The American Freedom

So I was reading chapter 8, and I came across yet another quote.

"Blue is for the American sky" (163).

I see this saying as almost a search for hope, or one who knows what the future holds. Someone who wants freedom for all. Because when I think of America, I think of freedom. He's talking about what's on the American flag, and what each color represents. So blue being for the American sky, to me, is searching for freedom from the war, and maybe all of the pain and suffering around them. What do you guys see this quote as?

Billy's Sudden Clarity

In chapter 5, I came across a quote that captured my attention.

"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt" (122).

I won't lie to you, this quote is deep. This was my favorite quote in the whole book. It got me thinking, is Billy really that sad that he's already thinking about what will be on his grave stone? The world is such a destructive place, but yet, you can still find the beauty in small things. I think that's what he's trying to say; that even though there's a war going on, there's still beauty around you. But it could also mean that everything stops hurting when you die. All of the pain and terror you feel within suddenly disappears and you're left with a wave of calm. That clarity is the beauty Billy now sees within the world that maybe he didn't before.

Free Will

While I was reading chapter 4, I came across another quote that caught my attention and made me think.

"If I hadn't spent so much time studying Earthlings...I wouldn't have any idea what was meant by 'free will'. I visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will" (86).

This statement from the Tralfamadorian caught my attention, because I had never thought of 'free will' that deeply before. We live in a society where everyone naturally has it, until you abuse the rules of the society. However, is there really such thing as 'free will'? No matter what you do, there will always be consequences for your actions, whether good or bad. 

Billy's Fate

As I was reading chapter 1, I came across a quote that caught my attention.

"I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go" (20).

I feel like this quote is what keeps Billy going, because it seems like a strong quote. The war has had such an impact on him, that even waking up is bad. He's saying he wakes up to sleep, because he doesn't want to be in this war or where there's pain. He slowly wakes up because he's not ready for the tragedies he will witness. Maybe he's saying that he cannot fear his fate, because it is what it is; uncontrollable. He just gets up and does what he needs to in order to survive, and for him, that's enough.

What do you think the quote means to Billy?

Billy going crazy

In chapter 5, Kurt Vonnegut talks about how nobody really thought that Billy was going crazy, they just thought he was acting normal. He then went to to the hospital, and they said, he had gone insane. What was the cause for Billy going crazy, the war, his child hood?

In chapter 5, Billy time travels back into his childhood at age 12. He was going crazy, because in the chapter before, he was captured by a flying saucer in the next chapter. Billy travels back to the Grand Canyon. This chapter was important, because it shows that Billy is going crazy in Tralfamadore.

Billy as a character

The writing style of this novel doesn't give the reader a chance to fully understand Billy as a character. We have read snippets about Billy's childhood, read about his job as an optometrist, and heard about his strange interactions with his war comrades. Some of the Billy's memories that we read seem to be random and sometimes unexpected which makes it hard to figure out Billy. In many other books, the reader is able to learn and connect with the main character within the first 50 pages of the book, but all throughout this book I find myself still trying to understand Billy as a character. In class when we read The Grapes of Wrath, we were able to quickly learn about Tom Joad. We quickly learned that he was recently let out of jail, he's faithful to his family, connected to his community, and a hard worker. All of these qualities are personal things that made it easy to connect to Tom, but the main character of Slaughterhouse Five, Billy, is quite different.
When Billy was in the hospital after his plane crashed into Sugarbush, few people came to visit him. Another patient who shared the room with him said, "'He bores the hell out of me'" (pg 184). Even in the war he was not appreciated or liked at all by the other men. He even told them to "go on without me" because he knew that he was not wanted (pg 156). When he traveled with his comrades on the train, they wanted him to "keep the hell away from here" (pg 79). So, at many different points Billy was clearly not accepted by other people. However, it is hard to understand why he wasn't accepted since the reader was never able to fully connect with Billy and understand him. It is hard to imagine what he does to make people hate him so much.
Why do you think Billy is not liked by many people? Why was Billy chosen as the main character of this book if he isn't a "likable" person? Do you think that the writing style of the book contributes to how much we are able to discover about Billy?

Billy's First Tears

One thing that struck me as strange in Slaughterhouse Five was the lack of empathy that Billy showed. There were neither cradling fallen comrades nor trying to save the life of anyone. There was not really anyone that he cared for most of the time. The first time that he shed a tear during the book did not come at the death of his wife, or the bombing of Dresden. It came with the physical suffering of two horses.

  “When Billy saw the condition of his means of transportation, he burst into tears. He hadn’t cried about anything else in the war” (Vonnegut 197). The only reason I can think that he would cry at this and not the many other horrors that he saw is that this had a similarity to his Billy’s own life. I believe that he felt the horses were just as helpless as he was and that he saw that both he and the horses lacked free will. He felt that like him the horses were forced to work and do things that they did not want to do.

Why do you think this event was the first thing during the war to make Billy become visibly emotional and cry?   

Death Everywhere?

Death was a large part of this book. Towards the end of the book, it is noticed that Vonnegut starts to refer to death more and more. It seems to me that death is what this book is based around, but at the same time, I feel like this book is trying to avoid death. The term "so it goes" is repeated a multitude of times in this book, written after any mention of someone or something dying. Although "so it goes" is such a well known and repeated phrase, it seems to me that Vonnegut may be trying to avoid death the whole book. The Tralfamadorians believe that every moment is happening all the time. That nobody ever actually dies, because though they may have died, they still lived and always will live. In some ways, death is nowhere because when you die you are still alive in your memories, but in other ways death is everywhere because "I, Billy Pilgrim, the tape begins, will die, have died, and always will die on February thirteenth, 1976" (Vonnegut, 141).

At one point in the book, Billy is talking to a boy who's father died in Vietnam: "While he examined the boy's eyes, Billy... assured the fatherless boy that his father was very much alive still in moments the boy would see again and again" (Vonnegut, 135). This Tralfamadorian way of thinking about death was a way for Billy to help others and himself while dealing with death.

I wonder if Billy used the Tralfamadorian way of looking at life and death to help him in accepting his own death and any death that he witnessed in his life.

Humans: Machines in Disguise

A little more than halfway through the book, Vonnegut mentions an idea that, "Tralfamadorians, of course, say that every creature and plant in the Universe is a machine. It amuses them that so many Earthlings are offended by the idea of being machines." (154) It seems to me, that at war, many people become simply machines. People no longer think about what they are doing. When they are told to kill, without a second though, they kill. 

Earlier this year, we read All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. The book was about a boy named Paul Baumer who fought in World War I. At one point, Paul describes "This is the first time I have killed with my hands, whom I can see close at hand, whose death is my doing." (221) Before that, he had killed with guns. Though he was still killing, it wasn't so close up and personal. Paul and many other soldiers were turned into machines who were taught to kill, but when Paul sees death closer up, he realizes how brainwashed he was.

In some ways, I wonder if we are all machines, brainwashed to some extent by society. Told what were are supposed to look like, act like, and say. 

Connections between Past Books and Slaughterhouse Five

Our readings in American Studies have covered many events and time periods. Three of the books we have read had to do with war and the effects of war on its surroundings. More often than not the effects of war had a horrendous result for the people and places involved in them. In Slaughterhouse Five an image shown is of men and people acting and being treated as animals and "nothings." Relatable to events in All Quiet on the Western Front, and Night. 
    
"Men were hurling themselves against each other..... Beasts of prey unleashed, animal hate in their eyes"(Wiesel 7.25-29). Once peaceful people now fight viciously in order to gain scraps of food, they fight as if savage animals. 

"We march up, moody or good-tempered soldiers – we reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals"(Remarque 2.27). When entering the battlefield a soldier becomes part animal in order to be violent enough to kill and to survive.  

"It had been built as a shelter for pigs....Now it was going to serve as a home away from home for one hundred American prisoners of war"(Vonnegut 152). While living in a POW camp is hardly human, forcing men to live in a place most likely filled with the stench of dead animals is not the least bit humane. Pointing towards the lack of care for the "American Pigs".  


Each of these quotes show in some way human beings losing part of their human identity. Whether they themselves were driven to the point of acting as wild animals, had to be animals in order to survive, or were being pushed towards living as an animal. This type of effect on people is a part of war that makes a person question, "is it worth it?"

All That Mother Does For Billy

Billy's mother visits him while he is in the mental hospital. Billy is described as being ungrateful and embarrassed to have his mother there because "She had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all." (102) Billy had a difficult life. He fought in war, was "kidnapped by aliens, taken to their planet" then he was thought of as mentally ill when he told anyone of his travels to Tralfamadore. At this time in the book, when Billy's mother visits him at the hospital, Vonnegut says Billy is embarrassed. The embarrassment comes from Billy not wanting his mother: the person that gave him life, see how unhappy or crazy he was. Even though in retrospect some people had harder lives than Billy, he was still unhappy, and he didn't want his mother to see that ungrateful side of him.

Later in the book, Vonnegut mentions Billy's mother asking, "How did I get so old?". The way that I took this quote, was that Billy's mother spent so much time worrying about Billy, that she almost forgot about herself. "How did I get so old?" is often a question asked by older people when they see how old someone younger than them is getting. Do you agree with me? What do you think the importance is of Billy's mother in Slaughterhouse Five? Do you think she is even important at all?

A Writing Style Similar to the Tralfamadorians Thinking

The writing style that Kurt Vonnegut uses is somewhat confusing. The order of Billy's memories don't always make sense, and the passages sometimes seem out of context. The writing style that Vonnegut uses is similar to the unorganized way that the Tralfamadorians see life, and think.

When Billy first got on the Tralfamadorians spaceship, he started asking questions, like "why me?": "That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is..." (77) These questions are similar to questions I was asking myself while reading Slaughterhouse Five. Why did Vonnegut choose to write this way? Why does he repeat phrases in such a way? Later in the book, Billy is confused by many Tralfamadorian concepts such as there being many different sexes etc. "It was gibberish to Billy... There was a lot that Billy said that was gibberish to the Tralfamadorians, too..." (114) Though most of what the Tralfamadorians said to Billy didn't make sense to him, it was true the opposite way as well. This shows that the unorganized thoughts of humans are just as as unorganized as the thoughts of the Tralfamadorians.

I wonder what Vonnegut's thought process was when choosing the order of memories. How do you think Kurt Vonnegut chose the experiences of Billy's to tell? Why do you think he made it so confusing? Do you think it has to do with the way that the Tralfamadoraians think?

What does "so it goes" really mean?

Throughout each chapter, Kurt Vonnegut ends the paragraph with, "so it goes". I think in other words, he's trying to say, or hint that you as the reader knows what happens next. "The Germans carried the corpse out.
-The corpse was Wild Bob. So it goes"(p.69).
-Billy was the only one who had a coat from a dead civilian. So it goes" (p.82)
"So it goes" is used when Vonnegut talks about death or people dying, even if the person has been dead for a while , like in the quote from pas 82. He uses it more as a symbol for "dead" or "dying".

Romanticized War

In many cases, wars can be romanticized. Citizens back at home have a different perspective of war than the actual soldiers who fight in the war. In World War 2, soldiers fought under brutal conditions and for long periods of time. Throughout Slaughterhouse Five, Billy's experience in the war seemed difficult and tiresome. He felt weak, unimportant, and hopeless at times. When he returned back home from the war, his wife (Valencia) told him, "I'm proud you were a soldier" (pg 121). She talked to him as though she wanted to hear a captivating story. As Billy and Valencia talked about the war (pg 121-123), it was clear that Valencia wanted to know every detail. She asked Billy about the death and burial of Edgar Derby, even though she knew it was painful for Billy to talk about. Billy answered "yes" or "no" to the many questions that Valencia had for him. It was clear that as Billy was sharing the dramatic details of the war, Valencia was sympathizing with him, but she was only gathering a surface level perspective of the war. Billy also thought to himself that "it would make a good epitaph for Billy Pilgrim..." (pg 121). I think that this quote was saying that fighting in the war could "look good" on the surface. In Billy's case, the things that people see on the surface do not reflect exactly what he went through during the war.

In a way, it seems like the people can know many details about the war, but never truly have a deep enough understanding to really sympathize or understand. As Valencia was asking Billy Pilgrim questions about the war, was she trying to understand Billy's pain or was she just trying to satisfy her own curiosity?
Do you think that the interaction between Valencia and Billy is common with many people who come back from war?
On page 122, there is an illustration of a tombstone with a epitaph that says, "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt." This quote enforces the romanticized version of war that people can have. Even though many people know that war is brutal and that there are awful casualties, somehow the romanticized version of war is still circulating through peoples' minds and the media. Why do you think this happens?
What do you think the tombstone really signifies when it say, "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt"?