Good or Bad?

Being good is a point of view. What’s good or bad isn’t written by god in a couple of stone tablets. People are good because of how people or “god” would judge them, whether they would go to hell and suffer for all eternity. Some people like being good, they feel rewarded or pleased by helping others. Some people just like to be happy by themselves. Have a good life without necessarily helping others. These people aren’t bad, they just don’t feel rewarded by being good. Yet there are two sides of being a hero or a villain. The first side, the hypocrites are the ones that’s feel rewarded because of what people think about them when they help others. The other side, the really good side, help just to feel they helped, just to see the reaction on the person they rescued. 

Love Hurts Commercial

The main approach to this commercial is ethos. They try to relate people who have crazy girlfriends/wives to the main character’s situation. The position the man is in is very common in relationships, summited to his girlfriend’s rule. They also try to have people relate to the ability of drinking something delicious without gaining weight. The end, when the women accidently hits the other uses pathos to make people laugh, with this you’ll remember and share it with others. The strong ethos relation and the strong pathos ending is marvelous. The goal was certainly met: now I want to try this new Pepsi and share this clip with my friends.

Tying Loose Ends

I have to say; this book’s ending was disappointing. What could I expect? The author’s style isn’t made for big mind blowing endings. I didn’t imagine a nerve wrecking end we are used to. But I did expect for most mysteries to be solved with a simple sentence at the end. It was ignorant to think so. The last chapters were no change of passé; we learned nothing, just hints to the truth behind the book.

As most nonlinear novels, the book ended as it began. As a reader I have more questions that I had in the beginning. Throughout the chapter we were given more clues on the existence on Kilgore Trout. This solved and created questions. He is indeed a fiction of Billy’s imagination. He created him to have something to hold on to. Of course as most things in this book, we may never know.

What these final chapters really do is: they expose the moral and style. The final moral being death is a cruel thing and there is nothing we can do about it. In chapter 10, Vonnegut writes as if he was in the book. He writes of the death, like of important people like Martin Luther King Jr and soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War. Most of all he takes the topic on a personal level, how he will live on even after his death. The highlight to the ending of the book is the crude style. The pictures and references to sexual encounters are very graphic.

I really enjoyed this book. The references, second meanings, and awesome topics really make this an intrepid novel. “Poo-tee-weet?”

Contradictions and More Contradictions!

As I started to read this book, I was quite eager to read on. The book’s topics are my favorite. There is war, manhood, and science fiction. It’s almost as if we could call Slaughterhouse Five, a guy flick. Throughout the first chapters I read not because I had to, because I wanted to. The feeling has faded. I now find myself angry because of the number of second meanings in the book. Nothing in Slaughterhouse Five is for certain. Everything has a relation to other chapters, Vonnegut’s life, or information not found in the book like some historical events. To be honest it’s getting annoying. Although I don’t want to read another word of the novel, I must continue on to find the ending to an incredible story.

The problem with this novel is it’s complex ideologies. This leaves room for criticism and mistakes by the author, contradictions if you will. The main ideology in the book is: everything is inevitable. All moments are permanent. This can be very hard to comprehend. The perfect metaphor is a rollercoaster; you know where you’re going yet you can’t stop it. In Chapter 7 there is a major contradiction. From what I understand, according to the book, you can’t change your destiny. Some novels and movies, explain this by showing that if you try to avoid it, you’ll just make it happen. Like quicksand, the more you try to escape, the quicker you’ll sink. Vonnegut made a mistake in this chapter with how Billy knows he is going to crash on the plane; nevertheless he can’t to anything about it. “He knew it was going crash, but he didn’t want to make a fool of himself by saying so.” The mistake is simple. If Billy is reliving the moment, he can change things that are up to him for example, when he goes to the bathroom. He is a slave to destiny but he isn’t a puppet. He has some freewill. It might not be a mistake; it’s just an ideal I don’t share. Billy has the ability to choose whether he boards the plane or not. He is actually living the moment not just being there.

The most annoying factor is by far: uncertainty. As you read you’re always wondering. It’s not just the plot; it’s the existence of Vonnegut in the book, if what you’re reading is an explanation or a reality. I can relate this to the bible. You know some of it is true however you don’t know how much. Right now I wonder on two things. Are Billy’s “time windows” true? And, does Kilgore Trout exist? Throughout chapter 7 and 8 there are more and more signs to time windows being just dreams. “Billy dozed in the meat locker. He found himself engaged again word for word, gesture for gesture in the argument with which this tale had began” These short signs indicate Billy is just wondering off in his dreams, he doesn’t “become unstuck in time”. The existence of Kilgore Trout is also undefined. In no point does he mention he doesn’t exist, he just suggests it. “Everybody was thrilled to have a real author at the party, even though they had never read his books.” It appears as if Billy had invented Trout for him to have something to hold on to. Although there are many references to the existence of Trout there is one that directly proves my theory. “You ever put a full length mirror on the floor, and then have a dog stand on it? Trout asked Billy.” The many clues to this mysterious author indicate he is only an illusion. As you may know he isn’t real author, he is a fictional character found in many of Vonnegut’s books. What’s his importance in Slaughterhouse Five?

Billy’s Tralfamadorians

Slaughterhouse Five is becoming impossible to interpret. As I read on I find more styles, references, and hidden morals. I find myself wanting to comment on every single phrase in the book. There are however some parts that are more important than others. For example in Diego Rodriguez’s post, he wrote of how the Tralfamadorians had basically the same ideologies to the author, the book, and the characters. I couldn’t agree more. As we read on, Tralfamadorian concepts keep popping up. Diego used the example of how both the Tralfamadorian’s books and Slaughterhouse five appeared to be in the same form. They are described as pictures. I agree with the explanation the aliens give, you could only perceive it when “you saw the big picture”. This metaphor could be extended even further because these moments aren’t static they are always happening. A good representation might be the moving paintings in bestseller, Harry Potter. In the book, “magic” paintings are like living characters and are always “alive”. This might be an even better metaphor, for in the book moments are described as happening constantly.

Diego continues on and relates the “So it goes” with the concept of destiny, explained at the end of Chapter 5. As Diego, I also related them as when I read the concept. The book with the catchy phrase of “so it goes” accepts death as an unstoppable force. Both the writing and the Tralfamadorians have this ideology. Billy believes in this too, in his speech in Chapter 6 he says, “If you protest, if you think death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood one word I’ve said.” Once again, a reflection of the alien ideologies in the overall book and characters.

I agree with Diego’s conclusion, the Tralfamadorians are an invention of Billy’s. The author of the blog post traces it back to Kilgore Trout’s books. Billy reads these books in the veteran’s mental hospital. They seam as Billy’s last resort hold on to something, to avoid going mad. I heavily relate this to the movie Memento directed by Christopher Nolan. In the movie, Leonard Shelby, the main character, has a problem with his memory; he can’t remember anything new since the accident. Spoiler Alert, at the end we learn that he created a goal to base his life around. Find the murderer of his wife. We learn that he has already found him yet continues the search. As Billy, he sub concisely knows he invented it so that they would have something to hold on to. Yet in his concise personality they believe it by heart. The Tralfamadorians are a way for Vonnegut to explain his ideals.

"Farewell, hello, farewell, hello.”

The way Kurt Vonnegut writes a book with hundreds of interpretations is mind blowing. The ongoing questioning of his existence in the book is exhilarating. He has a way of integrating the complex plot with the ongoing mystery of his existence. The merging between them is just genius. In chapter four he states how he is a fellow soldier of Billy’s. Is he just a character, or is he a narrator too? As I read on, I find certain key words that take me one step closer to solving the mystery, “Billy Pilgrim says he went to Dresden, Germany…” This aphorism is written at the beginning of Chapter 6, making emphasis on it. Now the narrator clearly has become an existing character, whereas in the beginning he clearly was omniscient. This new perspective is as if Billy had told the narrator his story, and the narrator had made it into a book, Slaughterhouse Five. However the author can be narrator, character, and Billy Pilgrim could be his shadow. What I mean is, Vonnegut might have invented Billy to give his story room to grow. They were both born in the same year 1922, and both where soldiers who were present in the bombing of Dresden. He could have easily turned his own life into the life of a crazy war veteran optometrist.

The prevailing theme throughout this chapter was death just around the corner. This novel has the ongoing theme of death, with the constant so it goes and the title itself. This was different. The theme in the chapter was that, death was nearly here. The book explains how Billy has a tape in safe deposit box that says, “I Billy Pilgrim, the tape begins, will die, have died, and always will die on February thirteenth, 1976”. After this, he explains in a speech he is giving in Chicago on that day of his death, how he will only die for a moment in time but yet will continue to live in other points in time. “Now he closes his speech as he closes every speech-with these words: Farewell, hello, farewell, hello.” The way death is described in this book by the Tralfamadorians reminds me of the movie Source Code featuring Jake Gyllenhaal. His character must go back in time to stop a bomb from going off on a train. To go back in time he must in person a victim in the train wreck, by using a device that can recreate dead people’s memories. He has a limited amount of time until the train blows up again. He constantly relieves the last moments of that person’s life, as Billy, he dies repeatedly.

The importance of title is shown at last. In the previous chapters, we were told why the book was titled Slaughterhouse Five, yet the actual moment hadn’t occurred. The title resembles what stood as shelter for the American soldiers in Dresden. How the old pig corals saved the one hundred soldier’s lives. Vonnegut plays with the structure of his book in a humorous way with bombing of Dresden. Back in the camp, one of the Englishmen tells his fellow Americans’ how, “You needn’t worry about bombs, by the way. Dresden is an open city.” Dresden was actually bombed and it is ironic. Nevertheless it appears this Englishman’s words, aren’t true, they were added by Vonnegut for humor, he indicates so by overdoing the irony in the story.

As we are approaching the end of the book, I am thrilled to learn the ending of this incredible novel.

Another Piece to the Puzzle

Mind blowing doesn’t even begin to describe the second part of chapter five. This part of the book was very dense. There were so many ideals and references you could write a whole book on them. And we finally have the answer to the ongoing question, is Billy a representation of Kurt Vonnegut?

Throughout the book there have been many hints towards the relation between the protagonist, the narrator, and the author. There were some points in which I thought they were all the same person, the protagonist being a representation of the author, and the narrator being the author. We finally our have our answer, the author is a character in the book that knows Billy. “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.” The narrator is this character in the story; this explains the intense second and third person perspective. Yet I am eager to learn how he learned so much of Billy’s life.

There is one very important part of Billy’s life told in this section, his marriage to Valencia Merble. Their honeymoon is described in heavy detail. These details are very important and yet often overlooked. For the first time we are given the specifics of Billy’s bathroom routine and his sex life. In the chapter, each time he relieves himself, there is an important event or a change of mood. For example when he goes to the bathroom in the camp, he find the author as “…he had excreted everything but his brains.” After this event there is a sudden change of mood, “He went through the door, and found himself honeymooning again”. This chapter indicates a change in mood in the novel. Suddenly Billy is happy, he is now having intercourse with his wife and Montana Wildhack. The highlights of the mood done by particular events remind me of Scorsese’s Shutter Island. In the movie, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Teddy Daniels, a deranged police detective. The movie has a few very strong and important scenes. In all of them the audience is lead to another understanding of the movie. There is also always, a key factor in them, fire. The presence of the classic element highlights the different scenes. This highlighting of the scene makes the audience understand the value of the section, in perspective to the whole plot. This strategy employed by Vonnegut and Scorsese is what makes them so important in their fields. By having hidden highlights, the audience understands their complicated story.

Finally, it is important to highlight the criticism done by the author to the Catholic Church and the American people. Although Vonnegut states them as others work, he does include them in his book. This sampling, to me is a very cowardly form of criticism from the author. The first critic is done by summarizing The Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout, in which Trout uses the premise of an alien visiting our planet and studying the Catholic Church. The second is monogram from Howard W. Campbell Jr., in which he takes the American people as generalization of humans, and continues on to critiques us. These forms of critique are very protective and cowardly. I was a disappointed Vonnegut, he has such a big potential and then goes on to write this? What happened?

As I read on, I hope to find other amazing styles and ideals from Kurt Vonnegut; because we can safely assume that he is, indeed, a literary genius. 

Hidden Morals

As I continue to read, Billy Pilgrim’s life becomes more and more complicated. We learn other of his traumatic life stories and start to understand his madness. This passage was by far the most simple and original part of this novel yet. We follow Billy in his trip around the universe with the Tralfamadorians. As his trip goes on, we learn more about his experiences at war. The war stories then relate to the other part of the chapter, where Billy is in a veteran’s mental hospital. Will we ever come to understand Billy Pilgrim?

What I most liked about this section was the reference to book titles. “The book was Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout. It was about people whose mental diseases couldn’t be treated because of the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension…” This brief referencing occurs about 4 times. The book titles all explain the current plot. It’s impressive that as it turns out, all these titles exist and used to be best sellers. The book titles all embroil the characters feelings, they explain to the reader the reasoning the characters have. The clarifying of different character’s reasoning is also a very important factor in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. In the movie, the classic comic book villain The Joker terrorizes Gotham City. It isn’t until the middle of the movie, that the audience understands why he is destroying the city. The Joker tells Batman he isn’t looking for money; he is just trying to prove a point. “I'll show you. When the chips are down, these... these civilized people, they'll eat each other. See, I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve.” The “hidden” explanations in book and films like these are great, they teach us the complicated morals behind a story. In Slaughter House Five, in the quote I mentioned, the author is clarifying that there is no cure for mental diseases. On the other hand in Batman, The Joker is trying to prove that deep down, everyone is as crazy as he is.

I infer that in the first chapter, we follow the Vonnegut trying to start the writing of this book. He discussed with a friend’s wife, that he would call his book “The Children’s Crusade”. Then at the end of today’s reading, a mysterious coronel that is part of the “medical team” in the prisoner camp says, “My God, my God-’ I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade”. This makes it seams as if Billy is a representation of the author, consequently, the title of the book. Therefore, I am very excited to learn the existence of the Kurt Vonnegut, in his novel.