Death: Fact or fiction? Life: Fact or fiction? Sacrifice: Worth it? Is it dependent on something? What? If you were a prisoner of war, with no promise of hope, would you fight, flee, or finish yourself off?
Time Travel. This concept is not really present in a particular passage or quote, but a section from pages 55 to 59. Billy blinks and he is transported forward, then back, than forward and in between. Let us talk about the way Vonnegut writes the book. He is very straight forward with easy to understand political and figurative jargon. The inclusion of time travel and the paralleling of moments, death of people, and planets containing other worldly things is intriguing to the reader and, surprisingly, is only mildly challenging to fairly easy to follow. The time traveling portion of the book is used as an escape to recall the memories he held dear and important as an outside survivor, but almost to survive the imprisonment. In the reader's eyes, he is close to crazy. Vonnegut writes "Billy Pilgrim had stopped in the forest. He was leaning against a tree with eyes closed. his head was tilted back and his nostrils flaring. He was like a poet in the Parthenon. This was the first time Billy became unstuck in time. His attention began to swing grandly through the full arc of his life, passing into death, which was violet light. There wasn't anybody else there, or any thing. There was just violet light-and a hum." (54-55) Personally, I do not know what is to be made from this quote and concept. Going off of it from a philosophical viewpoint, the human race seems to regard life as an "arc" instead of my view of it as a circle, and that death is the climax and big question of our stories. What about before life? I wonder more about before life than after death. Death is purely a figment of our own creation that pulses through our skin. Billy was so very close to death so many times and was engulfed in the resentment, mistakes, triumphs, woes, and happiness of his life that it all seemed over throughout the war. Death was a concept too close for comfort, but maybe this was all the comfort anyone in a horrific situation would need. The comfort that it could all be over in an instant. This does not mean to stop trying though, just reassurance. We look at this concept of a hero's death or a sacrifice for a country. It's all excuses to give life a meaning that we have been brainwashed to think. Especially in the era of World War II, America was seen as the rescuers of the battle and it was as if it was something to die for. Does giving death a purpose give life a purpose?
"Billy was wearing a thin field jacket, a shirt and trousers of scratchy wool, and long underwear that was soaked with sweat. He was the only one of the four with a beard. It was a random, bristly beard, and some of the bristles were white, even though Billy was only twenty-one years old. He was also going bald. Wind and cold and violent exercise had turned his face crimson. He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo." (41-42)
When Billy received orders to head over seas he was thrust into a different type of battle that stripped him of his identity and placed him into a situation of brutality and captivity. Billy was literally and figuratively demoted form the concept-superiority of the human race to a "filthy" animal. He no longer resembled a human with an identity and a story but a flamingo that could be seemingly insignificant. Billy is also separated from the other people he is with based on physical appearance. He is ragged and bearded and a young man who was "going bald" at a young age of twenty-one. This starts the isolation in Billy's character from the other prisoners of war and how he is viewed within the book: as an outsider. The comparison to a flamingo expresses the loss of character that a prisoner of war experiences and how historically accurate this loss is for not only prisoners of war, but also genocide survivors. In this case, the holocaust. Thematically, this is relevant to the story in regards to breaking away physically, emotionally, and mentally from the shackles that bound Billy and other characters within the book.
"'When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes.'" (34)
Throughout the first two chapters there is a nonchalant sense of "que sera sera" translating to "what will be, will be". Kurt Vonnegut in describing Billy and his own world of the Tralfamadorians and how they view death and their perception of a paralleling reality corresponds to Billy's physically paralleling realities of the Tralfamadorian. The final phrase, "so it goes", appears regularly throughout the book and puts emphasis on the relationship with war and life during World War II. Billy has seen things that could potentially scar him for life and his journey to Tralfamadore suggests either a coping mechanism or a metaphor for some philosophy/philosophical concept he created during the war. Both are topics of debate.
An American writer known for his use of humor and irony to relay a powerful, painful, or sad message to the public. He was born November 11th, 1922 and died April 11th, 2007.