Slaughterhouse Five Journal (One) - Caitlynn Hancock
My role for this weeks discussion was "passage identifier." My role is to discuss the key events of what we have read and to read a short passage and describe the passage. During the first chapter of SlaughterHouse Five, the author is talking about writing the book that the readers are reading. Basically, to give an overview of why and what he will be talking about. He talks about how he is writing a war book about Dresden.
The next chapter is where it gets more interesting. He talks about a character named Billy who time travels. Which there was a great passage in this second chapter that really stuck out to me. It reads "All moments, past, present, and future, always existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever." (p.34)
This is very interesting because this is what Billy wrote for his second letter when he went to another planet and no one believed him. He talks about how death is just an appearance and that a person is not really dead because these moments are still alive. His experience with the Tralfamadorians experience these moments differently than people on Earth. People on Earth tend to forget moments so easily, but the Tralfamadorians can re-live moments as they please. Billy was explaining that a person shouldn't cry at a funeral because there will always be those moments to look back on of a certain person.
The reading of this book so far has greatly reminded me of two movies that have to do will time travel. The movie "The Time Traveler's Wife," and another movie called "In Time." They both deal with men that can time travel to different events in their life and either re-do an event that can change their future or just re-visit and re-live what happened in the past. My thoughts immediately made this connection with Slaughterhouse Five.
The next chapter is where it gets more interesting. He talks about a character named Billy who time travels. Which there was a great passage in this second chapter that really stuck out to me. It reads "All moments, past, present, and future, always existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever." (p.34)
This is very interesting because this is what Billy wrote for his second letter when he went to another planet and no one believed him. He talks about how death is just an appearance and that a person is not really dead because these moments are still alive. His experience with the Tralfamadorians experience these moments differently than people on Earth. People on Earth tend to forget moments so easily, but the Tralfamadorians can re-live moments as they please. Billy was explaining that a person shouldn't cry at a funeral because there will always be those moments to look back on of a certain person.
The reading of this book so far has greatly reminded me of two movies that have to do will time travel. The movie "The Time Traveler's Wife," and another movie called "In Time." They both deal with men that can time travel to different events in their life and either re-do an event that can change their future or just re-visit and re-live what happened in the past. My thoughts immediately made this connection with Slaughterhouse Five.
Hi Caitlyn, nice connections you are making here. How might the passage you provide from the novel connect to the films you mention?
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