Sh5

    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?

Sh5

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?

Blog 1 SH5

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?