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".