The Climax of a Book that Tells You the Climax

In the first chapter of Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut says that "'I think the climax of the book will be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby' I said 'The irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American foot solider is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. He's given a regular trial, and then he's shot by a firing squad.'" Although this is Vonnegut telling about his experience trying to write his "big war novel," this scene of Edgar Derby's execution does appear in the book. But in my opinion, in the novel Vonnegut wrote, this is not the climax of the story.

This scene of Derby's execution certainly could be the climax, but it's not because the author told us the event before it happened. We knew that after reading the first chapter that after the Dresden firestorm, an unknown character called Edgar Derby would eventually pick up a teapot and be executed for it. That event is already on our timeline. Because of this, that point isn't the climax of the story because it holds no sway over us. It's as if J.K. Rowling had said at the beginning of the first Harry Potter book, that Voldemort would kill Harry and it would be revealed that Harry himself is a horcrux and they have one last climactic fight where Voldemort is defeated. We have no idea who these characters are or what a horcrux is but we have already plotted that point as the most tense point in the story. So when we finally get to it, there's no suspense. What a bummer. So there evolves a new climax that the reader decides is point of most tension.

I have a different point where I feel the tension is highest and where the story of Slaughterhouse Five is the most compelling. It's another point with Edgar Derby. It's where he is debating with Campbell about the meaning of American justice and the American way. He just starts talking about everything a die hard patriot would talk about. All of this is happening while "The air-raids sirens howl mournfully." Although this isn't the night that Dresden is bombed, this scene was also one we never saw coming. It became the new climax for me because of that.

It also became the new climax because as I looked back on this book a while later I saw that of all the events that happened (the alien abduction, the death of thousands, the rearrangement of time) this is the part I love to re-read the most. There's so much irony and so much hypocrisy in a man arguing on behalf of American ideals only to be bombed by American bombers the next day.

Overall, because of the suspense of the bombing being ruined by the structure of the novel and the lasting impact that Edgar Derby's speech had on me individually, I would give the prize of climax to this scene. Although the bombing of Dresden and the subsequent execution of Edgar Derby still had punch, they fell flat in comparison to the shock that Edgar Derby's speech delivered out of the blue. Maybe that was the intended purpose of the introduction. To take the punch out of the bombing. To take the punch out of war and allow a simple speech about ideals take the spotlight.