The purpose of Slaughterhouse five: to discourage people from glorifying war. War in media is often glorified to the point that it almost turns into fantasy. Kurt Vonnegut wants people to understand what war is really like. War is pointless, most of the time you end up exactly where you started. Like in the Korean war, the starting point was the same as the end point.
Multiple times in the story someone said something that was supposed to be taken lightly but you could see the real message. Billy was in Dresden when it got firebombed, so to escape he went to when he had a conversation with his daughter.
"It was the next night that about one hundred and thirty thousand people in Dresden would die. So it goes. Billy dozed in the meat locker. He found himself engaged again, word for word, gesture for gesture, in the argument with his daughter with which this tale began. 'Father,' she said, ... 'You know who I could just kill?' she asked. 'Who could you kill?' Billy said." (pg. 165).
Billy's daughter is making a joke of death when thousands and thousands of people die during a war. Death is not a joke, it is even less of a joke when your talking about war. Everybody dies, we know that. But to die over something pointless like getting shot over stealing a teapot is just ludicrous. It doesn't even make sense, why should thousands of people die for something their leaders did?
Kurt Vonnegut makes sure that you know by the end of the book how pointless war is. Do you think war is pointless? What do you think the purpose of Slaughterhouse five is?
There is no middle for Slaughterhouse five. The middle for Billy Pilgrim is his entire life. He feels that there is no beginning or end.Billy has many different timelines that seem to all be happening at once. Billy goes through time in Illium, New York as an optometrist. He is a soldier in World War two, and he is kept in a zoo on Tralfmadore. There are multiple times that could be the actual time line line.
I think the one that is most likely the timeline is the war. All the events that we see, like Billy getting into a plane crash, and Billy going to New York to talk about the aliens that kidnapped him. I feel like none of that actual happened.
The first time Billy jumped through time, he was in the woods with the Three Musketeers. Billy saw his death when he jumped through time. When you are tired and you just want to give up, you start imagining things. Billy wanted to stop walking, so he imagined what it felt like to give up and die.
Billy once said "not in the present",
Billy Pilgrim was meanwhile traveling back to Dresden, too, but not in the present. He was going back there in 1945, two days after the city was destroyed." (pg.212)
That got me thinking, what is the present for Billy? I thought it was during the war and I feel like this confirms it. He said he went back to Dresden but not in the present. That means that the present is in Dresden but it is before the fire bombings. Maybe that means that nothing in the book really happened after the bombings in Dresden, because Billy died in the slaughterhouse. Or maybe Billy dies and this is what he sees in Heaven to help him cope with what he had to live through.
What do you think the main time line is? Do you think Billy actually experienced everything in the book?
Hello readers,
For this blogging assignment, I will be doing Slaughter House Five. Slaughter House five is a book about Billy Pilgrim and how he goes through life before, after, and during World War Two. Billy was an American solider, not a very good one but a soldier none the less.
This book is anti-war story. It most definitely discouraged me from going into war. I never really thought about how if I go to war I'll most likely go crazy like Billy. And Billy is most definitely crazy, he thinks he jumps through time. Billy sees all these terrible things that he no longer wants to deal with, so he travels through time to escape the bad things happening around him. To make him feel better, I think he creates the Tramlfadores. They tell him that only focusing on the good in life is the right thing to do.
"Later on in life, the Tramlfamadorians would advise Billy to concentrate on the happy moments in his life, and to ignore the unhappy ones -to stare only at pretty things as eternity failed to go by." (pg. 195)
They tell him that escaping something you don't like is completly normal. You shouldn't have to go through something that you don't like. The Tralfmadorians convinced Billy that not seeing the bad things in life is the way you are supposed to live.
Billy doesn't see how crazy he is with the Tralfmadorians reassuring him that he is perfectly sane. He sees aliens that look like toliet pluggers and yet thinks nothing of it. Why do you think the Tralfmadores were added?
Remembering something in 1984 is practically impossible. What you think is true, could end up being false. In 1984, all the texts are rewritten over and over again. Speeches made by Big Brother are rewritten to make it seem like everything that comes out of his mouth is true. Because all the texts are rewritten, there really is no truth in 1984. Wilson tries to convince O'Brien that the Earth is older than man kind and O'Brien won't hear it because all his life he has been force feed the Party's lies.
"We can shut them out of existence. Oceania is the world.'
'But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny-helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.'
Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness." (Orwell, 218).
O'Brien can't fathom that anything existed before humans. That shows how powerful having a past is. How the past is written and passed down can change our perspective of everything. In our world most people believe that evolution happened and that dinosaurs roamed the earth, while in 1984, humans have always existed and there was never a time when they weren't there. Dinosaur bones were created by scientist according to the people in the Party.
All of our history books are written over and over again, it seems likely that eventually people will leave things out or rephrase a sentence that completely changes history. Does that surprise you, to know that everything in your history book could be a lie that we all just believe? Do you think that there's a way to come up with a way to record history accurately? If so, how? Do you think that the truth actually exists or is it how we perceive the truth?
The language in 1984 took me sometime to get use to. There were multiple times in which the word "proles" was used. It took to the part when Winston slept with the prostitute for me to understand that proles were prostitutes. Or did I get that wrong and a prole is anybody who's not part of the Party?
Wilson was given instructions on what to do for his rewrite,
In Oldspeak (or standard English) this might be rendered:
The reporting of Big Brother's Order for the Day in the Times of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to nonexistent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing." (Orwell, 40).
Wilsons coworker, Syme, said that Oceania was the only language in the world that got smaller every year (Orwell, 46). I can understand using double speak to make things sound better than they are but I don't understand why they get rid of most of the language. They take out a word when double and un can be used, but what's the point of shortening Big Brother to bb? When I was reading the Newspeak words I could pick out what went where (after reading the translated version). Something I noticed was that the structure of the sentence was different. If they went in the same order shouldn't it go something like this
Double speak can actually be really useful in life. I would rather someone tell me that I'm going to the making of a better child room than going to detention. The use of double speak in our language is already a thing, so I think it's only a matter of time before we start using language like they do in 1984. I don't think it will be as drastic but we already use acronyms in every life, it wouldn't be hard to change the language. Do you ever think that we could completely change our language to look like how it does in 1984 or do you think that that's to much of a drastic change? By making the language into a couple simple words, do you think that the Party is brainwashing it's citizens?
Humans can do many things that we really do not want to. We can drop a bomb on a country and kill thousands of people. We can issue an airstrike knowing that it will kill 40 elementary students. But we can't seem to see a single person die. If we never meet the person that was murdered, then it's almost like they never existed. We would rather pretend that it never happened, then find out the murdered persons name.
By dehumanizing the enemy we no longer need to worry about who we killed. They are just a face in the crowd that doesn't matter to you. You don't have to look into their face and see that they're the one you killed. In 1984 during the Two Minutes Hate Winston talks about Oceania's enemy's.
"-row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar." (Orwell, 14-15).
In 1984, the people in Oceania think that killing is perfectly fine because they think the enemy deserves to die. They view the enemy as nothing more than animals, so that makes it much easier to kill. By dehumanizing the enemy you no longer have to worry about if they die or not because in the end you think that they probably deserve it. Do you think that by seeing the enemy as nothing that it would be easier to kill them? If you never met the person that was killed would you remember them after some time goes by or would you rather just forget about them?
What's up? Tally, that's who. To escape from New Pretty Town, Tally caught a ride on a hot air balloon. Tally and Zane were being watched and their every move was being recorded by the bracelets on their wrist. To get them off they had to jump into a hot air balloon and put their hand into a fire with just a little sliver of plastic protecting them. (I chose this balloon because they were riding in a pig balloon, which relates to the first book in which Tally had on a pig mask.)
After the bracelets were safely removed, Zane jumped out onto his hoverboard (exactly what it sounds like, a board that hovers with metal). While Tally was delayed because her best friend Peris wanted to stay pretty and live in New Pretty Town. Because Tally was delayed so much, she ended up not going where she was supposed to and broke her hoverboard by trying to land to harshly. A group stumbles upon Tally and I found this interesting because these people are practically cave men. These people have a completely different appearance then anybody Tally has ever seen and they live in the wild. When they found Tally they planned to kill her but because they saw her pretty face they thought she was a god.
Where Tally landed; turned out to be a reservation where pretty scientists' can study 'underdeveloped people'. From what I got, the reservation is only a thing that scientist know about. I got this because at first Tally didn't know where she was, but when she was taken to the 'end of the world' she couldn't pass because the Pretties had put in a security system to keep the cave men in.
"This was a reservation.
And Tally was trapped inside."(289)
While Tally was trapped inside with Andrew (the one who could speak the 'gods' language) she learned some things about him and their culture. Apparently there are multiple tribes and they are all fighting with one another and killing each other, when it's their turn to kill. If you live in a world without war and murder I guess you can say it was quite a culture shock. Because Tally was raised in a city and lived there her whole life (except when she was in the Smoke) she had never been exposed to anybody but her 'kind'. It shows that the city can change your actions. A person who has lived in the reservation thinks killing is normal, why a person born in the city, thinks it's barbaric. Andrew's behavior reminded Tally of something Dr. Cable had said to her. This is a conversation between Tally and Andrew:
"I was glad to see that it was you that they brought home, and not a kill. So that it is still our turn, and I may still be there for my father's revenge."
Tally found herself speechless. In seconds, Andrew Simpson Smith had changed from a grieving son into some kind of . . . savage.
She forced herself to stare at Andrew's grim expression, his weird delight in the heft of the knife in his hand.
Then she remembered D. Cable's words. Humanity is a cancer, and we are the cure." (279-280)
I chose this quote and video because it shows that people do think humanity is a cancer. That they are savages that need to be controlled. Pretties is not the only book/movie to do this concept. Do you think that this means humans should be controlled? That we are a cancer and without a proper vaccine, we will end up killing everything and everyone around us. Do you think that if humans are not controlled that they will reverse to cavemen type people who believe that murder is the only way to solve a problem?
After this conversation Tally started to think about how maybe humanity should be controlled. She may never be fully on board with the idea but she can see the appeal. In the end, Tally ends up becoming Special. Do you think this means that ne matter how far you run, you can't outrun destiny?
