Tag: Kurt Vonnegut

This is the end friends, for the book and the year. The reason that I got turned on to this book was I was looking at reading lists related to 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. Most of the books that I have been working on for the last two years have been on that list. This one, I can see that it is a very distant cousin at best.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the book, I certainly did. It is just that the book wasn’t what I expected. The truth is that I didn’t really know what to expect. Or maybe more specifically, I expected it to be more dystopian that it was. This was an acid trip on the horrors of war.

I enjoyed the dark humor and satire throughout the book. It reminded me a lot of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe” but set in a more historical setting. I guess I don’t follow the alien encounters interlaced throughout the book. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say it was either to lighten up the darkness or make the whole story of war a farce. I am not sure which.

The main character Billy Pilgrim is made out to be a buffoon. In many ways, it was hard to empathize with him. The only thing that really changes this is that many of the other characters are even more dislikable. The sci-fi author Trout is a two-bit hustler, Billy’s wife Valencia is a glutton, most of the different soldiers were blood lustful jerks as examples. It makes the hapless Billy much more likeable compared to everyone else he encounters.

Does this book fit into the AltF4 reading list? I am gong to say no if you are following along. I would say that if this is the first book you read with me, then maybe. As far as it goes with changing your programming, you should already know that I am pretty anti-war. Even if we give World War II a pass as a ‘just’ war, it more than likely wouldn’t have happened without our meddling.

You had Churchill begging the US to get involved. You had the neutral US running arms and ammunition to the allies while at the same time embargoing raw materials to imperial Japan. And Hitler’s rise to power was a direct result of the World War I settlement and punitive policies that the US was instrumental in codifying. Sure, the Nazis were disgusting but they were only following our lead on our progressive, eugenics ideas. Using hindsight, who didn’t think that we were going to get involved?

Ever seen the movie where the bully antagonizes someone until they get fed-up and strike? We are the bully. Let me be clear, this is not what the book is about but the time to fight is actually before we get to the fight, not when we get in theater. It is too late by that point and then we have Billy’s account.

Now that we know what the book is not about, let me give a quick opinion on what I think about the book. Many pundits think that this is Vonnegut’s view of war through his personal experience. I can buy that. Kurt is Billy and arrives to the scene by what he feels as unprepared. As the “F’n New Guy”, not only is he scared and unprepared but also not battle hardened. So, everything that he sees seems revolting, including all of the people that he meets that are tempered by war. This is exemplified by the war winding down and people acting out of anger making things seem more senseless than in the context of battle.

I liken this book to all the flashbacks that Kurt sees as the result of PTSD. Whether he really had that or not, he probably had seemingly unrelated triggers bringing him back to those horrible days in the war. Truthfully, I think that a movie like “Platoon” does a better job transcribing the horrors to the uninitiated than this book. But the book is not so depressing and a lot more humorous than “Platoon”.

End Your Programming Routine: “Slaughterhouse – Five” does not make the AltF4 reading list. But, after reading it, I am more interested in more of Vonnegut’s work. There is nothing wrong reading a recognized author for entertainment. It just doesn’t quite bring the punch of foreshadowing deceptiveness as many of the other titles I have read in this vein. It is only the lens that I am evaluating the work that causes this opinion. “Slaughterhouse – Five” is a unique book with a good message that entertains along the way.

We have reached the end of another book. This was a different sort of book then the ones I have been reading in this series. I would say that it is the lightest of all of them but before I get carried away with the totality of the work, today I am going to focus on the last four chapters.

Here is a quick section summary of these chapters. There is a crash of the plane full of optometrists in Vermont. Billy was the only survivor. Then the bombing actually happens. Billy’s wife Valencia dies of carbon monoxide poisoning on her way to visit Billy in the hospital. The war ends for Billy as the Germans flee the Russians

I am struggling to perform a linear read a chapter, note the theme and then write about it. So much so that I went to read what other people was saying about the chapters. The story jumps around so much that it is hard to draw any sort of direct correlation to a strong point.

Some of the analysis I read talked about things like Tralfamadorian theory and drawing analogies to Einstein with four dimensions (X, Y, Z plus time). There was also the very strong antiwar theme, that one seems obvious and is the one that I would pick overall. There is also a bunch of symbolism that is pretty heavily abstracted.

For instance, on analysis I read said that the bird at the end represents the nonsensical-ness of war. I suppose that because the bird is the last thing written and not a character in the book, then maybe I could buy that it does mean something. But there were other speculations where Billy’s hatred of the barbershop quartet was related to the faces of the singers versus the faces of the Germans when they first saw the destruction of Dresden. Have you ever seen the ‘Gilmore Girls’? The show is annoying enough but then when you have the random barbershop quartet interlude into your conversation, it is downright obnoxious. In my experience, a barbershop quartet can be wonderful or downright inappropriate.

I missed this when I read the previous chapter block, the significance of the title. Before I read the book, I made an assumption was the title was going to be something like five individuals participated in some sort of urban firefight. As it turns out, the title is actually the POW’s address. This comes up several times in Billy’s delusional dreams as he goes back and forth between being in the war and other random events in his life.

End Your Programming Routine: I am struggling to find meaningful, consistent themes so I am going to cut it here. I definitely have more to say next week and I don’t think I will be so blasé. Distinguishing a very non-linear story with a specific portion of the book makes it hard to pick appropriate anecdotes. So it goes.

Here we go trucking along, one more week before the end of the book. I am still enjoying this psychedelic trip into the mind of a WWII vet. Even after all this book is supposed to be about, the prisoners of war finally arrive at Dresden at the very end of chapter six. So lets do a quick plot summary.

We have a whole diatribe where Billy goes on a long distance trip with aliens. After being shown off in a zoo like an animal, he is flashed back to being in a mental institution to a honeymoon night to a prisoner of war. Finally, in chapter six is all about his war comrades and their personal delusions.

I am getting the sense from reading different analyses of this book that there is more inferred than is written. There are strong biblical references combined with alien references as well as the horrors of war. If all of this is to be believed, then this thing has more dimensions than the Twilight Zone. I am going to reserve stating my opinion for after the book but you literary types can interpret this as foreshadowing.

I am not feeling it today. I am not sure what I think yet, but one thing that does drive me crazy is trying to make something out of nothing. And I am saying that I have nothing so far. I remember from my school days how we would spend the entire hour trying to force all of this innuendo into books that we would read. I am going to resist the urge to do that at this moment.

End Your Programming Routine: For this reason, we will consider this week a check-in. This isn’t the first week I have felt this way, but it is the first week that I realized that I am approaching that point of trying to force something. With that, I hope that you are enjoying the book as I am.

I am making decent progress on this book. To me, it seems like a change of pace that is an easy read. That is probably because I am missing all of the significance enjoying this story.

Kurt Vonnegut was an author of the ‘Greatest Generation’. He served in the heart of the World War II years and was part of some of the infamous battles is Europe like D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. It is no wonder that war has a strong pull to his work. This is my first exposure to Vonnegut and the way things are going I will be back for more.

The story’s main character is a man named Billy Pilgrim. He seems to be an enigma of a person surrounded by luck. So, for instance he marries into money and becomes a highly successful business owner with investments in the medical field as well as franchises such as hotels. Meanwhile, it seems like he can barely function in a day to day capacity.

I don’t know this for a fact, but the story seems to be written as a PTSD description or possibly mental illness. I haven’t read this book of the same genre but Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolf and trying to describe what taking LSD feels like seems like how this book is structured. There are many horrific events that are described as time flashes forward and backward each event triggering a new anecdote of the story.

I can see why Vonnegut is labeled a humorist of satirist. So far, there is a lot of death in the book. Each time a death is written about, he uses the phrase ‘so it goes’. But, to make it more comical, he even uses the phrase out of context. As an example, when he is describing dead (flat) water, so it goes. A lot of serious and absurd situations are delivered deadpan and matter of fact.

As of yet, I haven’t determined anything in line with my typical concepts in these three chapters. I was reading a quote by Vonnegut and he said about this book the book is nonsensical because there is nothing valuable to learn about mass extermination. This is why people have labelled Vonnegut as a strong antiwar voice.

I could add one more thing this week. The supposed subject of this book is the firebombing of Dresden Germany. As of yet, Vonnegut has not really written about it. Billy is trying to write a book about the event but has a hard time getting his war buddy’s to talk about it. So let’s focus on that.

The firebombing of Dresden has two opinions. The first is that this was a campaign to eliminate resources the Nazis were using to continue fighting the war. The other side contends that this was a punitive attack. It is true that these were valuable, soft targets but it is also true that most of the damage was not military but civilian. I know that it is a very thin line between military and civilian when they are building war material. The opposition side contends that it was unnecessary because it was only a matter of time before Germany gave up.

I suspect that this anti-bombing opinion has gotten ahold of Vonnegut. Later in the book he starts to reveal more, including his own opinions as a result of the observation of the campaign. You will have to wait until next week for more of that stuff. Just like I talked about Wednesday, it just isn’t fair and when something unfair happens, you want vengeance.

End Your Programming Routine: Don’t think for a minute that you cannot substitute Japan for Germany. We were going to do whatever we had to to ensure that we were going to make them pay as well. The difference between our story and theirs is that it is very rarely brought up that a neutral country (USA) had cut off Japan from raw materials and built weapons and munitions for the Allies. There is no way I can condone the actions of our opponents but don’t think they didn’t have some shoving to get there.