. Spinning .

I believe that I’ll not take this book out of my Amazon.com cart, feeling that even though I’ve read a library copy, it is a book that wants re-reading some day.  There’s more to be said about Vonnegut’s ability to pull an event burned into memory through twenty-three years of added experience along with the skill of his writing to present it in such form.

I’ve touched on this in mentioning, but the alien world of Trafalmadore is more than just an escape of dreams for Billy Pilgrim, as well as a vehicle of flashback for Vonnegut.  It is posed as both an answer to the question of a new world society where mankind understands the uselessness of war, and as a statement that along with "So it goes," it is indeed alien to our nature perhaps. 

There is much more as well to the introduction of religious belief and how as a people we were able to crucify Jesus Christ.  This is so telling of both passion and apathy:

The Son of God was deader than a doornail.

There is the subtlety here that Billy Pilgrim is reading this in a book in a store that specializes in pornography.  What is more immoral than causing the torture and death of any individual?

Yes, there is so much more to be read yet.  Slaughterhouse-Five, for me, is not finished.

An excellent read.  And while it’s not going to be one of my top ten favorite books of all time, I must say that I can well see what the big hoopla was all about.  Vonnegut, in a mix of fact and fiction, a blend of great passion and pain with a very straight unemotional narrative, and with a great use of creative device to play with narrative structure, gives a very powerful rendition of his experience and thoughts of man, life and death.

The "So it goes" phrase that was everywhere within the book is Archie Bunker’s "Whatever"; the phrase in Johnny Cash’s song on Vietnam, "Roll on, it don’t mean nothin".  It is both sad commentary on the fact that war and death is inevitable, and a plea that someone do something to stop the madness.

The voice and style of the narrator in this novel is a comfortable, knowing one.  There is humor, but it is told with a straight face, and our laugh in response comes out a short "Huhh!"  There are symbols and metaphors both religious and political that likely require a second reading to catch; the narrative is often too interesting to want stopping and pondering as would more likely reveal some more of Vonnegut’s deeper feelings.

I’m curious to read some of Vonnegut’s other works and have put him on my "to read" list.

I suspect that Vonnegut is not so much fascinated with the question of parallel time as that he has chosen to use it as the perfect vehicle for this novel that is more a question of man’s warring nature and inability to change.  Since the story encompasses the protagonist’s WW II experiences as well as his present state as an optometrist and some relevant backstory or flashbacks, the hopping around in time and space suits the story wonderfully well.  Vonnegut also has hinted that Billy Pilgrim really isn’t a time traveler, but rather a dreamer and rememberer of experiences:

When Barbara left, slamming the door behind her, Billy traveled in time to thte zoo on Tralfamadore again.  A mate had just been brought to him from Earth.  She was Montana Wildhack, a motion picture star.

Montana was under heavy sedation.  Tralfamadorians wearing gas masks brought her in, put her on Billy’s yellow lounge chair, withdrew through the airlock.  The vast crowd outside was delighted.  Everybody on the planet wanted to see the Earthlings mate. (p. 125)

The cash register where Billy waited for his chnage was near a bin of old girly magazines.  Billy looked at one out of the corner of his eye, and he saw this question on its cover:  What really became of Montanta Wildhack?

So Billy read it.  He knew where Montana Wildhack really was, of course.  She was back on Tralfamadore, taking care of the baby… (p. 195)

The name of the book was The Big Board.  He got a few paragraphs into it and then he realized that he had read it before–years ago, in the veterans’ hospital.  It was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials.  They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212.  (p. 192)

I believe that Vonnegut has exquisitely made use of the principle of time and space travel, its constant nature, its spectrum and uniqueness yet its common thread of human fallability to direct attention at the uselessness of war.  His repetitious "So it goes" is one more sad commentary on the inability to change.  The alien Trafalmadore society does not have war; it is just that–alien.

Although I usually feel an immediate attraction to a particular author’s style (Marquez, Faulkner, McCarthy), I am questioning Vonnegut’s pull.

Aside from the most annoying, "So it goes." that is overdone in my opinion–although I do catch its revelation of a hopelessness in the constancy (?) of man’s nature and affinity for war–I do like the voice of the narrator.  It is a style that forms an intimacy with the reader in its easygoing conversational tone, especially after having forged a closeness of sorts by the direct author to reader background of the first chapter. 

I trust Vonnegut.  I may not agree with him and his opinions as are defined by the story, which transcends fictional novel form more than usual, but I trust him.  And that, for a writer of fiction, is one of the underlying goals.

There is a definite relationship between Boethius’ interpretation of Divine Knowledge in answering the question of man’s free will versus the seeming contradiction of foreknowledge, and Vonnegut’s highlighting of that concept in his attempt to understand man’s free will to choose war.

"I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains.  All time is all time.  It does not change.  It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations.  It simply is.  Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are al, as I’ve said before, bugs in Amber."

"You sound to me as though you don’t believe in free will," said Billy Pilgrim. (p. 82)

Not surprisingly, The Consolation of Philosophy, with its exploration of the question of the purpose and goal of man, is once again very relative to this reading as it has been with everything I’ve read since.  It’s a subject that’s as important to man today as it was centuries ago.

Vonnegut plays with time in the story, precisely stating that the character of Billy Pilgrim becomes "unstuck in time."  But it is not only the character, but the author’s own way of handling backstory that plays with time.

Once Vonnegut has explained Billy’s situation, then he is allowed to move the present to a place in the past, and the present then becomes the future.  It’s a most interesting trick of writing as well as an intrigueing thought; brings to mind Boethius’ in The Consolation of Philosophy wherein Divine Knowledge is explained as the past, present and future all being one simultaneous event. (Which is exactly Vonnegut’s statement of the alien’s version of time.)

Vonnegut also travels in space; Billy Pilgrim has been abducted by aliens of the planet Tralfamadore, and this bit of information is easily absorbed into the reader’s view of Billy’s world.  After all, we believe him up to this point, or at the very least, have come up with our own reasons for his beliefs.

This "unstuck in time" is brought full front when the answer to Billy’s "Why me?" to the aliens is answered by pointing out the beetle in the amber example; something which IS obviously stuck in time.

The only thing that bugs me a whole lot about this novel so far is the repetitious:  So it goes.

There must be, I thought, a reason other than a busy schedule to have laid aside so interesting a theory on life and living, death and dying as presented in logical argument by Socrates in Phaedo.

Socrates attempts to prove the existence of an eternal soul by argument of opposites:  If smaller, than greater must have existed prior, and vice versa.  More just is a product of unjust, as unjust must once have been just.  While the "change" or transition would certainly prove this point, I’m not sure I have not been lulled by Plato’s "therefore’s" to agree to the opposities of life and death.  Certainly death springs from life, but does the theory still hold as undoubtable that life springs from death?

After an intimate revelation of his personal involvement in the novel he offers us, Vonnegut hits his reader hard with a very strange character in Chapter 2:

LISTEN:

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. 

Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day.  (p. 22)

It seems that I have been fairly consistent in my simulaneously reading of Philosophy and Fiction in that the selections assist each other in theme.  Socrates speaks of a linear timeline that traverses several lifetimes.  Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim appears to wander in out of sequence segments of a single lifetime. 

This should be a very interesting partnership, this trio: Philosopher and teacher, visionary and writer, and reader and student.

Something that I rarely do, and yet it’s not that I have never seen an image of the man before: Without immediate immersion in the story, I think upon the dustjacket of Slaughterhouse Five.

Kurt Vonnegut.  The name itself is visceral.  Aside from just the gut, the K, the V, the G and Ts are hard-edge, cutting sounds.  I half expect the images McCarthy draws.  The photo of the man is a bit disturbing; a young Mark Twain on drugs.  This is appearance only, and opinion only.  And imagination truly.  But it forms a preface even to the preface of this intrigueing thought:

"The British mathematician Stephen Hawking, in his 1988 best seller A Brief History of Time, found it tantalizing that we could not remember the future.  But the future is child’s play for me now.  I know what will become of my helpless, trusting babies because they are grown-ups now.  I know how my closest friends will end up because so many of them are retired or dead.  Mary O’Hare is a widow now."  (Slaughterhouse-Five, p. xi)

So then, the future is known; it is only a question of time in when we learn it.  Just like trigonometry; a mystery until it changes into knowledge.  I love this thought.