Slaughterhouse-Five (Quarter 3)

            Over Christmas break, I started to read Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I was inspired to read it after reading his Cat’s Cradle. This book is about a man named Billy Pilgrim, who becomes “unstuck in time”, which means that he uncontrollably travels to different times in his life. Though the book is fiction, it is based off the author’s experience during World War II. The book can be seen as anti-war because Vonnegut spends a lot of time talking about the horrors of war. The first chapter of the book is not part of the story. It is actually how Vonnegut’s research and inspiration for writing the book. The story of Billy Pilgrim is very nonlinear as the events occur at random periods of the man’s life as opposed to chronological order. I was confused in the beginning of the story because of the structure of the plot. Also, the transitions between different times were unclear. One interesting quote from this section is when Billy says “When a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral.” Taken literally, this quote is about Billy Pilgrim’s time travelling and abduction by aliens. However, I believe that this quote is supposed to mean that even after people die, they can still be “alive” in the memories of the living. Vonnegut is basically trying to tell his readers that as long as they remember loved ones who have passed away, they are technically not “dead”. This book is not yet as interesting as Cat’s Cradle, but I still cannot wait to read the rest of it and to find out about the man shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that was not his, who was foreshadowed in the beginning.