So, I have finished reading the book. Here are my preliminary thoughts.
Also, right now these are just the somewhat incoherent ramblings of a 17 year old boy with too many thoughts flooding his head and not enough knowledge of the text to weed out the good ones from the bad ones. So treat this post as a coal mine. You might find nothing but clay and dirt or you might find a nice bit of coal to take home if you (and I) are lucky. At the moment the quotes from the text I have used below are just from my memory (and i have only read it once) so they will all almost definately be paraphrased and wrong. ThemesFree Will (or lack thereof)
Throughout the book the notion of free will is questioned. There's a quote from one of the Tralfalmadorians somewhere in the book. It's something along the lines of 'we have surveyed hundreds of planets and Earth is the only one where there is any notion of free will' (not the actual quote, but it's something along those lines). Simmilarly, Billy seemingly lacks controll over his life. Here's quote from sparknotes about the topic:
Throughout his life, Billy runs up against forces that counter his free will. When Billy is a child, his father lets him sink into the deep end of a pool in order to teach him how to swim. Much to his father’s dismay, however, Billy prefers the bottom of the pool, but, against his free will to stay there, he is rescued. Later, Billy is drafted into the war against his will. Even as a soldier, Billy is a joke, lacking training, supplies, and proper clothing. He bobs along like a puppet in Luxembourg, his civilian shoes flapping on his feet, and marches through the streets of Dresden draped in the remains of the scenery from a production of Cinderella.
Also, that recurring motiff of the phrase 'so it goes' implies a lack of controll for people in their lives. Another good example of this is when one of the Tralfalmadorians describes the end of the universe to Billy and billy asks them why they don't change it and (yet another recurring motiff) they respond with something like: 'because the moment is structured that way'.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OKAY, so. I'll write a little bit about a character I found interesting in the book. I can't even remember his name but he was the British soldier (if you've read the book you'll know who i'm talking about). He described to billy the fierce structure that he has in his life. He described to billy how he has developed a sort of ryhthmic, methodic routine whilst he has been in the war camp. He describes to billy how he ensures that he shaves, showers etc. every day and makes sure that he does this otherwise he fears he will slip into depression for having nothing to do.
I think that this character compliments the idea of free will being a benign sort of a notion well. He has shown that a human can behave in many ways like a machine, always doing the same thing over and over again each day of the week and that this has had huge benifits for him and for the rest of the british soldiers around him. Vonnegut may, through this character, be implying that freedom isn't actualy all that centeral to the human character at all. The british soldiers are in many ways a 'diamond in the rough' in the prison camp (and the war for that matter) and they have achieved this by following methodic routine.
^this stuff about the british is an idea in the making and would require a seccond reading of the text by me to fully explore (and even confirm) it entirely.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Poot-tee-weet?"
The Bird Who Says “Poo-tee-weet?”
The jabbering bird symbolizes the lack of anything intelligent to say about war. Birdsong rings out alone in the silence after a massacre, and “Poo-tee-weet?” seems about as appropriate a thing to say as any, since no words can really describe the horror of the Dresden firebombing. The bird sings outside of Billy’s hospital window and again in the last line of the book, asking a question for which we have no answer, just as we have no answer for how such an atrocity as the firebombing could happen.
^ I reckon they're kind of on the money with this. Also, the phrase 'poot-tee-weet' is so very very simple. Its mono-sylabolic (that can't be spelt right) and I seem to remember Vonnegut building up to this finale with quite a simple, 'matter of fact' sort of tone and structure of direct terms and sentences, not digressing into any great lengthy descriptions [I may be remembering incorectly... tell me if i'm making a mistake here]. This could be Vonnegut once again bringing up the point of an inability to change what has happened and the need to accept these things for what they are and to look at them objectively and from afar in a simple manner.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
These are all just quotes from this site:
www.shmoop.comThere are a bunch of dogs in this novel. There is Sandy, the narrator's dog; Spot, a (sadly deceased) dog of Billy's; and Princess, the freezing cold German shepherd who accompanies the soldiers that capture Billy and Roland Weary in the cold forests of Luxembourg.
These dogs appear briefly, and we don't want to read too much into this, but it does seem significant that when Billy is on the run from the Germans in Luxembourg, he sometimes hears dogs barking. They indicate that the German troops are nearby and sound terrifying. But up close, all the dogs we meet in the book are loyal and likable. Even Princess, an imposing German shepherd, is just a frightened animal, cold and unfamiliar with war. This may sound like kind of an obvious message, but it remains true that appearances can be deceiving
The narrator tells his sons in Chapter 1 that they are not to participate in massacres, but Billy Pilgrim willingly sends his son Robert off to Vietnam, presumably to kill people. This difference between the narrator's and Billy's choices exposes a fundamental difference between the two men's characters: Billy is resigned to war, while the narrator is trying to prevent fighting.
By focusing on the suffering of individual human beings, such as the German refugee girls killed in the Dresden firebombing, Vonnegut shifts attention about the morality of war away from big questions of national politics toward smaller, less justifiable instances of personal pain.
The Tralfamadorians are pretty clear that their novels hold no moral lessons for readers. After all, what would be the point of a moral lesson when you can't do anything to change the future? Slaughterhouse-Five, with its stars and tiny sections, seems to be imitating a Tralfamadorian novel. So it makes sense that the narrator doesn't spend much time preaching about right or wrong: that's not the point of this book.
If the book were really trying to deliver a moral message, the narrator's emphasis on the suffering of the Germans in Dresden might have to be balanced out by a much longer meditation on the Nazis' concentration camps. What Vonnegut seems to be asking his readers to do instead is to think about how much human suffering the war brought for both sides. Some of the most evil characters in the book – Bertram Copeland Rumfoord and Paul Lazzaro – are the ones who think they are absolutely right. This kind of righteous self-assurance is what leads to war in the first place.
I'll add more to this post later on.
Right now I'm regretting not taking notes while i read.
Home
Help
Search
Login
