![]() ![]() The bombs are unloaded from the plane, and women work around the clock on disassembly lines breaking the bombs down to their basic elements, and those elements are buried deep in the ground where they will never do anyone harm again. The dead soldiers and brought magically to life, and their plane lands on the airbase where they are made citizens again. A fighter plane flies backwards past another and draws the bullets out of the damaged aircraft and out of the injured bodies of its passengers. He comes slightly unstuck in time, and the film runs backwards. There's an amazing passage where Billy watches an old war movie on television. There was never anything he could have done, so why feel guilty?īilly bounces back and forth through memories of his life not because of alien enlightenment, but because he is never satisfied with the present. But that's okay, the Tralfamadorians revealed that no one has free will anyway. Looking back at his life, Billy feels he was only a passenger and never the driver. It's a peaceful place he can retreat to whenever his real life becomes too difficult or demanding. His notion of being put into a zoo with her only comes to him after he sees her in an adult magazine. He makes up this alternate life for himself where he is whisked away and coupled with a beautiful woman. He invents them and their view of the universe to explain the horrid events he witnesses in the war and to ease his grief over the senseless death. Of course, you can also make the case that the aliens are actually figments of Billy Pilgrim's imagination. Everything happens because it is predestined to happen. The Tralfamadorian philosophy also means that no one can ever be blamed for their actions. All those moments can be visited in any order because time does not flow linearly as everyone thinks it does. They teach him that nothing really dies, it just exists in a state of death in one moment in time but exists as alive in other moments. They make contact with Billy and teach him how to view the universe as a series of events that are always occurring. ![]() You can take the Tralfamadorians at face value. Therein lies the difficulty of this novel. We can buy that, but what about the damn aliens? Did they happen, too? Maybe a guy really was executed on the spot as a looter when he picked up a teapot he found in the ruins, and a guy who collected ears as trophies went free. Some of Vonnegut's characters may have been based on real people. People survived and combed through the rubble of their homes and told their stories. The first line of the book says, “All this happened, more or less.” Did Billy Pilgrim really get kidnapped by aliens and put into a zoo and forced to mate with a porn star? That happened? Okay, the bombing of Dresden, a city with no strategic or military worth, did actually take place, and Vonnegut was indeed held there as a prisoner of war during the attack. What? If the author is also a character, then either the author is fictional, or the story is true. Then somewhere in the middle of the story, which skips backwards and forwards through the life of its protagonist Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut mentions that one of the soldiers held captive with Billy is in fact him, Vonnegut, the author of the book. The opening chapter actually serves as an introduction to how the book came to be written, why it took Vonnegut so long to write about his experiences in War World II, and why he ultimately didn't believe his little anti-war book would have any impact on the world. It's the sort of line blurring he would take to extremes later with Breakfast of Champions, but here, because it is so off-handed, I was jolted from the page and had to stare off into the distance to stabilize myself. ![]() First off, Vonnegut himself appears in the novel as both the author and as a character. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |