as Shelley personalizes the consequence of human technological expertise; a monster is bound to result. Slaughterhouse Five, although it focuses on the highly idiosyncratic life of Billy Pilgrim, illustrates the depersonalization or indeed dehumanization of the most personal of human experience. In both novels, a philosophy of technology is implicit, but in each novel there is evidence of a deeply felt moral philosophy as well.

How the differences in vision come about can be explained partly by the difference in prevailing world views of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But what Shelley and Vonnegut share is an uneasiness with the notion of progress. The heroic adventure of the ancient Prometheus is one thing; the adventure of the modern Prometheus is quite another, and what it is is not heroic. For Shelley, the Enlightenment notion of the perfectibility of man, and the popularity of the view that the world can be improved by scientific progress is attached to the universal law of unintended consequences. Shelley's story demonstrates consequence of scientific action that leads to emotional and psychological isolation on the part of human beings connected with it. In seeking to create life, Victor seeks to play God by way of science, even though he is slightly disgusted by the corpse that h

Related Essays

Slaughterhouse Five This research will examine reviews and selected criticism of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five. .... Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade. .... (2593 10 )

Critical Reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five This research will examine reviews and selected criticism of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five. .... Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade. .... (2593 10 )

Slaughterhouse Five .... The film version of Slaughterhouse Five (George Roy Hill, 1972) has more abrupt transitions than the novel because they are visual and take place in real time .... (1104 4 )

Slaughterhouse-Five In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, we are told that the Tralfamadorians view "every creature and plant in the universe as a machine," (Vonnegut 1969, 196 .... (729 3 )

Impact of War in Slaughterhouse Five .... "You Must Remember This: Trauma and Memory in Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five." Critique, 46(4), Summer 2005, 357-368. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. .... (695 3 )

critique of emergent industrialization, which irrevocably transformed the whole of humanity, and which Shelley appears to understand is at best a mixed blessing for humankind. The moral dilemma created by "progress" that outgrows its creator and inevitably develops as it were a life of its own constitutes as well the development of Victor's character. On this view, the novel is a cautionary tale and by implication a critique of the culture (and perhaps decisive, irrevocable victory) of industrialism or more exactly of the encounter of the bleak ambiguities of modern industrialization with residue of sensibilities about right and wrong. In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut raises the philosophical stakes and consequences of scientific progress enormously, presenting a condemnation of humanity's ultimate expression of horrific scientism, war. Importantly, the war that Vonnegut describes is highly technological and impersonal in nature. The firestorm at Dresden was of course experienced directly on the ground, but those who dropped the bombs or in some manner contributed to the bombing raid are well insulated from the horror. The impersonality of perfected scientific horror is conveyed most strongly in the sequence in which Billy views

Category: Literature - S