Slaughterhouse Five Blog Post Report- Caitlynn Hancock

          As have finished reading Slaughterhouse Five, there are a lot of unanswered questions that I have about this book. Although, those questions will not be necessarily answered, I have had time to ponder certain ideas about what certain parts of the book mean.  In the book, Billy Pilgram, the main character, time travels. Kurt Vonnegut, the author, takes the reader on a journey through Billy's time travels in no order at all, but the main time travel that really caught my attention was going back and forth to the time of being kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians.

The Tralfamadorians are very important in this novel. They bring a lot of attention and curiosity to the novel and bring questionable ideas. I believe, Kurt Vonnegut wrote this book in the point of view of how Tralfamadorians view the Earth, the Earthlings, and to understand Billy Pilgram’s story a bit more. I also think that this part of the novel has what new critics call ambiguity for the reason that there could be multiple meanings to this part of the novel. 

                The first example I have of this is when we are first introduced to how the Tralfamadorians think. “He is still very much alive in the past, so it is silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, presents, and future, always have existed, always will exist….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 quote is quite important to the idea that I believe. This entire book is Billy time traveling to random places. He will be in Dresden, then he will be on a honeymoon with his wife, and then with the Tralfamadorians. The book jumps around in a sequence that does not make too much sense to reader, but to a Tralfamadorian, and specifying to this specific quote, it says: “….they can see how permanent moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them.” So, as we read Slaughterhouse Five we realize that we are not taken step by step through Billy’s life, but in certain parts that are just random to get a background. We are not guided by a series of events and Billy re-visits these places frequently. Whereas, according to the Tralfamadorians, Earthlings cannot just re-visit a moment, but Billy can. 

This quote also demonstrates ambiguity because maybe Billy's time travel has nothing to do with this quote and that the Tralfamadorians just think this way so that they don't get as hurt as the humans do by moments that happen. Or that most Earthlings don't have the ability like Billy where they can't ever relive a moment but they can remember moments not as they once were only the bits and pieces. However, Billy has abilities like the Tralfamadoirans to go see many moments again. This idea relates to Billy's time travel and the Earthlings do not have this ability to time travel and re visit moments like Billy can. 

Furthermore, if a reader takes a brief look at how the book is set up, they can realize that the book is cut off into sections that don’t make a ton of sense. There are line breaks in the middle of conversations and of course the random sequence of ‘time-hopping’ with Billy’s time travel events. Another part of SlaughterHouse Five that really stuck out to me was on page 112 that reads: “There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. 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.” So this particular part of the book Billy is on the saucer with the Tralfamadorians and he wants to read a book, but one of their books. He was warned that they would not make any sense to him. They were right, and one of the Tralfamadorians explained to him that their stories really don’t have a sequence of events that builds up to anything. This really made me realize that the book had to be written in this idea. From beginning to end the events happen out of order, there is no climax, no suspense. Just events that don’t have a particular order and that is it. We find out the end of the story at the beginning and the climax is only three sentences long at the very end of the book. There is not much of a conclusion except for the fact that Billy is a corpse miner, but the ended is just quite unsettling and just ends like the story was nothing. I think this links with ambiguity though, because the link may not mean anything more than  a coincidence and Vonnegut wanted his story to be different. Vonnegut apparently has written other books that are different and not the ideal or traditional story.