A Lucrative Business

The greatest writers are those who not only play with the story and the characters in the literal side, but those who have the capability of manipulating the mind of the reader as such goes around the plot. Kurt Vonnegut very cunningly takes a stab at this technique with chapter one in Slaughterhouse Five by playing with the reader’s expectancy. He starts off his book with: “All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true” (Vonnegut, p.1). Who would think a book should start by putting yourself in doubt before your public? Well I certainly got shocked by this technique, but guess what, now I realized it worked to perfection in grabbing my attention as the pages intended to work. “And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big” (Vonnegut, p.2). As I thought the first was great, this second message really hit me directly across as a mistake, for I detest authors who, for some reason, find in books simply a lucrative business, and especially worse when talking about historical tragedies. I understand many, if not all, of the authors intend to make money, but publicly admitting it in the book I found rude and forced me to adopt a preventive attitude towards the subsequent chapters which I am to read. You have to be very careful when in the application of these double intentions in a text, for there is a thin line between creating suspense and wonder, and causing the reader to stray of the real intentions of a page. In my view, Vonnegut crossed the thin line for a while. Maybe that’s his tactic, maybe he intended for me to think that way so that the shock in later chapters is greater, making it mind controlling. I am not yet sure of why he did this, concerning a topic so sentimental to many.
Thinking about it for a while I decided to come back to analyze what I said previously, because I found a relation between my thoughts and those of another character in the book: Mary. She had a high level of prevention against the author, as I do, but he later demonstrated that she mustn’t think so and they became friends. Maybe we will also come to understand each other much better soon. All I can say is that at least he pretty much succeeded in playing with my mind by producing all sort of contrary interpretations. I really look forward to next chapter where I will have enough backup to make a more educated decision, but until then, I will give him, who seeks gold in martyrs, a chance.