Reality?

The book Slaughterhouse-Five is filled with abstract concepts: aliens and time travel. This brings up questions to the thought behind Vonnegut's novel. The main one being, "Did Vonnegut write with all of these mystical aspects to make his war book more interesting, or to convey a stronger point?"

PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) is the reasoning behind a lot of mental problems from soldiers returning home from war. It affects many; A recent study from a PTDS website suggests that "30 out of 100 (30%) of vietnam veterans have had PTSD sometime in their lifetime". Back in the 1940s, PTSD was not understood as well as it is now, so there aren't any statistics. Signs of PTSD include: re-experiencing situations, avoidance and numbing symptoms, as well as arousal symptoms.

Reliving situations is the symptom that seems most appropriate for correlating Slaughterhouse-Five to PTSD. The main theme found in Vonnegut's novel is time and how out of control it is. Maybe this structure is a metaphor of what war veterans have to deal with: confusion, lack of understanding, loneliness. We were warned before handed this novel that it wasn't going to be the easiest book; it was going to be confusing. Maybe there isn't a great amount of difference between reading this confusing book and being in the mind of one suffering from PTSD.

So, did Vonnegut write with all of these mystical aspects to make his war book more interesting, or to convey a stronger message? Do you have any other "real world" explanation for why the book is like this? Do you think Vonnegut suffered from PTSD at all throughout his lifetime?

Tralfamadorian Absence

Tralfamadorians are aliens with various concepts that contradict to a lot of "Earthling" ideas. In this novel, Billy Pilgrim interacts with them a fair amount. Throughout his visits back and forth through time, he couldn't help but be influenced by their presence.

Billy, as we've come to know, is a very passive, underwhelming character. He isn't the typical war protagonist we, as readers, would often expect to fill the role of main character. Maybe this odd characterizing has something to do with the Tralfamadorian visits. Billy has surely learned "lessons of Tralfamadore" throughout his lifetime that affect him as we read further (199). One of these "lessons" was that "everybody has to do exactly as he does" (198). This philosophy carries with Billy when he says that he "had found life meaningless"(101). This insuites there is very little choice or purpose in life. Everything is how it is: nothing more and nothing less.

Another Tralfamadorian concept Billy has adapted is the very demonstrated understanding of time. Tralfamadorians believe that "all moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist"(27). Billy shows his agreement with this concept on multiple different occasions; one of which occurred in his optometrist office. In the office, Billy explains to a fatherless boy "that his father was very much alive still in moments the boy would see again and again"(135). Billy believes in time as the Tralfamadorians do because of his visiting with them.

What other examples of this topic do you see? What other things impact Billy's dry personality, or is it simply chance?

Poor Old Edgar Derby

In the book, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, the character Edgar Derby is a slightly older school teacher that is always referred to in the same way - Poor Old Edgar Derby. After reading this description time after time, I eventually started wondering, Why is he always referred as Poor and Old, and why did Vonnegut feel the need to have this seemingly unnecessary repetition?
I came up with some ideas as to why this phenomena was happening. At first I thought that it was just a physical description and that he was literally Poor and Old. This made sense to me because he was older than the rest of the clique and he was a teacher in what I assumed to be in a small town. But the more I thought about this phrase, the more ideas I had as to why this message was really hammered into the reader's mind. After thinking about it in the back of my mind, I thought of another thing. What I came up with was that Billy felt sorry or even responsible for Derby's death. I thought this was a good explanation, thinking that Billy felt remorse for his older war friend. Whether that remorse was because of his drugged execution via firing squad with "A piece of paper," (Pg. 123) acting as a target attached to him, or because he was such a nice guy and didn't deserve to die is up to interpretation.
But I still have questions as to why this was so important to Vonnegut that he habitually wrote it again and again whenever he referred to Derby. Are there any other ideas that you guys have as to why this was so crucial to the character description?

Cinderella - Parallels and Symbolism

It seemed to me that Vonnegut didn't choose the play, Cinderella, randomly. One reason that I think that this play is important is because it's referenced so much, but more specifically, the Blue Fairy Godmother and the azure and pink trim of the stage. It seems that the Blue Fairy Godmother was supposed to symbolize that some people thought that they were better than the others, but ultimately, they were all the same (i.e. the
Englishmen were still living in the same area as the "disgusting Americans"). Does this make sense to anyone else and is it logical to come to that conclusion? I also thought that the Azure and pink trim of the stage was also significant. I took this as another reference to the blue and ivory, because the "ivory" was referencing skin, which you could also say that skin is a pinkish hue. Has anyone else thought of this and is this a good connection, or is this a stretch?

Hermaphroditic tendencies throughout the book

I was wondering why this idea of a female looking male was expressed throughout the book. One time this was expressed was when Billy met the German boy that was described being "as beautiful as Eve," (Pg. 53). This description struck me as a little odd, but this puzzling (possibly unintentional) theme wasn't cemented into my mind until the play, Cinderella, comes into the book. The man that played the Blue Fairy Godmother comes up three or four times. This seemed important to me as one of the underlying themes in the book. Did the idea of men looking female seem important to anyone else? Is there something that I missed that makes this elusive idea make sense to the story? Am I just overanalyzing and was this a random connection that I made, or does this have a bigger part to the story?

Billy, as a character

Billy Pilgrim is a professedly obvious passive character. He doesn't seem to have the emotions or reactions we would often expect from the main character of a war novel.

There are many places throughout the duration of Slaughterhouse-five where Billy shows us, the readers, how detached of a character he really is. The detachment could be a useful tool to focus more on the story, or distracting and irritating to the reader.

 Billy explains to the Tralfamadorians how being in a zoo made him feel "about as happy as [he] was on Earth" (114), which obviously doesn't say much about his joy of life on earth. He gives constant examples of how he "really didn't like life at all" (102) during his war experience. It wasn't uncommon for him to be miserable in the war. He mentioned that he "wanted to quit" and had the guys "go on without [him]" (34) multiple times.

Is Billy's underwhelming personality helping the story or alluding from it? If you could, would you change Billy Pilgrim's personality to make it more relatable? What was Vonnegut thinking when he made a character like this?

Kilgore Trout

In chapter 5, we are introduced to a character by the name of Kilgore Trout. At first glance he may seem like just some crazy man, yet, if thought about deeply enough, he can be correlated with the author, Kurt Vonnegut, himself.

There are subtle clues that lead me to believe there is some parallel between the two individuals. The initial introduction where Trout is described as a "science-fiction writer" relates to Vonnegut, as we know by the very novel we read from (166). Trout also writes novels about ghastly tales which include "burning jellied gasoline on human beings" (168). As we read this novel, we can't help but notice many heinous situations like the ones in Trout's writing. Vonnegut writes that "candles and the soap were made from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies" (96), a dog being fed "steak" with a "cut up with pieces of spring" (139), and about his wife dying of "carbon-monoxide poisoning" (25). These two individuals are both far from being afraid to allude towards these detestable situations. But the main piece of evidence I gathered was the line when the novel reads that "Trout's unpopularity was deserved" because "his prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good" (110). This brings me back to Vonnegut's seemingly odd style of writing, but his fascinating ideas and concepts (war, time travel, aliens, etc.).

Do you believe there is a parallel here? What other evidence supports this? Where else can we see the author, Kurt Vonnegut, throughout the novel?