A "Happy" Ending

Related to Cinderella or not, Slaugtherhouse-Five´s ending was LAME. The story is full of sarcasm, mockery, and black humor, and the ending didn´t meet my expectations. Many endings in the story tend to be lame, and by "endings" I also mean deaths. Valencia died in the most lame way she could have died. Only dying because of her overweight would have made it more boring.

Otherwise, there were two characteristics of a vehicle that make me consider many variables. After the POWs finish the "body-mining," they just leave. The only vehicle available is "an abandoned wagon drawn by two horses, yet the outstanding characteristic about it was that "the wagon was green and coffin-shaped." This is the last mock in Slaughterhouse-Five, where I feel Vonnegut represents their survival of WWII as simple, and the fact that they are leaving as an introduction to a dangerous and life-threatening journey. I am forced to believe this because of the "coffin-shaped" vehicle, the tree that was "leafing out," and the way Vonnegut tends to under-rate any war eventualities. 

I do feel the end of the novel lets me down, I awaited a special ending with unexpected turns, not Billy leaving in serenity. I still believe Billy was crazy and Trafalmadore was made-up, but it was his way of escaping our current world, which is torn apart every day by the endless inner and external conflicts we have to confront.

I Feel Gay Today

An aphorism I can´t get of my mind:

"It was a picture of a Gay Nineties couple on a bicycle built for two. Billy looked at that picture now, and tried to think something about the couple. Nothing came to him. There didn´t seem to be anything to thing about those two people."

Wasn´t gay intolerance one of the big factors why WWII unfolded? Once again, Vonnegut continues mocking traits from the time period, and this maxim is deemed important.

I tend to feel awed by the magnitude of WWII, and would even have the nerve to compare Hitler with a madman. I dare anyone to explain how someone decides to exterminate a high percentage of Europe´s population to try to achieve the perfect race, the Aryans.

How did this maniac achieve this amount of followers? He used words. They are the poison employed by leaders to influence their public. I refer to them as poison because they´re always able to modify the listener´s thoughts, whether in a negative or positive way. A clear example is Hitler´s Salzburg speech against Jews in 1920:

"Jewish contamination will not subside, this poisoning of the nation will not end, until the carrier himself, the Jew, has been banished from our midst."

People became both fearful and discriminational towards this culture, but it wasn´t only the Jews he reached out to annihilate, between the prosectuted were Jehovah´s Witnesses, the mentally ill, homosexuals, Roma peoples, and any other race that wasn´t considered pure. Would you have anything to say about the picture?

"Billy is Normal, We Are All Crazy"

Is it even logical to believe that if every person in the world read "Slaugtherhouse-Five," only one of the 6.97 million human beings isn´t crazy? Isn´t this thought taking it overboard? I tend to think I disagree with Viviana´s controversial blog post, yet I think about José Saramago´s novel Blindness, where a plague begins to infect people and they begin to lose their sight. Thinking out of the box, there is a very slight chance that all of us have been infected by a plague and none of us have realized. Vivana´s reference to The Eye of the Beholder is more than valid, we might have grown used to living in this madness and consider Billy crazy, blinded by our own condition. Of course, these thoughts are all far-fetched, but like any philosopher would say, there is always a chance to doubt.

Lastly, I don´t consider Billy brave. In fact, I consider him weak and scared, scared of overachieving, scared of not being satisfied, scared of living in the real world instead of escaping into the fantastic world of Trafalmadore.