Slaughter House-Five Reading # 2

As I continued to read the third chapter of Slaughter House-Five, I stop for a moment and went back to observe some details that I didn’t understand so much at the beginning, but that began to make a lot of sense now.

I realized that what made Billy so special was his ability to travel back and forth through time living in his past and in his future, while in his present, meaning that he omitted the present of his life. For me this is very illogical because through out the different conflicts in my life I have learned one valuable lesson: “Seize the day.” Due to the fact that Billy is actually sacrificing in a way his present for distant or future memories is absurd to me. Then when I analyzed it more profoundly I considered the possibility that what Billy is doing is not traveling through time but living in his memories and dreams. This I suspected after reading the following line, “This wasn’t time travel. It had never happened, never would happen. It was the craziness of a dying young man with his shoes full of snow….The cheering went on, but its tone was altered as the hallucination gave way to time-travel.”(49). After doing a close reading to this part I could conclude that he had two types a hallucinations. One that was cause by pain that took him to the future, and another one within the future that because of a mid-life crisis, made him have visions about his past. Maybe the hallucinations that take him to the future also create images that relate to his past, but it is all in one big delusion that takes place during the present.

Again, religious topics begin to appear at the beginning of the chapter. Adam and Eve are mentioned as an image within a guy’s boots. This we can see it in the following segment, “If you look in there deeply enough, you’ll see Adam and Eve….they were naked, they were so innocent, so vulnerable, so eager to behave decently. Billy Pilgrim loved them.”(53) Here I could observe those religious elements that I had already mentioned in my last entry. The book has this great influence of Christianity, and the author creates this antiwar novel with the purpose of criticizing religion. Religion, as I had already said, is the major cause of most wars, especially the Christian Church. It is evident who the author uses Billy to make his judgments about this organization clear to the reader. By making Billy a person who uses Old Testament characters as the perfect example of human nature and admires how they never follow God’s instructions, the author succeeds to show what a paradoxical mind Billy has, and how he has been influenced by this religious institution and society. Later on in the third chapter, I observed other details like the bullet proof bible.

After reading some more pages I found the following fragment,

“God grant me
the serenity to accept
the things I cannot change,
courage
to change the things I can,
and wisdom always
to tell the
difference.”(60)

As soon as I read it, a bell rang inside my head. This quote was very familiar to me and I was sure I had heard it many times. I probably read it in another text, maybe another book or just in religion class. I am almost positive that my mother read it to me along time ago trying to teach me some lesson that I probably ignored. For me, this citation is going to be significant in the novel. Maybe I will see it later on and fully understand its meaning with relation to the text. The narrator mentions that Billy applied this stanza to his life in relation to the things we could not change, which were his past, present and future. One of the reasons of why he might say that could have been connected to my theory of Billy fantasizing about his past and future within a momentary dream in his present. The time games that Billy’s mind has created, could have been provoked by a traumatic experience, which he probably had at war. This resembles once again to the author’s great criticism towards war in this novel.

Finally I would like to address the following question:

Why is Billy weeping during certain hours of the day? Is this related some way with the possible trauma he could have had during war and that is leading his mind to create these hallucinations?

Slaughter House-Five Reading # 1

In the first two chapters of Slaughter House- Five, I could definitely observe a much elaborated structure that was based on different time and context sequences. In the first chapter we find the narrator of the book which is writing a book about his experience in World War Two. In that first part, this narrator uses many disorganized pieces of narration that at the end unite as a whole. Billy, the character he has created in his novel probably reflects what this author wanted to be or what he wished would of happen back then.

The destruction of Dresden, in Germany, is the focus of the story, making this novel antiwar. After analyzing this, I realized that it’s not a coincidence that all great historical texts and literary works are based on wars. As we saw last year, texts such as the Bible’s Old Testament, Nijal’s Saga, The Art of War, and many more are based on different historical battles. Telling what happened during that time and then adding your own political, social or religious twist to it, convinces the reader to follow support your ideals. This relation between wars and literary pieces explains why so many books about these topics have been written. The winners of the different wars, in this case, a soldier of the American army, is convincing us throughout his story that the ideals and the actions of his country in the war are the correct ones, creating this instant prejudice against the Germans. This is the purpose of the author when writing an antiwar novel.

Call his book, the Children’s Crusades, reminds me of the great influence that the Church has in the world. The crusades, being an event hosted by the Roman Church during the middle ages makes a lot of sense when it is mentioned on a book about World wanted everybody to have a Christian foundation, and the Nazis wanted to eliminate the Jews, because they didn’t follow the German Christian traditions. These two horrid events were based on religion and specially with the purpose of giving more power to the church.

The book mentions the story of Ruth, the wife of Lot, who becomes a pillar of slat when looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah, “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 was so human.”(21-22) It is interesting how he mentions this story because he identifies himself with this selfish character by saying that he is like the pillar of slat: a human. What Rachel did was a very human like thing to do, meaning that the novel as a story with flaws has also a selfish purpose, or a reflection upon a mistake.

More connections related to the influence of religion in this novel, for example I could see this small detail that is described in the life of Billy, but that has a great influence on what the story is about. “Billy wasn’t Catholic, even though he grew up with a ghastly crucifix on the wall.”(38) He can see that even though the author doesn’t want to show any specific religion related to the character, he still wants some credit connection to be established. He also includes the following, “…the imperishable honor acquired for themselves and the great services they rendered to Christianity.”(51) In this pert, Weary wants to compare the accomplishments of his group of friends in the war to the three musketeers. He establishes also a very significant relationship between what they did and the duties to be followed in the Christian doctrines. This shows the significance of religion in this novel.