Slaughterhouse-Five Group

Question:

dodi
dodi
Student
High School - 11th Grade

what is the purpose of the backwards movie episode in chapter four?

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Posted by dodi on Monday November 19, 2007 at 12:32 PM and tagged with in chapter 4, slaughterhouse-five.

Answers:


  1. sagetrieb Teacher
    Doctorate

    The entire novel deconstructs linear time, and watching the movie backwards is an enactment of this. Watching the movie backwards triggers in his mind memories of WWII, here imagining it going back to the beginning of time.  This imaginative flight signifies the timelessness of war and perhaps, too, the repeated evidence that humankind is violent and cruel. Throughout the book Billy goes back in time or out of time, so to watch a movie backwards makes "sense" in this sort of logic.

    Sources:
    http://www.enotes.com/slaughterhouse-five

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    Posted by sagetrieb on Wednesday December 5, 2007 at 4:28 AM

  2. slchanmo1885
    slchanmo1885 Teacher
    High School - 10th Grade

    eNotes Editor

    Also, watching a war movie backwards changes the "story" of the movie, which would be a story of destruction, if watched in normal chronological order. As it is shown backwards, the movie shows chaos to creation. Rather than everything being destroyed, killed, and pulled apart, it is made whole and born anew.

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    Posted by slchanmo1885 on Monday November 24, 2008 at 2:43 PM