Paradox

The meaning behind this is so deep.

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgement, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness. We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom. We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom and hate too often. We've learned how to make a living, but not a life. We've added years to life, but not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space, but not inner space. We've conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We've learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less. These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of quick trips and disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. Remember to give time to love, give time to speak, and give time to share the thoughts in your mind.

I thought I might interrupt the other chapters by telling you HOW Vonnegut shows these meanings and how he ridicules the ideas of free will, fate, and time.

For one thing, the story of Billy under the control of aliens reveals lack of free will. [As the example in when they make Billy have sex with the actress] These aliens can represent a lot of different things, ranging from God or the government. The lack of ability to stop his death when he knows it's going to happen show that he is submitting to his fate. The story of him traveling backwards and forwards between the past, some time that does not exist, and the present time also shows how time matters very little. Like the story of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Vonnegut shows how fate and time run in patterns of circles. There is no free will when there is things such as fate and destiny which control it. There is merely the idea of free will. And despite the tone of the narrator, these deeper meanings are beneath the criticism and mocking tone.

Chapter 6

Billy wakes up in his prison bed and finds two "magical" lumps in the lining of his coat. He fast forwards to a time where China had dropped a hydrogen bomb in Chicago and the United States became divided into twenty nations to prevent it from taking over the world. He makes a speech in which he knows he is going to die. When he ends his speech with "Farewell, hello, farewell, hello", Billy is shot be a laser gun.

Although everything that was told in the chapter is meant to have readers question what they can believe and trust, everything has their truths to it despite its craziness. The United States has become a world power which does not contribute to production but consumption. All that we fear in the present has happened in the novel. We are afraid, or at least told to be afraid, of China or Korea bombing us. We should be afraid of division among the country. As it all happens, Billy feels nothingness, even as he dies. It seems mechanical and things that Billy has the ability to feel for, he shies away from. Vonnegut seems to show that things that there are so many things that have contributed the race of humans to be mechanical. You wake up and go to work, come home and sleep and restart the entire cycle. It's not like you're actually living life, rather life has become a daily task which you are programmed to live through.

Chapter 5

The Tralfamadore, who are the group of aliens who kidnap Billy, knows how the world will end. Again, this is just like One Hundred Years of Solitude. The gypsy knows how the story of Macondo and the Buendia family will end. However he does nothing to help change their fate like Tralfamadore. They tell Billy that they are at war and the universe will end when one of their pilots accidentally blow up. They state that war is something that can not be prevented.

Meanwhile, Billy is transported back and forth into time. He visits childhood memories mixed with some war memories. He is in a mental hospital and he realizes that life is meaningless, which he also displayed in the first chapter. The Tralfamadore gives an actress to be Billy's mate. The hospital tells his daughter, Barbara, also that he is insane and she takes him home.

As I was reading this chapter, I was consistently questioning the reality. Which is real? The Tralfamadore or that Billy is insane? As a reader, I'm sure that everyone would be convinced that the idea that Billy is insane is more realistic. However as a reader also, you can see the truth that Tralfamadore represents.

The Tralfamadore shows a world without free will. They empathize that free will is a joke, some mythological thing that human beings have created and believe in [like God] when in reality, there is no such thing that exists. By empathizing this, the message shows that free will is important although often lost. It got me thinking that what if we don't really have free will? Sometimes it seems that people we put in power are controlling us. Although we might fight against wars that presidents create and high prices of gases that big CEOs impose, we are almost demanded to take it out of necessity. We HAVE to pay those high prices. We HAVE to pay these taxes which in the end, fund a war we don't want. These minor things all seem to be fate. These minor things questions our free will. Do we really have it if we're consistently condemned to follow something we seemingly have no control over?

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

On Billy's daughter's wedding night, Billy spends the night watching a documentary over and over again. Everything goes forward then backwards in the documentary. Such as bullets that had at one point hit a man, reversed back. As he is watching this drunk, he imagines Hitler becoming a baby and all of humanity works toward creating two perfect people named Adam and Eve. Before this he knew that he was going to be kidnapped by aliens and soon afterwards, he is. On the spaceship, he travels back in time where he is again in Germany. During the trip, a man dies in another cart while telling everyone that Billy is responsible. Billy is transported back into time when he was a child then forward when he is a middle aged man playing golf.

The entire chapter seemed to remind me of One Hundred Years of Solitude. This is because in chapter 3, a voice comments that only on earth is there free will. Ironically, the entire chapter shows that there is no free will. The way time works in the chapter also reveals Vonnegut's belief in fate and how it must be followed through. Billy's death is marked already, like the fate of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Billy's lack of thinking past "Why is this happening to me", also reveals that humans are selfish and limited creatures. Vonnegut shows that humans are consistently worried about themselves and what effects them directly, rather than the world overall. They don't question the "bigger things" but rather piety things that in the grand scheme of things, don't matter what so ever.

Vonnegut, in the next chapter, makes fun of life for a person as they are aging. They have kids who are all grown up, who never come to visit. They lose old friends that they can not come in contact with. The only companion to them becomes their dog. They drink away their lives and listen to news shows or late night television.

All in all, Vonnegut seems to be just saying: after a certain point in your life, you simply waste away. Days become mundane, more mundane than schools days for students [and teachers].

Vonnegut makes readers life very easy. From the very first page, readers can easily tell it is full of sarcasm.

So, as I said before, the protagonist is trying to write a story about what happened when he was a prisoner of war. He recalls that: "The best outline I ever made, or anyway the prettiest one, was on the back of a roll of wallpaper. I used my daughter's crayons, a different color for each main character. One end of the wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and then there was all that middle part, which was the middle." [6-7]

The fact that he HAS to mention that the best outline he ever made of his story was "the prettiest" seems to make it all fickle. Where it has been drawn seems almost unbelievable. I mean for one thing, an author who has an important story would not have written the backbone of their story onto something so perishable. Assuming of course, this roll of wallpaper was going to be in use. Using his daughter's crayons, again, downplay the significance of the event he is trying to tell the audience. It all seems like it's child's play. There is nothing serious about it. As a reader, I'm thinking that maybe he's not even trying to write a story about Dresden. Maybe he is but is blocking out the memories because there's some secret horror behind it.

Chapter 1

So while doing some background information on Kurt Vonnegut, I stumbled up0n very interesting information.

When Vonnegut enlisted in the army during the second world war, he became a prisoner of war on December 13, 1945. He was sent to Dresden with his fellow comrades in a vitamin-syrup factory. However when bombs started to hit Dresden and killed 135,000 victims, Vonnegut and his comrades survived. They had been hiding in a deep cellar of a slaughterhouse.

The beginning of the book, readers are introduced to a man who "ironically" shares a very similar story to its author. The protagonist is a writer who wants to write a story about his time as a prisoner of war in Dresden. However he has difficulties on what to write, saying that he could not really remember anything.

So perhaps, with all this background information, this book will be Vonnegut's way of telling people the story of Dresden and his time there. Perhaps he'll use this story to deal with some other physiological problems he has as a prisoner of war. Having read his other later works, he's a satirical writer who lightens the situation with clear sarcastic tone. In this way, I feel that by writing this story allows Vonnegut to deal with his memories: by lightening the experience as a prisoner of war to cope. Although everyone knows that being a POW is not very pleasant.

Kurt Vonnegut

I decided that since most of the books I'm reading are written by Kurt Vonnegut, I decided to do some research about him.


He was born Nov. 11, 1922 in Indianapolis. His parents were actually wealthy people who traveled world wide. Vonnegut majored in chemistry and biology when attending Cornell University because his father wanted him to study something "solid". When he was about to be kicked out of school for failing his classes, he enlisted in the army.

In September 1, 1945, after having returned from war, he married a friend he has known since kindergarten: Jane Marie Cox. To continue his education, he went to the University of Chicago to get his Masters as an anthropology student. During that time he also worked as a police news reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. However when his master's thesis was rejected, Vonnegut moved to New York where his career began to start. He worked for a company called General Electric as a publicist but when his short story: "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" made him enough money, he moved his family to Cape Cod.

His first published fiction book was called The Player Piano. However tragedy hit his life. By the time he published his second book, The Sirens of Titans, in 1959 he had lost his sister to cancer and his father. He adopted his sister's three children to his own family which already consisted of three children.

Sluaghterhouse-Five

Well here's the next book I'm reading. It's another book by Kurt Vonnegut. He's kinda the main author for my genre.

Well here's the summary of the book:

From Publishers Weekly
"Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time." So begins Vonnegut's absurdist 1969 classic. Hawke rises to the occasion of performing this sliced-and-diced narrative, which is part sci-fi and partially based on Vonnegut's experience as a American prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany during the firebombing of 1945 that killed thousands of civilians. Billy travels in time and space, stopping here and there throughout his life, including his long visit to the planet Tralfamador, where he is mated with a porn star. Hawke adopts a confidential, whisper-like tone for his reading. Listening to him is like listening to someone tell you a story in the back of a bus—the perfect pitch for this book. After the novel ends, Vonnegut himself speaks for a short while about his survival of the Dresden firestorm and describes and names the man who inspired this story. Tacked on to the very end of this audio smorgasbord is music, a dance single that uses a vintage recording of Vonnegut reading from the book. Though Hawke's reading is excellent, one cannot help but wish Vonnegut himself had read the entire text.

Finished!

I finally finished!

To finish it up, everyone kind of has this "tragic" ending. However the way the narrator states it, it kind of sounds like: "Yeah...whatever" type of tone.

Vonnegut mentions Shakespeare! The quote fits perfectly in the story:
"All the word's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many
parts....?"

I thought this quote seemed to summarize the entire story very well. The way the characters were described was that they were all playing a game. Mary, who was manipulative. The man who marries old widows for their fortunes. It is all a game of life, like Monopoly.

The final chapter, the narrator takes us through his time. He mentions he has gotten one teenage girl pregnant and says he has learned his lesson. However he says it in a way where he just seems to brush the lesson aside. The ending seemed like a cliffhanger. The narrator says he can't speak Swedish but the doctor says he'll learn.

I don't feel like this was one of Vonnegut's best books. In fact, many critics think it's his worst. I'm reading another book by him and I hope it's better than this.

Has anyone ever once thought about what life would be like if it was to start all over again? Perhaps there are only a few people left in the world. Let's say...eight. Four men and women. Would it be much different from the way life is today?

Wells I wanted to point out Vonnegut's point of view: "I sometimes speculate as to what humanity might have become if the first settlers on Santa Rosalia had been the original passenger list and crew for "the Nature Cruise of the Century" - Captain von Kleist, surely, and Hisako Hiroguchi and Selena MacIontosh and Mary Hepburn, and, instead of the Kankabono girls, the sailors and officers and Jacqueline Onasis and Dr. Henry Kissinger and Rudolf Nureyev and Mick Jagger....The island could have supported that many individuals- just barely. There would have been some struggles, some fights, I guess - some killings, even, if food or water ran short. And I suppose some of them would have imagined that Nature or something was very pleased if they emerged victorious. But their survival wouldn't have amounted to a hill of beans, as far as evolution was concerned, if they didn't reproduce....Humanity would still be pretty much what is is today." [182-183]

Basically all in all, if eight people were stuck on an island together, it'd be like a series of the Lost show. And in the end, life will still be the same as it always has been. I guess it's because each of the people know what life is like now. When the world "ends" and starts over, they carry those ideas with them. So money becomes important again and it just all gets cycled back. That's really sad to think that if we tried to make the world a better place, we'd pretty much go back to how the world already was like. :[

People

So far in the book, Vonnegut mentions new characters or refer back to them. He builds their character again or adds another depth to them. For example there is Mary who used to be a teacher. He describes her actions in her room as "murdering herself". He mentions six children who have good days and how their rewarded and their bad days and how they get away with it. It reminds me of psychology class where bad behavior should be ignored and good behavior rewarded so the child learns what's socially acceptable.

I found that the most interesting part of the story was Chapter 19. He builds more to a character named Andrew MacIntosh. Vonnegut begins the chapter off: "Like most pathological personalities, Andrew MacIntosh never cared much whether what he said was true or not - and so he was tremendously persuasive." [104] The connotation to "pathological" is negative! Someone who is crazy or is very mentally disturbed, kind of like a serial killer is what I think about. Maybe Andrew MacIntosh = Freddy? haha.

Anyways every character Vonnegut creates is a reflection of the small parts of society as a whole. Mary represents the character who can really care less about the world that she is not involved in. Nothing seems to interest her, she wanders through life. Andrew is representative of the character who perhaps is sly, like a snake. They don't really really tell the truth, they tell whatever they think will get them to the next level or whatever they think will gt them what they want. Kind of like temptation; extremely persuasive.

Talking

The beginning of chapter 31 is interesting: "How people used to talk and talk back then! Everybody was going, "Blah-blah-blah," all day long. Some of them would even do it in their sleep." [173]

I took it in a way that Vonnegut is talking about politicians. We listen to these people of power and we have no idea of what their saying. They go on and on and when it comes down to it, they're not saying much that gets to the point or intrigues us. Most of their long speeches end up to be one simple message: "I don't really know". I also remember Ms. Clapp always saying that back then, people were so genuine when they spoke. Now most of the time when people speak to each other, they are telling a lie or being sarcastic. There is nothing to the point in our own "speeches".

In a break between reading, I wanted to quickly answer my essential question. What I see displayed in this story so far in my reading is that the further we advance in technology and the years, the more of life is destroyed.

The example? We can now live up to 90 years old. Life seems so long. But as we advance and the average dying age is getting a bigger and bigger number, the more it seems that the beauty of life is destroyed. If we have so much time as they say, how do we manage to really truly enjoy it? I mean when we're 30, we don't stop to enjoy the scene in front of us because to us it's going to happen again in our 40s, 50s, or whatever. The idea that we have so much time on Earth has poisoned us.

It also shows that humans seem to be such bad and evil characters! They are so corrupt and easily influenced by sin! In both the stories I read, each character is obsessed with greed and vanity. Two of the seven deadly sins. We're tumbling down such a bad path.

The Last Human Marriage

According to the story, love is impossible. At least not true love. From the one hundred years later point of view, past the year 23011, "nobody today has any idea what a marriage is". This is because it was outdated and that marriage was "so difficult back then". The reason the speaker gives is the same he gives for everything else: the oversize brain.

I guess in today's world, we are over thinking it. We're always looking for the perfection and we have this idea of what we want, but can't seem to get it. So far this whole novel and the story talking about a humans flaw is all due to overthinking! So we should all just stop =]. Life is better to enjoy.