No Answers, Just An Ending

The ending of slaughterhouse five didn’t exactly surprise me. I expected something better and unexpected.  I always supposed that the ending would explain all the crazy things that happened throughout the book.  But we are left without an explanation.  At the beginning I supposed that Vonnegut was using Billy’s character to reflect himself. But as the book ends, we find out that they are separate characters. Vonnegut makes himself present at some of Billy’s stories, like if they had been war comrades or something.  “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.” page. 125 That was the only answer I got, that Billy and the author were separate characters. But I was still left with a lot of questions. Was Billy really crazy? Are the people he mentions real or in his head?  Where did he get such idea about Tralfamadorians?

Even dough the purpose of this book was to talk about war, I didn’t pay much attention to those parts. I spent more time thinking about all the time traveling and the 4 dimensions.  I found the Tralfamadorians and their way of thinking fascinating.  I loved the concept of how we all live forever.  The idea that we may be dead at a certain moment, but then there will be plenty other in which we are alive. To them, life is like a never-ending cycle.  The book did a good job portraying war as a terrifying and ferocious act.  But what I really learned from it, is to appreciate time.  Memories and moments are all we are left with, we have to make them worth coming back too.

Is War Really Heroic?

As I read this book I had forgotten that it was supposed to be an anti-war book. I was paying too much attention to all the time traveling stuff. By reading chapter 8 I remembered that the actual purpose of the book was to talk about war. This chapter shows the horrible state soldiers are in. Not only physically,  but morally as well. “There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.”  This book is not the typical war story were everything seems glorious and heroic.  It gives us a little taste of the actual reality of this horrifying act.

Kilgore trout is also a big part of chapter 8.  One of his stories caught my attention and actually made me laugh. It was called “the money tree”.  I think it was a really cool way of explaining human greed.  I don’t think Kilgore is actually real. He is a real character in the book, but I think Billy made him up. He uses Kilgore’s stories to explain his own thoughts or situations.

Real Soldier?

The beginning of chapter 7 reminded me of the movie “final destination”. In the movie, there’s a guy who is supposed to get on a certain plane. But somehow he knows that the plane is going to crash.  He decides to defy his destiny and save his life by not going into the plane.  Billy also knows that his plane is going to crash. But he has learned to leave moments as they are.  He goes into the plane and survives the crash.  But he injures his head. Earlier in the book, Barbara mentions that Billy’s stories about tralfamadorians started in this time. This makes me believe that since the airplane crash Billy became literally crazy. 

There was a certain aphorism that called my attention.  In page 159, a widow examines the soldiers.  She says “All the real soldiers are dead”. Billy agreed to this, but I completely disagree. They are all real soldiers.  For instance, what is a real soldier anyway? For the widow in the story a real soldier is a tough man who is the right age. For me, a real soldier is just anyone who is brave enough to defend their country with their own lives. Just the fact of being in Dresden and trying to help makes Billy, Gluck and Derby real soldiers. 

No Beginning, No End..

Talfamadorians describe their reading as “there is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”  I spent nearly 20 minutes trying to really understand this concept. I kept wondering how it would be possible to read many moments at once.  Then I realized that it’s the perfect description for this book. We are reading many different moments, seeing Billy’s life all at once.  If you think about it, there is no specific order for the story. Billy jumps from time to time, showing us different moments that have no specific relationship between them, no cause or effect. As I read chapter 5 I felt like a Tralfamadorian looking at Billy’s life. Maybe that is the point of the book.  Maybe Vonnegut wants to give the reader the feeling of perceiving life in 4 dimensions. 

  

After thinking about the book for a while, I realized Vonnegut is an excellent writer. He is able to write without a chronological order and still make it easy to understand.  It must be hard to keep the book organized with so much “time traveling”.