The first half of chapter five is very interesting because we begin to see the different factors that influence Billy to be the kind of person he is. We also infer why some of the elements seen on this novel relate directly to Kurt Vonnegut, after listening to an interview done to the author.
At the beginning of the chapter, the Tralfamadorians keep on emphasizing on their “live the moment” philosophy and it is very weird to see that this ideology appears everywhere, even in the structure of books. In the following citation we can observe this situation more clearly, “There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”(88) For me this is illogical because, although the “moment” theory is a valid life philosophy, you can’t write a book that shows one image of life. A book is precisely a group of images put together under a structure to teach a subject or lesson about life itself. Also, as we have been studying in class, a structure of a novel really defines the essence of the author’s interpretation and the message behind the words. These books in the alien planet of Tralfamador do not have a real purpose, but to entertain for a moment. Then as I moved on in the chapter I found the following quote, “he has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.”(117)This is somewhat contradicting to what they want to express in their books. According to them, these books have no structure because they are based on a moment, but then they say that a moment is structured in a certain way. That “way” is letting it be, or permitting it to take its own flight, but still it is considered to be a structure. My question is: What do they really mean?
After listening to the interview done to Vonnegut, there were some topics that I thought were deeply related to the novel. First, I could definitely understand why the author criticizes Christianity in his books when mentioning characters of the Bible in a sarcastic way. The author is atheist and despites Christianity and governments that tend towards a theocracy. For him, human laws are more valuable than God’s Laws. It is evident that when Billy prefers the human condition before the rest, when he inhabits the zoo in another planet, and when he admires Adam and eve for their humanly errors. The other factor I noticed that was included in Slaughter House–Five was science fiction. Vonnegut assures in the interview that he began to write science fiction simply because he worked with technology and he decided to use it as a tool in his writing, due to the fact that his knowledge could be combined with fiction. He states that he was “unfairly categorized,” as a science fiction writer. In the story, Billy is also introduced to this genre, and the author makes an indirect attack on the media by including the following as part of Billy’s life, “Kilgore Trout became Billy’s favorite living author, and science fiction became the only sort of tales he could read.”(Vonnegut being German-American as he is, imposes a great influence over the characters he creates, specially on Billy, who shares this characteristic, as well as being a prisoner at World War Two. Sharing this makes both of them the reflection of one another, what they were and what they want to be, which relates to the theme of the novel.
Finally I wanted to include a segment of this chapter which includes most of the topics I mentioned above, showing the connection that the author makes within his books: “It was the Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian, by the way. The visitor from outer space made a study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel.”(108)
After analyzing this quote I realized that here the author expressed his personal thoughts about science fiction, Christianity and related it directly to the extraterrestrial figures of the novel, probably referring to them as his own voice inside the novel.
