What would I write a novel about? That would be the question whose answer I have been thinking about for almost as long as I can remember. I certainly know a lot about the little pieces, but I wouldn't know where in the world to begin with the big picture. I could tell you all about my purpose in writing the story and what it would be based on, but all of that would probably change as soon as I picked up the pen to write. It certainly is an intriguing question though, and oneI would love to have answered by the time my life has ended.
I think much like Vonnegut's purpose in writing Slaughterhouse Five, my story would be about a lot of the things that have happened and will happen in my life, although there will definitely be some minor (and major!) changes. It's not like I want to write an autobiography because I think I would get bored of that even before the readers would ( which would be on the first page!). I just want a way in which I can tell my story, but tell another, different story at the same time.
I can tell you one thing, my main character will be the Billy Pilgrim to my Vonnegut. She will be just like me in so many ways, but so different in others. For example, she would definitely look different, with auburn hair and hazel eyes. She would be a normal size and her hair would be wavy. I could tell you a bunch of the little, unimportant details of her life too, but they would be pointless seeing as the book doesn't even exist and probably never will. She would be the important part of the story, more so even than the events. She would be my reason for writing, my inspiration.
A lot of the issues I would write about would be related to realistic things like her family dynamics and personal struggles, many things we probably wouldn't even think about. Regardless of their position as minor and unimportant in our thought processes, I would still like to write about them because they can be important.
I don't think it would really matter to me if anyone ever read what I wrote, because at least it would be out there. There was this one quote I heard on an episode of Criminal Minds last year and it kind of popped into my head when I started thinking about this topic: "Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."-Cyril Connolly, writer
On page 74 of Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut decribes a scene in a movie Billy watches backwards. The scene depicts the progression of the events of the war, but seen backwards, all the destruction is undone and the lost lives are given back. Reading this passage, I really liked the idea. It got me thinking about how we see our own lives. What would happen were we to see our lives as Billy saw the war movie: backwards?
Of course the damage done would be undone and all of the things we have to struggle through would disappear because there would be some time in our lives when we were without them. My idea though, is kind of different. I don't really care to take away all the struggles in my life ( though there are definitely some I could live without), but rather find reasons for them. I hold the belief that everything happens for a reason and that all of the trials I have in my life do serve a purpose. Whether that purpose will ever be know to me is what I don't know. Sometimes going through things though, I would love to know the reason. When things get so hard that I just want to give up, I would like to know the point of all the obstacles I am overcoming.
I think that's what I would use the rewind button (so to speak) for in my life. In the end, we often have that understanding of the purpose of what we just went through and it seems worthwhile. Being able to see that in the beginning may have been better, but looking at things in retrospect definitely makes acceptance easier.
This kind of relates to Billy in that he goes through so much, and for what? What does he gain for all his pain? If he could have seen beforehand the results of all the battles he fought, would he have chosen them differently? Would I choose my battles differently?
In the end, we can't see how things are going to turn out. I guess that means we have to take chances. See what happens. If we win, good for us. If we lose, so it goes.
"I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction. The sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar, I read. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.
So it goes.
There were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them.
And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.
People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore." (21-22)
When I first read this passage, there was just something about it that stuck me. As we went through the first few chapters of the novel, I kept going back to it, trying to figure out what it was about the few simple paragraphs that was so drawing. I knew the story of Lot and his wife and of Sodom and Gomorrah before I read Slaughterhouse Five, but I never really thought of it in the way Vonnegut expresses it.
The story of Lot's wife is the story of each and every one of us, although (to my knowledge) we are not literally going to be turned to pillars of salt. We, as humans, have this tendency to always look back. We line up our memories in our minds and play them over and over until it's as if they were happening again. For some of us, it is a way to remember loved ones we've lost or unique memories, for others, it is a torture device.
So often, it seems, I get caught up thinking about what happened in the past, all the things I've left behind, and all the things I did and could have done. I make myself dizzy chasing the question through my mind: would things be better if I had done that some other way? So much of my time is spent regretting the things I've messed up, and analyzing moments and words that other people have probably forgotten. Sometimes I am so preoccupied thinking about what has already happened that I can't see what is happening right before my eyes. I can't see today or tomorrow or the next day. All I see is yesterday.
I lose a lot when I think like that, when I'm stuck in reverse. I think that's kind of what Vonnegut is saying, that we are all, in essence, turning ourselves into pillars of salt by spending so much of our time walking backwards. We think and analyze and chip away at our pasts until they turn around and chip away at us. We break things into so many pieces and, in turn, we are broken down. We are pillars of salt.
"People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore." (22)
They call me crazy, And I can't deny They've got science On their side But I've got truth And I think that's better. Let them think What they think. They call me useless, Think I'm a fool Because my thoughts Don't mirror theirs. They look at me Then at the ground, Unable to meet my eyes. It's okay, Let them believe what they will. Maybe I believe in something Which, to them could not Be real, But it's real to me, It's what I believe. I'm not crazy And that's enough for me. So it goes.
I was recently reading another novel by Vonnegut by the name of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. While reading, I came across two passages which reminded me of the first discussion we had in class when we talked about Kurt Vonnegut as a writer and his life story. It had been mentioned that his mother had committed suicide when he was young, and for some reason that stuck with me. When I read the first passages, I immediately thought of Vonnegut.
The passages are talking about a man named Fred Rosewater whose father committed suicide when Fred was just a boy, something Fred was unfortunately a witness to. It reads: "Sons of suicides seldom do well. Characteristically, they find life lacking a certain zing. They tend to feel more rootless than most, even in a notoriously rootless nation. They are squeamishly incurious about the past and numbly certain about the future to this grisly extent: they suspect that they, too, will probably kill themselves. " (144) The passage goes on to describe how Fred's father had died and all his son had witnessed. A passage from further into the book says: "Sons of suicides often think of killing themselves at the end of the day, when their blood sugar is low. And so it was with Fred Rosewater when he came home from work." (196)
This all got me wondering about Vonnegut himself, being the "son of a suicide." I found reading about this character extremely sad and I wondered whether these passages contained some bit of autobiographical truth, so I did some research. In an article published after the author's death in 2007, I found out that in 1984, Vonnegut tried to take his own life with sleeping pills and alcohol.
I thought this was so sad thinking about the underlying message of hope in Slaughterhouse Five. I think the truth in these passages also highlights the fact that there must be more truth in his other work. This truth, I think, makes some of the horrors we are reading about in Slaughterhouse Five even more real to me, and even harder to read. It also amazes me that a man with such a background could write a book like Slaughterhouse Five with such a hopeful undertone of appreciation of beauty and positivity, then go home and contemplate suicide. It makes it all so much more tragic.
Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.
There is just something about this quote that has stayed with me since the first time I read the novel last year. It was the page I kept turning back to, the one line I kept reading. I didn't really know why until I thought about what it meant to me. I don't think that Vonnegut means that everything in life is going to be beautiful and that we are not going to experience any pain, because I think we all know that is not true. I do think that this quote is a reminder that the things we should focus one are the things which are beautiful, the things which bring us joy.
When I go through the novel, I find that this is a lesson Vonnegut tries to teach his readers from the opening to the close. There is a lot of pain within the pages of the novel, a lot of tragedy and unspeakable horrors, but even as the characters look upon scenes of utter destruction, there are things that are beautiful. There is hope. That is probably one of the reasons I like this book so much. It has its flaws, I will admit, and there are pieces of it I think are a bit offensive and inappropriate, but behind all that is on the surface, I think the author is just trying to give his readers something that this world doesn't really seem to have a lot of anymore: hope.
I mean, if you can live through even a few of the things this author has experienced, and still have hope, you really have something. It's inspiring, I think.
I guess that's probably why this particular line has stuck with me. Even with all of the bad we experience on a daily basis, with all of the things we see and hear and feel, there is some kind of hope. Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.
They pulled slowly into the parking lot, rolling over the cracked asphalt. Some of the pot holes had been large enough to swallow a small animal. Her father cursed, something he had been doing more frequently in the recent weeks, and her sisters stifled laughter in the seats behind her. When her father opened the door to pay the parking fare, Lauren could hear the whipping of the wind through the barren trees. A chill ran up her spine. As her father approached the ticket dispenser a few paces away, Lauren looked behind her and whispered harshly to her sisters that they ought to behave if they wanted to stay out of trouble. They rolled their glitter shadowed eyes at her and continued to pass their little plastic tubes of lip gloss back and forth and squeal in delight about how shiny they were.
A few minutes later, the four of them were making their way to the hospital door, heads down in order to escape the wrath of the night's brutal wind. It was only about , but it was dark. The entrance way reeked of sanitizing solution and burnt cookies. There were people milling about everywhere looking lost as though they had been thrust into this scene against their will, which most of them probably had been. Lauren and her family were not lost though. They knew their way by heart now. They made it up the stairs and stood impatiently in front of the delayed elevator. Her father tapped his foot quickly, nervously. He was angry about something again. The elevator doors opened and a flood of all sorts of people rushed out. They all had one thing in common.There were expressions of deep worry etched into each of their faces. Lauren stepped onto the elevator behind her two sisters who were vying for the envied spot at the front of the elevator, the spot of the person who got to push the buttons. Their father followed, admonishing the two girls for their behaviour which he found to be embarrassing considering the public building they were standing in.
The elevator ride seemed longer than normal. The silence was almost unendurable. Lauren could hear the squeak of the gears pulling the machine up to its destination on one of the higher floors of the building. They were the only four people in the elevator, and from how they stood so far apart all staring intently at the ground, you would never know they were related.
Lauren did not want to see her this way. She was not herself. She was not the person she knew and loved. She hadn't been herself at all any of the days they had gone to visit her. Her eyes were empty, as were her words. Lauren closed her eyes and felt the ground moving under her feet. She was waiting for it all to be over.
...
When she opened her eyes, Lauren was no longer nine years old, nor was she in the elevator at the hospital. Instead, she was surrounded by a bunch of rowdy grade eight students packed into an elevator taking them all to the top of the CN Tower. There were people laughing and shouting, but it all sounded like and undefined roar in the back of Lauren's mind. Her hands were shaking and her mind was racing and she grew more and more anxious as the elevator climbed nearer to the top.
When they had first stopped in front of the enormous structure, Lauren had made the mistake of looking up. At that moment she felt that the whole towering structure was going to topple down on top of her. She knew it was irrational, as was her fear of heights, but that had never been enough to convince her not to be afraid.
The elevator stopped suddenly and Lauren was pushed outside by a crowd of kids impatient to see the ground from a height so great. Another girl grabbed on to her trembling arm and pulled her over to the window where she could see all of Toronto down below. It was almost too much to look at, so she closed her eyes for a moment then blindly followed the rest of the group down a small set of stairs to another observatory.
After spending almost an hour suspended over one of the biggest cities in the country, the classes made their way back to the elevators before they made the last stop on the itinerary. When the doors to the elevator had closed, Lauren was packed in with all the other kids. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, relieved. It was finally over.
...
Upon opening her eyes, Lauren found that she was no longer in the elevator of the CN Tower, but in a hotel elevator in Ohio. Even the enclosed space reeked of that hotel smell that you can't help but wrinkle your nose at. Stranger than the hotel scent even, was the fact that Lauren was standing there with the rest of her family all of whom were dressed in bathing suits. She had wrapped herself in a towel, but somehow she was still shivering. There were a few other people in the elevator too, and they also appeared as though they were headed for the pool, wherever that was.
When the elevator reached the lobby, everyone made their way out and spread like roots in a multitude of directions. There were people lounging in chairs all over the lobby, people in business suits, people with their families, people in uniform, but no one else was wearing a bathing suit. Awkward would have been a fitting description of the scene.
Reluctantly, Lauren followed her parents into a pool room which smelled quite strongly of chlorine and moldy towels. There were at least 50 other people there, sliding down waterslides, splashing one another, laughing at the odd contraption with the metal monkeys who dumped coconuts full of water on your head. Everyone was having a great time. The only exception was Lauren's family. Her mother and sisters were discussing how much time they had and what they wanted to do before they left and her father stood sternly by a plastic table scrolling through e-mails on his Blackberry. Lauren was standing there still shivering despite the heated atmosphere of the pool room.
Contemplating what she was going to do for only a moment before speaking, Lauren excused herself to go back up to the room and change. She said she didn't feel like going in the water. No, not even for a few minutes. Once she was given the key, she made her way back to the elevator, wrapped tightly in her towel in order to prevent any more embarrassment. Thankfully, the elevator was empty this time. The ride seemed somehow longer though. Biting her tongue so as not to let any emotion show, Lauren made her way back to the room, changed and grabbed a book to read. She paused for a few moments before closing the door behind her.
In the elevator she closed her eyes and waited for the ride to be done. When she opened them again, she was back in the present.
Should books containing questionable or controversial topics be banned in schools or censored? There are definitely people who hold a variety of opinions about the answer to this question, and all have their reasons, I'm sure. I think that as students, part of the learning process is learning to form our own opinions and take our own stands for what we think is right, even if it goes against the public opinion. Our opinions are our opinions and we have our own reasons for having them, reasons which, to us are completely vaild. If we are encouraged then, to have our own opinions, isn't censorship or book banning a direct conradiction to that? The authors write the things they write in their books for a reason, and they have the right to their own opinions. They are in no way forcing you to believe what they are writing because, really, that is not physically possible. They can try to pursuade you to believe a certain thing and colour their writing to suit that belief, but in the end, what you take from the novel is your choice.
There are a lot of things in Slaughterhouse Five which are potentially insulting to readers, some of which are more obviously insulting, but others which may be insulting only to specific people for specific reasons all their own. Isn't it like that with all other books though? There are things each person finds insulting for his/her own reasons, and they may be bizarre to one person, to that one person they are insulting. Does that mean we should censor everything that anyone and everyone finds insulting? I don't think that would be a good idea because that wouldn't leave much out there for us to read.
The other books we have read this year also contain content some people would find insulting. much of it, in a way, may be considered propaganda for the "enemy." Yes, it gives people ideas, but it is not forcing people to act on anything or believe in anything because it cannot physically change what you believe. I think the controversy scares people and in order to defend themselves from the fear, they try to abolish that which inspires their fear, not even stopping to think that that is not necessarily a solution. Slaughterhouse Five may very well be a controversial text which inspires fear and questioning from various sources, but it should not be banned because, just like every other piece of writing I have ever read, it contains someone's opinions (even when you don't necessarily notice them), and those opinions, just as every other opinion, should be respected and heard, even if they do not meet agreement in the end.
I was rereading this passage for class today (in my book it's on page 115), the one that talks about the end of the universe. I was thinking about Billy's question that if the Tralfamadorians knew what was going to happen, why wouldn't they do something to stop it? And then I read the response he was given, that it always had happened that way, always would happen that way, that they always had let it happen that way, and they always would let it happen that way. " The moment is structured that way." (115)
I think I just really liked the idea that they were so certain that that was what was going to happen and that it was supposed to happen, so why would they change it? It kind of made me think of the way I worry about so many things that are happening in my life and it takes up so much of my time, but what is the point to all of that? There is no point in my trying to change something that hasn't yet happened because, unlike the Tralfamadorians, I don't know what is going to happen. I guess the passage just really struck me. I don't know.
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
When I read this quote, I immediately thought of Billy Pilgrim. I think this just sums up the effect the war has had on Billy. He live in a kind of dazed state where nothing really makes any sense, and he doesn't know what to do with the senselessness, so he cries. He's such a pitiful character too, that when I read the passages about him bursting into tears for no apparent reason, I can't help but feel the same way.
I think this quote also relates to Vonnegut in that it serves as a sort of explanation of why he uses the dark humour in his novels. Some of the things I have laughed at throughout this novel are not really funny, and I feel guilty about laughing at them because they are really just so tragic. Vonnegut though, who is a war veteran himself expresses this tragedy in a way that can be, if you share his dark sense of humour, funny. I think this is the author's way of being able to express what has happened to him in the war. He said that he could either laugh or cry, but he preferred to laugh, and that is what is demonstrated on the pages of this novel.
There is a direct contrast then, between Vonnegut and his protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. Billy, when frustrated or exhausted, or even when he just doesn't know what else he should be doing, can burst into tears and just cry about his circumstances, while Vonnegut uses humour and laughter as his personal outlet for these emotions.
I find myself able to relate to this quote somewhat as I have used both of these outlets as a response to a numerous amount of situations. Like Vonnegut though, I prefer to laugh. I think it is probably easier to cry when faced with difficult emotions, but I have found that it is more freeing to be able to laugh, and there is less damage done to myself and people around me.
