Twenty-five thousand Germans were killed when the allies bombed Dresden, Germany in 1945. An American writer was a POW in Dresden when the bombing started, and yet he survived. How did he do it?
Subject: Narrative - Vonnegut’s Shapes of Stories
Event: Author Kurt Vonnegut captured while fighting the Battle of the Bulge, 1944
If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do. -Kurt Vonnegut
On this day in 1944, author Kurt Vonnegut was captured along with 50 other American soldiers while fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. After his capture, he was taken to a prison camp in Dresden, Germany, where he worked by day in a malt syrup factory and slept at night in a subterranean slaughterhouse. In February 1945, when Dresden was fire-bombed by the Allies, Vonnegut survived by taking refuge in one of the slaughterhouse's meat lockers. Vonnegut later fictionalized his experiences in the novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) (1).
In 2005, Vonnegut published an essay presenting a new way to trace the shape of a story. Most people are familiar with Gustav Freytag’s model -- sometimes known as Freytag’s Pyramid. The 19th-century German playwright, broke the dramatic structure of plot into seven parts: exposition, inciting action, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, and denouement. Vonnegut’s paradigm provides a different way to graphically trace the movement of a plot from beginning to end.
In the essay entitled “Here is a Lesson in Creative Writing,” Vonnegut begins by drawing a vertical line on a blackboard. He calls this line the “G-I” axis. At the top of the axis G represents good fortune; the bottom, I, represents ill fortune. Every story begins with a protagonist whose life can be placed somewhere on this axis based on his or her relationship to fortune. For example, if we were tracing the story of Cinderella, we would mark her relationship to fortune at the beginning of the story as much closer to ill fortune than to good fortune.
Image by Gaëtan GUINÉ from Pixabay
Vonnegut’s horizontal axis is drawn beginning at the middle of the “G-I” axis; Vonnegut calls this the “B-E” axis for beginning and “entropy” (end). This axis allows us to trace the chronology of the story as the fate of the protagonist changes in relation to good and bad fortune (2).
Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason: What two axes did Kurt Vonnegut use to graph the shape of stories?
Challenge - Story Time Graphs: Find the video of Kurt Vonnegut’s lecture on the “Shapes of Stories.” Then, identify a story that you know well, and create a graph to illustrate it.
Sources:
1-Kurt Vonnegut. https://www.biography.com/writer/kurt-vonnegut
2. Vonnegut, Kurt. A Man Without a Country. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005.
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