"'Why me?' he asked the guard. [...] 'Vy you? Vy Anybody?'" (116)
"'That's the attractive thing about war,' said Rosewater. 'Absolutely everybody gets a little something.'" (241)
"Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones." (150)
"That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book." (160)
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| Bright Angel Point |
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| Carlsbad Caverns |
A bit of background information:
This chapter references several books. The only book the Tralfamadorians have in English is Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann, which follows the lives of three women in New York City. Edgar Derby reads The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, which is about the American Civil War. Eliot Rosewater said that "everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov by Feodor Dostoevsky," which is a Russian philosophical novel (129).
Jerry - This was an actual nickname that Allied soldiers used for the Germans during WWII.
Kilgore Trout is a fictional character that appears in several of Vonnegut's works. Interestingly, an author (and Vonnegut fan) named Philip José Farmer used the character's name as a pseudonym, so there is now a book published under the name Kilgore Trout. Read more here. Also, while Vonnegut writes about some real people, both Howard W. Campbell Jr. and Montana Wildhack are fictional characters.
A lot happens in this reading! Vonnegut makes an appearance (160). Billy hangs out in hospitals. He talks with his wife. He watches a performance of Cinderella. He is given a celebrity mate on Tralfamadore. He scares a young patient and more...
Here are some questions:
1) The Tralfamadorian book structure (explained on pages 111-112) follows a unique form. "There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully," and "there is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, [and] no effects" (112). I would argue that Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five in a similar fashion. The scenes do no appear to connect. The story is not told chronologically, etc. In my opinion, there is not a true plot. Do you agree? If so, what does this say about Vonnegut's view of the Tralfamadorians and the ideas of free will and time? Why include this connection?
2) There are several more pieces of evidence in this chapter that suggest Billy is imagining the Tralfamadorians and only dreaming about his time with them. Valencia is referred to as "one of the symptoms of his disease," and Billy acknowledges that he is "going crazy" (137). Billy's perceptions are also described as "unreliable" (159). What do you think? If he is imagining the Tralfamadorians, do you think any other parts of this chapter are imagined? What is real, if anything?
3) Several parts of this chapter are either confusing or shocking to me. Is there a moment in the story that stands out to you because it is bizarre, unusual, or disturbing? Why did Vonnegut include it, and what, if anything, does it add to the story?
1. It’s interesting, but John, Keyes, and I had a conversation about this today before class started. In that conversation, we discussed Vonnegut’s frequent use of the paragraph breaks, and how they made the book resemble Tralfamadorian books, the text appearing in clumps of symbols which are fairly unique and not connected to one-another, but still, combined, convey an emotion. I agree that Vonnegut described the Tralfamadorian book structure to be like how he was writing this book itself, with clumps of text rather than one chronological plot. This makes sense when compared to the Tralfamadorian idea of time, as, since they don’t see time as chronological, a chronological story wouldn’t make sense. I think Vonnegut is both trying to write a book with a structure unlike any other, and attempting to convey how scattered and un-anchored Billy is—even the story of his life is a mess.
ReplyDelete2. I think Billy’s time in the war is real, and I think he was traumatized during that time. I think that, due to that trauma, Billy had a mental breakdown, landing him in the hospital, and I think that he actually had a bed next to Rosewater, who read a lot of science fiction. I fully believe that, due to the combination of his mental trauma and newly found affinity for science fiction, Billy started to use what he read in those books to cope with what he has seen in the war. I think most of the class will agree that the Tralfamadorians aren’t real, and I am willing to bet that they were inspired by the book mentioned on page 138, where it is said that the book “is about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian.”
3. Yes, there are many parts that stood out to me. The one that first came to my mind when reading this question is when Vonnegut is talking about all the gifts given by the English soldiers, on page 122. He mentions that, among those gifts, the Americans were given a bar of soap and a candle. He then goes on to say that, though the British had no way of knowing it, those items were made from the fat of the people that the State had killed. This of course is horrifying, but I think that Vonnegut included it because he wanted to recognize that, though he is writing this book about how horrible to bombings of Dresden were, attocities were committed by both sides of the war, and that, as he assures the University of Chicago professor, he knows and hasn’t forgotten about how horrible the Germans were.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Charlotte that there is no true plot. In describing the Tralfmadorians way of writing, Vonnegut intends to describe the book. Reading this chapter I wondered whether Vonnegut tries to illustrate the Tralfamadorians as the ideal species. They seem to assign equal weight to each moment in life and understand that everything is ultimately arbitrary which I would argue is Vonnegut's ultimate message. By not having a plot or writing chronologically, Vonnegut is doing what the Tralfamadorians achieve in their books which is “the depth of many marvelous moments seen all at one time”(112). I think that Vonnegut includes the idea of free will to illustrate how human way of life is not necessarily the right way of life. The definition of free will which I interpret as “the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate” and the idea of chance which are both human attributes seem to conflict. By being human, Billy has or at least believes in “free will” but we see that he is so passive that I would say he leaves everything up to fate. He never tries to change the past or future or even the present but just floats on by.
I do not think that it matters whether or not Billy’s stories are true. I believe Billy thinks the stories are true, but does that mean they are? And if not, who gets to decide what the truth is or the validity of Billy’s stories. This question reminded me of Tim O'brien's How to Tell a True War Story. Like Vonnegut, he interpreted the meaning of “truth” unusually. In both stories, truth is subjective. According to O'brien, Billy war story is especially true because it is filled with “fictional things” and unglorified moments of war.
So many parts of this chapter shocked me! The part I found most interesting though was when Billy is in the Tralfamadorian zoo. Vonnegut puts this scene in here, I would argue, to illustrate the absurdity of humans and how we odd it is that we put animals in cages. I appreciated the irony in this scene as well. Billy is the most lame protagonist and yet he is treated as an extraordinary creature. This may be a stretch, but I think Vonnegut includes this scene to convey his motif of human insignificance. People think that they are all knowing and important in the universe when really we are not. An example of this is when Billy asks the Tralfamadorians how they keep peace and they are all struck by his sheer stupidity even though this seems like a totally valid question.
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ReplyDeletePrompt One: I find that the transitions in this story, while lacking “particular relationship” at times, do follow a loose and chronological order. For instance, while Billy may be popping in and out of Europe and Ilium, the war-time narrative, his moments as a soldier in war have been revealed chronologically. First he is captured, then he is a prisoner. We know that he’ll next experience the firebombing of Dresden. There is a clear order, though one that is spliced with childhood memories and vacations to the Tralfamadorian home planet. And from the beginning of this book, Vonnegut has made clear that this story does have a beginning and an end, a Billy and a “Poo-tee-weet?” So why is it that we let the distractions of a wandering mind convince us that such structure and intentional order has been forgotten.
ReplyDeletePrompt Two: Why do we question the honesty of a story’s main character? The answer I’d like to give is that the Vonnegut of this story is the one who has been imagining things, providing an unreliable narrative. From the way he has so far inserted himself into scenes (twice), I believe that he is not the best of acquaintances with Billy. How could he know so much then, and how could he know what the zoos of tralfamadore are like when he’s never been there. I question whether Billy even exists. This is certainly a debate of Vonnegut’s reliability instead.
Prompt Three: Like Leo has mentioned, the distribution of human-made candles in this chapter stood out to me as another attempt by Vonnegut to depict the absurdity of war. Here, men who were fighting against Nazi Germany, were unwillingly supporting its horrific treatement of those minorities it sought to exterminate. Perhaps this is also jab at that professor for Chicago: It doesn’t matter who is using the candles; it’s bad, it’s absurd. It doesn't matter who is being fire-bombed; it’s bad, it’s absurd.
1. Indeed, as Leo reports, we were talking about this before class. I can't disagree with Charlotte that there is no "true plot." Yet the narrative bits build and build, the seemingly random "messages" building exponentially to create a coherent view of contemporary life—maybe all history—grounded in the tragedy—if it is a tragedy— of one unlucky man and those around him. The Tralfamadorians see "many marvelous moments seen at one time" in the random details. Maybe that's having one eye does to you and not believing that free will exists. And ignoring anything unpleasant. Maybe what holds the narrative together is the sheer unpleasantness of the world Billy exists in. Living like the aliens—and living like a human—allows that ignorance. But Billy is not ignorant at all.
ReplyDelete2. I got to agree with Leo and his reasoning. I think everything in the chapter happened...in Billy's mind. The Tralfamadorians offer Billy a Magic Fingers for his soul; yet they can't allay his trauma and sadness anymore than the real Magic Fingers and, as Javy said yesterday, fake ice cream. Real ice cream isn't doing the trick either.
3. The saddest moment of this entire sad book has always been the Russian undoing the barbed wire from Billy's body as he stumbles in the dark. He is the anti-Roland Weary, the anti-Paul Lazarro: he is response to the passivity extolled by the aliens with their silly plunger bodies. "Good-bye" is one of the saddest lines, if not the saddest line, because it is so unusual in this story. The Russian is not a bug in amber. He is humanity at its best—which makes him unique in this story.
1) I agree. I kept thinking to myself when doing this reading that Vonnegut plays an important role in his novel but I couldn’t tell exactly which character he takes on. At first, I thought it was Billy, but I think that his ideas about war and life in general are expressed through the Tralfamadorians. A quote that continues to stick out to me from the Tralfamadorians is “there is no why” (97). In class, especially when reading The Sun Also Rises, we talked a lot about how the atrocity of war made it difficult for veterans to feel importance about everyday life. As Vonnegut did serve in World War II and witnessed the bombing of Dresden, perhaps he is making a similar point. Vonnegut is showing readers some of the pointlessness that he feels with his post-war perspective of life. Another interesting idea in Slaughterhouse-Five is that Billy manifests a lot of this passivity and non-caring worldview that Vonnegut expresses through the Tralfamadorians. I think that Vonnegut includes his ideas in the form of the Tralfamadorians to show how foreign the ideas may seem to someone who has not experienced war like himself.
ReplyDelete2) I would agree that Billy is imagining the Tralfamadorians. Most of the evidence points to that. I think the most convincing form of evidence is the distinct similarities between some of his experiences in war and life and on Tralfamadore. For one, on Tralfamadore Billy is in a cage and in war he is in a prison. Also, there are even quotes from both sections that are exactly the same. The most prevalent reoccurring quote is “Why me?” (116). Billy receives a similar answer to the question in both cases which further enforces the point that his experiences on Tralfamadore are just a rehashing of the trauma that he experienced during World War II. On Tralfamadore, he is told that it is arbitrary that it is him and he is just caught in a moment of amber, while on earth he is told, “Vy anybody?” showing that the German guard also thinks it is arbitrary (116). Overall, I think that all of Billy’s time travel is real in that it is just his memory, but the moments on Tralfamadore are just his imagination obscured by some form of PTSD.
3) The moment that was the most bizarre to me was the story of Billy exiting the medical area of the prison camp to “take a leak” (157). Vonnegut describes Billy as a dancing scarecrow as a Russian prisoner approaches him and helps Billy out of the barbed wire he was caught on. The only thing I could figure out from this moment was that it shows Billy’s disorientation. Following the exchange, Vonnegut states, “Where had he come from, and where should he go now?” (158). I’m still not sure of the full meaning of this small moment in the story but it seems to show that even Billy is confused by the obscurity of his life.
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ReplyDeleteI would argue that there is in fact a true plot in the novel. Vonnegut’s use of frequent paragraph breaks is almost always preceded or followed by a particularly significant or eye-catching remark. I would argue that Vonnegut uses the breaks in the narrative to draw focus to specific parts of the novel. As for the plot question, I would argue that Vonnegut places the elements of the story in a deliberate way to propel the reader’s understanding of Billy—and to an extent war—rather than to propel the chronological plot of the story. For example, Vonnegut writes how Billy is about as happy living as a prisoner of the Tralfmadorians as he was on earth, and then he cuts off the paragraph.
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I think that there is a very strong case to be made—using both contemporary analysis of PTSD and what Vonnegut explicitly says—that the events in this novel take place around 1968, and that all the events in the past are either figments of Billy’s imagination or a post-traumatic-stress coping mechanism. I believe that the majority of what Billy remembers about the war is true in the sense that it is what he remembers happening; what Billy—the sobbing crazy veteran—remembers and what happened may be two distinct categories. On page 159, the narrator tells the reader that “Billy’s perceptions were so unreliable that he saw the words as hanging in the air.” This is Vonnegut both discrediting Billy’s telling of war, but also his claims that he is a time traveling abductee.
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I was quite confused as to why Vonnegut repeatedly wrote about Billy’s genitals. The porter comments on it on page 161 and the narrator on page 169. I do not know what these add to the story beyond establishing a tone of bizarreness to mimic the bizarreness of war.
I had not made the connection between the Tralfamadorian pattern of storytelling and Vonnegut’s/Billy’s, but it makes complete sense to me. The story seems to become more chronological as we progress further into the book. It’s like multiple stories that are all broken into bits but told in chronological chunks. I think there is a plot even if it’s not structured in a typical fashion. I do not think a plot must be in chronological order.
ReplyDeleteI think most aspects of the novel are imagined. I think his perceptions of the world are only “unreliable” if we are trying to make it make sense in a “typical” world (the concrete world most of us imagine when some says, “world.”) And there’s the whole saying about one’s perspective being one’s truth, so maybe anything can be real in that sense. It just depends on the “to whom.”
Well, the breakdown of the crucifiction of Jesus is one of the best things I’ve ever seen in writing. He says, “So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground” (139). There are honestly quite a few disturbing things in this chapter (and in general, but specifically in this chapter.) Billy catches on fire and is just like, “Meh,” and Valencia cries in bed because she didn’t think anyone would ever marry her. We also see the disturbing image of the tiny jacket filled with bullet holes. Typically, when I think of death, I think of the person, of the family, etc, but never the clothes, and seeing the clothes and imagining Billy wearing a way-too-tiny “vest” filled with bullet holes suddenly makes it more real, like I can see and feel the frays around the edges.
1. In many ways I do agree, and in many ways I don't. I do believe that the stories written by Tralfamadorians described are reflections of this book in that they are written in a very similar fashion: they are absurd and random. They are organized with excerpts of writing strategically placed in the story to make an overall point about life and death and what it all means. However, I also think there is a plot in this book unlike in the Tralfamadorian stories. Although out of order and a little bit difficult to follow, there is a beginning, a middle, and an end. We are experiencing the unraveling of a once sane man who is dealing with what I think is some major PTSD. We get excerpts of his childhood and little blurbs about his life in between (which is the beginning) but then the major time period of his life that we read about is his tragic experience in war (the middle). Then, we see the effects that it has on him and how he ends up in mental hospitals and writes to newspapers about his alien abduction and then we see him scare off one of his patients in the end and people believe that he is "evidently going crazy"(172). There is a beginning, a middle, and an end to this story I just don't think that Billy sees it that way.
ReplyDelete2. In this story I think it is really hard to tell what is real time, and what is a flashback as well as what is real and what is not, but that's just Billy coping and it doesn't matter. He even says it, he knows he is going crazy. Everything to Billy is real and that's all that matters. None of it could be real, but these are Billy's real perceptions and real feelings and so even though none of it may be real, at the same time it is all real. Billy's stories and "experiences" may be perceived as unreliable to surrounding characters but all of his thoughts and struggles are completely real to him which make them real in the story because they make him the way that it is and they propel this ever-twisting plot.
3. One part of the story that jumped out to me as a little bit oddly placed and random (but then again so is everything else) is on page 156 when it's just this image of a grave that reads "everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt". I think this kind of goes back to the idea that it doesn't seem like Billy is really all that thrilled to still be alive. Everyone around him keeps dying, he is obviously dealing with a lot of grief and PTSD, and he keeps imagining these other dimensions where things are different and death doesn't mean just death or sex isn't just sex between a man and a woman, and I think that he would much rather be there than on earth with all these other "earthlings" who he can't really identify with and who call him crazy and don't see what he sees or "know" what he seems to think he "knows". It's kind of like his fascination with science fiction. When he dies, he will be somewhere else where he is more understood and everything will be beautiful and nothing will hurt anymore. Just like when he just stood there when bullets were flying at him and gave the soldier another chance, Billy isn't afraid of death. Billy believes that with death comes a better life that he is better suited for.
1. I agree, I think it is clear that Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five so as to deliberately emulate the form of the Tralfamadorian books. As Charlotte said, there is no chronology, no order, and seemingly no plot. However, in this instance I do not think that the lack of a plot in any way lessens the impact of the emotional or thematic significance Vonnegut writes about. In other words, the lack of a plot does not detract from the story. Although I am hesitant — perhaps because I am human and I so desperately want to believe in the existence of free-will and the construct of time as an intangible but constant, steady force in our lives — indeed in some ways I think that the Tralfamadorians are on to something. In many ways the Tralfamadorian stories are similar to the arc of human life. There is life and there is death and there is everything in between, and at the end one is left with “the depth of many marvelous moments seen all at one time” (112).
ReplyDelete2. Although at first I was inclined to simply accept Billy’s time travelling and the Tralfamadorians as a manifestation of some strange mixture of magical realism and science fiction rolled into an antiwar novel, after reading this chapter my opinion has shifted. The Tralfamadorians are certainly not real. Nor is time travel. While we can speculate on exactly why or how Billy conjured up this extraterrestrial world (symptoms of PTSD, a result of his newfound affinity for science-fiction?) I think that in-keeping with the nature of Vonnegut’s story, the reasoning behind Billy’s imaginations do not matter. It is enough to acknowledge that although these things do not exist in actuality, they do in Billy’s reality.
3. There are so many strange and wonderful things in this chapter that I could have talked about, yet the one line that stood out to me the most is so extremely simple that it is profound in its simplicity. The middle of the chapter is dominated by scenes of Billy in the hospital bed and the various interactions he has while there, some of them being with his rich, rather fat fiance. In response to her asking him about war Billy simply says: “It would sound like a dream…Other people’s dreams aren’t very interesting, usually” (155). We have spent this entire year reading different stories and accounts of war, and in nearly all of them the authors struggle with how to properly convey the reality of war to readers who have never experienced combat. Conversely, I feel as if this entire year we have also struggled to understand a world that is so far removed from our own, but this made sense to me. I finally understood it.
1) The Tralfamadorian book structure (explained on pages 111-112) follows a unique form. "There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully," and "there is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, [and] no effects" (112). I would argue that Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five in a similar fashion. The scenes do not appear to connect. The story is not told chronologically, etc. In my opinion, there is not a true plot. Do you agree? If so, what does this say about Vonnegut's view of the Tralfamadorians and the ideas of free will and time? Why include this connection?
ReplyDeleteAlthough at first glance, not everything is in chronological order, it may seem that there is no true plot in the story, however, I would like to disagree. I believe there is still a plot, as each moment might be considered their own plot or own story. However, when you put together all of them, they create overarching themes and statements that connect each story and moment together. For example, the importance of death and its existence in every story. By having everything not in chronological order, it shows the mental state of Billy, as he remembers things not in order, and most times, he doesn’t even get to choose what he remembers, much life PTSD and life in general. By not putting all of the moments in chronological order, the reader is not in control of time and how we get our information, just like how Billy is not in control of time in the book. We can’t control that the book shifts from WWII to then decades after within two paragraphs, it just does. Billy can’t control when and what time he shifts back to, he just does. Or so it goes.
2) There are several more pieces of evidence in this chapter that suggest Billy is imagining the Tralfamadorians and only dreaming about his time with them. Valencia is referred to as "one of the symptoms of his disease," and Billy acknowledges that he is "going crazy" (137). Billy's perceptions are also described as "unreliable" (159). What do you think? If he is imagining the Tralfamadorians, do you think any other parts of this chapter are imagined? What is real, if anything?
First off, the author points out many times in the book that Billy is an unreliable person to base the complete truth off of. Many times Billy sees things that are just simply not the case. For example on page 159, he sees the sign as if it was floating in the air: “Billy’s perceptions were so unreliable that he saw the words as hanging in air, painted on a transparent curtain, perhaps.” However, in times like these, it is so hard to deem something as a truth, but rather just a different perspective. To Billy, all of these events would be true, just like how to Weary, the Three Musketeers story and his heroic deeds were true. I don’t think you can say that anything is true definitely, because in different perspectives, it would seem like something completely different for someone else. In this sense, it is like trying to distinguish what a true war story is.
3) Several parts of this chapter are either confusing or shocking to me. Is there a moment in the story that stands out to you because it is bizarre, unusual, or disturbing? Why did Vonnegut include it, and what, if anything, does it add to the story?
What stood out to me was when they talked about the interactions between the Germans and the Englishmen: “They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were exactly what Englishmen ought to be. They made war look stylish and reasonable, and fun”. It really brings the gloried part of war, and how in society it is deemed as something to look forward to, or something positive and fun when in reality, it is just the opposite. This is also shown when Billy’s wife starts asking him about war, implying that it was something heroic and glamourous: “It was a simple-minded thing for a female Earthling to do, to associate sex and glamour with war” (154).
While I have no clue when the present is, the most continuous storyline of Billy becoming a POW and making his way to Dresden seems, for now, to be vaguely chronological. And despite the small glimpses and deliberate “spoiling” of future events that Vonnegut does, it does feel as if the book is building up to Dresden itself and has a narrative arc, if a nontraditional one. However, I do agree that the Tramalfadorian structure is mirrored purposely by Vonnegut’s writing, and seems to suggest a persistent trauma of living and consciousness. In some ways, Billy is forced to be a pillar of salt. It also suggests a total lack of free will and agency in the face of such absurd, overpowering forces such as war. After all, The world will end in a bang, but a meaningless one, triggered by a rocket fuel explosion that there is no preventing. Not because of destiny, controlled by some being with access to a bigger picture, but rather, simply careless predestination, where all moments have already happened and things are just what they are. This is this.
ReplyDeleteI think it goes back to O’Brien’s whole deal about how a true war story need not be factually true. The Tramalfadorians feels like they could be part of a true war story that never happened, the same way that Billy Pilgrim is presented as being a “real” character who doesn’t know “Vonnegut” (as he presents himself in the story) but is in many of the same places that he’s in. In this case, I would say that the aliens are as real as anything that happens in Billy’s life, if not more so. After all, him marrying Valencia is “one of the symptoms of his disease,” and he thinks of her as a woman whom he would never marry if he were in his right mind. For him, at least, his marriage is not particularly real on any meaningful level. Everything that occurs to him seems to occur with a level of abstraction, where he doesn’t engage with the world around him. It also reminds me of what Rosewater says about why he reads Kilgore Trout’s science fiction novels:
So they were trying to reinvent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help.
Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy one time about a book that wasn’t science fiction. He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov by Feodor Dostoevsky. “But that isn’t enough any more,” said Rosewater. (129)
The Tramalfadorians and their view of the world could be seen as more "real" and meaningful than reality for Billy. Like the turn to surrealism after WWI, objective reality seems to be overrated in this book after living through war and atrocity.
The discussion of Kilgore’s view of Jesus’s story teaching people that there are right people to lynch and wrong people to lynch was pretty affecting. It was a very novel interpretation and point that I had never considered before and the aggressively colloquial language it was presented in was both amusing and slightly jarring. It seems to reinforce his point that an atrocity is an atrocity, no matter who is being killed from the beginning of the story, when he talks about his disdain for massacres and the professor who justified the bombing of Dresden with what the Germans had done to Jews in concentration camps.
1. I definitely agree that Vonnegut appears to have replicated the plot structure of the Tralfamadorian book. I think this was clearly a conscious choice, considering how often he points out that the plot is changing time periods. He draws attention to the structure of the book, in ways I don’t think he would if it wasn’t important or worth attention. But what I like about Vonnegut’s decision is that he doesn’t do all the work for you. He prompts these kinds of questions— and I guess, my answer as well— by setting up a theme and then never really explaining it, but bringing it up just enough to where you can’t forget about it. He does the same thing with “so it goes”, and the candles made out of Holocaust victims. He doesn't want any detail to be forgotten. Every detail is important, but it's up to you to figure out why.
ReplyDelete2. I’m not sure if there's any sort of pattern that one could use to determine what is real or not real in this book, and again, going back to my previous point, I think that’s definitely intentional. I’d imagine that this same sort of “which way is up” confusion is present, and infinitely more intense in actual war settings. Could this book be a metaphor or analogy for war? I’m not sure if that’s just an incredibly bold reach or if there’s any truth to my statement, but it would definitely explain why Billy’s life is so chaotic and hard to follow.
3. The scene where Billy is in bed with his wife was particularly eye-catching because it is incredibly domestic, very average and not at all chaotic. It's boring when so little of this book seems to slow down or calm at all. Obviously Billy is an incredibly bland individual, but I’d argue that his life itself isn’t bland. He’s had many people in his family experience tragedy, he’s lived through an incredibly intense war, and he seems to have some kind of mental illness. That makes for a very hectic, arguably traumatic life. The scene with his wife is touching because its just so normal.
1) I agree that Vonnegut wrote his story in a very similar fashion. He not only has an idiosyncratic story line that focuses “on the depths of marvelous moments seen all at one time,” such as when Billy and Valencia have sex and then their child Robert is described, but also the very layout of the book is similar with the “brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. "There is not a true plot because a plot involves interrelated sequences which lead to a climax, but the structure of this book offers no place for a climax and I feel the only denouement could be everyone in the story dying. The constantly repeated phrase “so it goes” captures the mentality of acceptance that the Tralfamadorians instill in Billy. By accepting life’s events as mere facts it allows Billy to be comforted in an escapism mentality.
ReplyDelete2) As I previously stated, I truly believe that Billy is engaging in escapism. He has created the Tralfamadorians (also what kind of name is that?) in order to avoid the unpleasant, boring, arduous, scary, and banal aspects of his daily life and to help relieve persistent feelings of depression that he feels about life after the war. The Tralfamadorians offer him the perfect escape because they confirm that everything happens no matter what you personally do to either stop or inflict them. After witnessing the atrocity that is war, the only way Billy can live with himself is with this notion of predetermination. It is very interesting, because for many the idea of lacking autonomy is incredibly alarming and deepens one’s depression, however, for Billy it makes his actions in the war and life justified. In this way, the Tralfamdorians are a coping mechanism and a figment of his imagination. Also, the fact that they bring him an attractive twenty year old actress really makes me feel that he has imagined it. I understand that this is a sci-fi novel, or at least shares many aspects of a sci-fi novel, and in the sci-fi novels that I have read the extraterrestrial creatures are more real to the reader than the people on earth. The author makes them more real and less like a dream made by one of the characters in the story. Vonnegut’s manipulation of time, for some reason, makes me feel like he has created the tralfamadorians to explain the events of the past.
3)“The Tralfamadorians tried to give Billy clues that would help him imagine sex in the invisible dimensions. They told him that there could be no Earthling babies without male homosexuals. There could be babies without female homosexuals. There couldn’t be babies without women over sixty-five years old. There could be babies without men over sixty-five. There couldn’t be babies without other babies who had lived an hour or less after birth. And so on” (146). I do not understand why Vonnegut included this in the story, what the relevance is, or how it biologically works. Perhaps Vonnegut is making a statement about no one truly understanding anything and everything we have been told about life and death is a lie; however, he says that in much clearer terms throughout the chapters. Why have this entire paragraph explaining sex? Also, maybe as the mere earthling that I am I could not possibly understand, but when you think about it through science and medicine it really makes no sense and is just wrong. Maybe Vonnegut is showing the reader that even something as naturally human as sex can be made confusing.