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.