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.

Vonnegut: On the Verge of Losing His Mind

Like I said in one of my previous blog posts, most of the story unfolds around mocking war. Therefore, my feelings towards the following excerpt are unclear:

"Billy wondered if there was a telephone somewhere. He wanted to call his mother, to tell her he was alive and well."

Billy wants to let his mother know he is well, that he has been surviving the concentration camps. Anyone would with all the comodities the Englishmen gave them. Ironically, Billy has dodged death many times, even thought it´s constantly right around the corner (bombs, starvation, climate, etc). Billy says he´d like to talk with his mother and tell her something, and this may be due to the thought that Billy was based on Vonnegut´s life. When he was young, Vonnegut´s mother committed suicide and the lack of a maternal figure probably influenced how Billy acts with his own mother in the novel. He seems scared to confront her, fearing letting her down and unable to express himself to her. Mrs. Pilgrim is presented as a lovely person, and her conversations with Rosewater expose these traits.

Children who lose a parent tend to have three times the risk of depression than those with two living parents, as well as an increase in the risk for post-traumatic stress disorder. These issues combined with surviving war probably made Vonnegut a ticking psycho machine.

Carpe Diem

I see a trend in Billy´s attitude. He is SO easily satisfied with life I feel frustrated. He could achieve so much more but seems like life doesn´t have to do much in order to impede his from growing in various aspects.

As far as I´ve read, he´s satisfied with:

- His wife

- Her physique

- His Earthling habitat

- His lack of the ability to see in many dimensions

- Death

- His room tempreture

- Bed in the Concentration camp

The list could go on for a long time. They lead me to ask myself, why would Billy be satisfied to easily? Did he give up on life, even though he had a life many would consider enviable? What would be so striking to cause a man to lose the desire to keep living?

People do even the impossible to live, often depending on other´s leftovers to feed their families, or stealing food to have access to it. I find it hurtful that Billy is so "eager" to have a roadblock instead of overcoming it, given to all the things and commodities he can access.

War may have been one of the reasons leading Billy´s trian of thought, yet I can´t be sure, since the way he´s "unstuck in time" makes it hard for the reader to organize chronologically certain events which are related.

Finally, the way Billy is so careless about death reminds me of diverse cultures in terms of similarities and differences. There are endless ways to embrace death, ignore it, mourn because of it, or introduce concepts to inforce the continuum of the soul in this world.

Clothing Magnetism?

I actually "googled" the term "animal magnetism," and the meaning I found was the following:

Animal Magnetism is a person's sexual attractiveness or raw charisma.

How could a trench coat have animal magnetism? I first thought the term referred to when people stare and you actually feel their gaze, which now seems ridiculous. So why would Vonnegut use this term to introduce the setting in Chapter 5? The previous definition was followed by this intricate one:

"Originally the term referred to a supposed magnetic fluid or ethereal medium that resided in the bodies of animate beings (i.e., those who breathe)."  

This leads me to ask myself, is Vonnegut considering the same concepts I am? Did he acknowledge that plants also "breathe"? Is the magnetic fluid blood?

Without going in depths into this concept, I do believe blood is the answer to these questions. Maybe the trench coat was a constant reminder of the death and bloodbath surrounding him, to later find himself rewarded when he found a "two-carat diamond and a partial denture [...] an obscene little artifact - silver and pearl and tangerine." 

This story is just like Jesus´, who was forced to climb a mountain with a cross where he was to be crucified. Then was rewarded by going to Heaven, where his father awaited. I believe the cross was a symbol of the misery he had to endure, and even though the symbolism in both cases is different, the concept is similar. 

Lazzaro really left me thinking. Even thought I believe his bravery is non-existent and he has the personality of a raisin, if people thought like he did (you should only be violent when it comes to vengeance), war wouldn´t exist. People wouldn´t bother fighting for their country when it was their associate/neighbor/friend/cousin/etc. who "messed" with them. Violence between individuals would increase, but depending on people´s morals, they would/wouldn´t act upon these ideals.

Mocking History?

A very interesting point in Chapter 5 was the narrators mocking tone towards major occurences in Billy´s life. For example, the differences in terms of the treatment the Germans gave the Englishmen, Russians, and Americans covered a wide range. Englishmen supposedly had become officers and monitored the camp, yet it seems harsh they would betray their nation after fighting for it. Hard for me to accept, but I would also act this way. "With desperate times comes desperate measures." I once heard this and completely support the message; eventhough I´ve never been in a position so demanding, if need was unbearable, I´d probably take many unmoral decisions. Patrotism would be the last thing on my mind, were I part of the Englishmen. Amazingly, on page 95, the Englishmen refer to the Germans as "Jerry" and thank the Americans for putting up a good show, promising "Jerry was on the run."

The narrator insists these men made "war look stylish and reasonable, and fun", yet the English make it obvious they can´t wait to be back in England, and one of the reasons may be the lack of female companionship. Men are often sex-driven and nowadays, very scandalous about it. I find it offensive towards the female figure, thus I often feel men are controlled by their animal insitinct. This is contradictory because most men strive to leave their "animality" behind and often insult each other with animal characteristics.    

I feel a bit crestfallen by how a human´s death is compared to water´s, animals, and champagne´s "death." I don´t mean to undervalue animal life, but I do feel like something as simple as a drink shouldn´t be considered as valuable as human life. "So it goes."

Shockingly, Americans and Russians don´t live in squalor. Billy is clearly treated the worst, even his fellow Americans treat him in an irrespectful way, but in the book´s context, the life quality exceeds anyhting I ever imagined for war prisioners during the Holocaust. Their welcome included "a safety razor, a washcloth, a package of razor blades, a chocolate bar, two cigars, a bar of soap, ten cigarettes, a box of matches, a pencil, and a candle." Actually, it was considered a miracle to have a pencil, and you were really lucky if you had more than a stub. Afterwards, the narrator mentions a ghastly "fact", the candles and soap were made of fat from Gypsies, Jews, communists, "and other enemies of the state." I suddenly remembered my visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which I visited long time ago, but still haven´t been able to forget. These places are made to honor the dead and remind people what happened,. Nevertheless, I´d still like to consign the following memories into oblivion:

 

1. An actual boxcar from WWII as part of the exposition.

2. The testimonies written by various survivors.

3. Germans boasted that they filled pillows with Jews´ hair and made furniture with skin.

4. Nazis used to experiment on prisoners to develop cures for diseases and military equipment.

This last point leads me to think that Billy may be crazy, and that his "abductions" by Trafalmadorians were what he made up to ignore or overcome experiments he was sumitted to, but this is only an idea.