Life as a Puzzle

As I continue to read into chapter 3, I am still very impressed and captivated by Kurt Vonnegut’s great use of structure. Throughout the chapter he changes from different experiences in Billy’s life in such a passive style that as a reader you are shocked with the seamless transition you took from an impacting war story to the dull life of an old optometrist. The way he makes the reader understand his complex plot is genius. This complicated structure reminds me of director Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece Pulp Fiction. Both the book and the movie use the inconsecutive plot structure. In Pulp Fiction the story is told from different characters prospective in different time frames, which makes it confusing. Tarantino and Vonnegut take advantage of this and create breath-taking puzzles. By using the irregular plot they tell a story that although the audience knows the ending to, it’s still intriguing. The obvious example being how we know the general story of Billy yet still want to find his path through the war.

The complicated puzzle structure used by the author leaves a huge amount of possible endings. The short references he does to articles and historical events leave a lot of space for interpreting. The reference that most caught my attention was that of the bombing of Dresden on page 59 “It looked like Dresden after it was fire bombed like the surface of the moon”. It seams as if Vonnegut is telling us that Billy is actually himself represented as a character in his story. The reference is only a sentence long but does leave you wondering whether the author is actually Billy. I am very curious, I hope that along the way we will be able to identify if the author is really taking a third person perspective on his life. This book’s complexity makes me eager to read, it leaves me questioning more than one aspect of the story, which makes it a great novel. Asides from the existence of the author in the book, I want to finds out what will happen to Billy as a war prisoner to the Germans.