Slaughterhouse Five

A new book in Humanities!  This time we read Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut.  I'll admit that I didn't relate well to the main character so I can't say that I'm as enthusiastic about it as All Quiet on the Western Front.  However, it was still a good read and I believe it showed the chaos of the main character Billy's mind well.  It is the sort of book that requires reading and re-reading to fully understand, due to the complexity of the layout.  It is still a good book though.

Here is my reflection from the Seminar we had on the book!

My Reflection:

   There were several great comments in this seminar that made me really think about things.  The comment that made me think the most though was Claire’s.  She added at one point that every person has their own war.  This was a new line of thought for me when considering this book, with how it relates to the characters.  Billy’s war is the actual war, and if he’s crazy then the war is that much more prominent for him.  Mary’s war is how battles are depicted as being so glorious.  She doesn’t want her children to be hurt, and wishes to protect them.  Each character and every person in real life has their battles, and I feel that Vonnegut made his characters more real by including those wars inside of them.

   Question one: Is this an anti-war novel?

   This is an interesting question that I really had to think about during the seminar.  Vonnegut, both in his writing and seen in his interview, has shown that he has a very cynical sense of humor that masks a lot of grimness. “INTERVIEWER: What happened when you reached the front?  VONNEGUT: I imitated various war movies I had seen” (from the interview.)  “The third bullet was for the filthy flamingo, who stopped dead center in the road when the lethal bee buzzed past his ear.  Billy stood there politely, giving the marksman another chance.” (from the book.)  In both of these passages you can see his humor which is generously applied alongside Tralfamadorians.  When this question was first asked, all I could think was that this book had no opinion, because the humor balances out the grim realities quite often.  After thinking about it though, I believe that Slaughterhouse 5 is an anti-war novel.  Stripped of the humor and sci-fi, this would be quite a grim tale and it would be very hard to read.  This book is an anti-war novel in the fact that it speaks plainly about the harsh realities but also pairs them up alongside an opinion that these realities are unavoidable.  This can be considered an “anti-glacier book,” in the fact that there’s very little hat Vonnegut can do to stop the wars, only write-against them.  This is also supported by the fact that in the first chapter, Vonnegut states that it is an anti-war novel.

   Queston 2: Why would Billy Pilgrim want to believe in the Tralfamadorian views of time and free-will?

    This is a similarly tricky question, especially considering Billy’s frustrating neutrality to everything.  However, I believe that this neutrality is the main show of how he believes it.  If he is neutral, and just goes with the flows of time, he doesn’t have to change anything and he can always know the outcome of his actions.  If he changed something though, got angry, chose to swim when his father tossed him into the pool, things would become unpredictable.  This is protective.  He doesn’t have to wonder or keep guessing at what will happen, he just knows, and if he doesn’t commit fully but doesn’t back out either then the worst that will happen is that someone will be frustrated with him because of it.  They won’t become his enemy.  He can use the Trlafamadorian views of free-will to back up this decision to just float along and take everything that happens, good or bad, with the same reaction.  Similarly, if Billy believes in the Tralfamadorian view of time he doesn’t have to acknowledge the fact that he’s probably crazy or that he can’t escape the war, no matter how much time has passed.  Not acknowledging that makes him trapped and, in a way, strips him of his free-will, only backing up the view.    So I believe that he wishes to believe in their views because then he can, to a greater degree, control the outcomes of his actions.

   While I was writing up this reflection, I came upon a connection to a quote.  “If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for everything.”  The author of this quote is greatly disputed.  However, I believe that it ties into Billy’s life quite well.  He’s never happy or sad, doesn’t fight or stand down, doesn’t laugh or cry.  He just is.  Until the plane crash, which I now believe drove him off of the edge.  When he is free of the hospital, Billy becomes a whole new person, all because he stands for his beliefs in the Tralfamadorians.  He has a motive and is ready to accomplish it.  This, standing up for what he believes is real even if he’s probably just clinically insane makes him a much more interesting person.  “The temperature in the house was down to fifty degrees, but Billy hadn’t noticed.  He wasn’t warmly dressed either.”  (from the book.)  I believe that this quote shows Billy as a person who finally has something to work for: educating the world about the existence of the Tralfamadorians.  He becomes more animated and works for something for the first time in his life so hard that he doesn’t even notice that it’s freezing in his house.  By standing for something he’s become a completely new person.

   On first glance, there are very few similarities between these two books.  To start with though, they are both anti-war books, and they both have segments about what it is like in the war. They both talk about prisoners, though one person is guarding them and in the other, the person is a prisoner.  The Russians are prominent to the prisons in both books, though in truth I still don’t understand why.  In each of these books, the main character is disconnected from civilians by their experiences in war.  I believe that the message is similar: once you join war, there is very little that you can do to escape it no matter what you would like.  You can ignore it and you can leave the front but war has still permanently effected you.

All Quiet on the Western Front

So, seminar one!  We have been reading All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque.  I really enjoyed this book as it follows the tale of a young soldier, Paul, and his friends in World War two.  It is somewhat anti-war, but it is a great book and I definitely recommend it to anyone who would like to read a good war story!

My Reflection:

   Reactions:

   There were several opinions expressed in this seminar that made me think harder about this book and the project that we’re studying.  Helen and Dusty both made good comments about war in general.  Helen said that, “war takes and takes,” and it really does.  Paul could no longer be the person that he used to be because slowly, it was all being stripped away in return for the instinct to react well on the battlefield, and the ability to go on even after a friend dies in the war because he just had to accept things like that.  Dusty said, “war’s an addiction,” which really adds on to Helen’s idea.  War is a completely alien world to most of us, something that can be talked about and considered, but not really understood until you participated in it.  Once you become integrated into war, it’s very hard to pull yourself out of it, because as I mentioned before, it’s so foreign to what we do in everyday civilian life.  I believe that that disconnection makes everything about war difficult and dangerous.  You can’t make any decisions or opinions about something that you’ve never experienced, so that even leaders of countries send them in somewhat blindly.  It’s a scary thought.  This is what Dusty and Helen’s comments made me think about.

   A Question from Seminar: Was Paul’s death the best thing for him?

   A:  It’s really hard to think about Paul’s death being a good thing.  However, at the exact same time, there is another question that you have to consider: Did he have any chance at life beyond the army?  He spent so much time working with life or death decisions, direct orders, and a true understanding of what it is to be at war.  If he’d gone home, he would have to completely relearn and refine every single aspect of society that the war had so harshly stripped away from him.  It’d be hard, and he’d be surrounded by people who wanted to know what war was like, what happened that made them lose, why couldn’t they have done a better job?  He’d have no real way to answer them either.  So even though he loved people like his family and friends, he would still be incredibly alone because of this factor.

   If his only life was in the army, because that was the civilization he was used to, then what happened when everyone died?  He lost Haie to a gunshot in the lung, Mϋller to one in the side.  It is assumed that Kropp killed himself after he left the hospital having his leg amputated.  Kat, Paul carried on his back after he’d been shot in the leg, and still he died because of a sliver through the skull.  If the army was Paul’s only life with people who would actually understand him, what happened when he was the last one left?  That would be the hardest thing, being alone in that war, which was the only place that they understood you.  Of course, he could always make new friends, maybe help out the new recruits, but eventually the war would’ve ended and he would’ve gone home, which returns me to the first paragraph.  I don’t believe that death was the best thing for him, because I myself believe that if you look, there is always something or someone worth living for.  However, I believe that this was the only way that he’d die peacefully, and is one of the happiest endings he could’ve had: on duty, surrounded by the life that he had chosen and people who he could relate to.

   Connections:

   The thought of Paul’s life after the war, or at least outside of the war, reminded me of the movie The Shawshank Redemption.  In this analogy, war is like the prison, all of these people using cigars and other oddities as currency, only able to understand each other and only able to do your best.  Both the prisoners and the soldiers had to follow direct orders and the veterans reacted far more calmly to the atrocities or shelling (in AQotWF).  In the Shawshank Redemption, they used a term that I believe applies very well to both stories: institutionalized.  To be institutionalized is to be completely adjusted to the prison or war, unable to turn back to normal everyday civilian life without feeling a sense of complete loss.  Eventually you want to stay, simply because it’s familiar, it’s something that you understand, and there’s a sort of routine to everything that becomes as regular as breathing to you.  I believe that Paul, like Red in the Shawshank Redemption, had become institutionalized, and unable to turn back civilian life that had continued to go on while they were away.  There were many new things that hadn’t been there when they left, and it wasn’t like going home anymore; it was like going back to some Picasso rendition of your home, already complete and fine without you.  I feel that there were many similarities between these two and it’s fascinating because the more I think about it, the more similarities I see.

   Lori’s Choice:

1)      “It is a great brotherhood, which adds something of the good-fellowship of a folk-song of the feeling of solidarity of convicts, and of the desperate loyalty to one another of men condemned to death, to a condition of life arising out of the midst of danger, out of the tension and forlornness of death – seeking in a wholly unpathetic way a fleeting enjoyment of the hours as they come.  If one wants to appraise it, it is both heroic and banal- but who wants to do that?”  page 272

2)        I feel that this quote captures the truth of war very well, partly because it’s mostly unbiased.  It balances the grimness of war with the strength in fellowship, how close they are.  It mentions people as “Men condemned to death,” which considering the book’s ending, and how in one battle, they lost over eighty men in one barracks alone, seems very correct.  However, it also mentions “the desperate loyalty to one another,” and how, “It is a great brotherhood,” which depicts the atrocities that they’ve seen together as a sort of bond that pushes them together.  Even if they wouldn’t have liked each other before the war, they now trust each other with their very lives, because they don’t have much room much bickering.  I feel that this quote shows both the harsh reality and the finer points very well.

3)      If I were to represent the idea in the quote, I would use a combination of art and poetry.  It would have a black frame that was coated in crushed mirror or glass if I was allowed, and the background would be a series of dark colors.  The words would be stark white and have little segments set here and there around the depictions.  This would be a painting with a picture for each segment.  The segments would probably morph from a dislocated view of war, the softer depiction that everyone knows, then would move to the truths of war before ending in something speaking about the brotherhood and maybe a picture of hands, one clasping the other as though to help each other up.  They would be wearing uniforms from both sides of the war (Germany and France for example).