Anecdote

Well, here goes nothing. This is my first real blog post about Slaughterhouse-Five.
Before I start, I must say, I already like this book. Vonnegut's writing style totally crushes Charles Dickens' style by a landslide. I guess I'm trying to say that A Tale of Two Cities was nothing more than a real snore of a book and it was just too hard to understand what Dickens was saying. Slaughterhouse-Five, on the other hand, is completely easy to follow because Vonnegut's voice is heard throughout and it's very relatable to the present, especially the words he uses because they are actually used by people. (Unlike Dickens' "Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched..." in T2C for example, this book acutally makes sense! Also, note to self: look up the meaning of the word besmirched.)
Okay, now I think I'll actually start talking about this blog post. Maybe I went on a little segue in that little paragraph above, but I guess after reading a chapter of Vonnegut, one begins to imitate his anecdotes throughout Chapter One. (See what I did there?) As I said, Vonnegut seems to love to throw a boatload of short stories around in this opening chapter in order to piece the whole book together. One example of an anecdote is found on page 10 when Vonnegut says, "I happened to tell a University of Chicago professor at a coktail party about the raid as I had seen it, about the book I would write. He was a member of a thing called The Committee on Social Thought. And he told me about the concentration camps, and about how the Germans had made soap and candles out of the fat of dead Jews and so on. All I could say was, 'I know. I know. I know.'" Vonnegut uses this anecdote to explain examples of how it was "worse in the war" and also how the war made those who experienced the trauma first-hand seem "tougher" and know that things weren't quite as bad as they might seem. And, most importantly, the quote serves as an example of the many tangents Vonnegut would later use throughout the chapter.
Vonnegut's use of anecdotes also brings a much lighter and happy tone throughout the book as the reader is able to see Vonnegut's personal style shine throughout the text.
Well, that's my blog post about Chapter One. I hope I did this right. If I later read this one day and think, "Wow, what a great blog I wrote. I think I let my voice truly be heard in this post", then I guess I will have done my job. If not, well, I guess I still have more work to do this summer.