Slaughterhouse Five (Part Three) Journal - Zach Vance

(Spoilers for the film Arrival below)

For this week's literature circle, I had the role of literary theorist (which was convenient as I was the one doing a presentation on deconstructionism this week).

While trying to attain meaning from the text, I used the deconstructionist method of double reading, which is an integral part of this specific literary theory. I focused, at first, on Pilgrim's conversation with the Tralfamadorian lecturer. Pilgrim asks him "How the inhabitants of a whole planet can live in peace!" Pilgrim goes on to describe certain horrors he had seen, such as schoolgirls being boiled alive and candles mad of human fat. This coincides with many, many more horrors that had been seen throughout the war segments, which are represented in vivid and distressing detail. Because no pro-war book would go to such lengths to highlight and recognize the horrors of war, it must be an anti-war book (pro-war vs anti-war being a classic example of the structuralist concept of binary opposition). This is the first phase of double reading.

In the second phase of my double reading, I thought of the Tralfamadorian's response to Pilgirm's question, where he essentially states that war is inevitable, and even happens in their own society. Typically, an anti-war story is written from the perspective of one who wishes war was not part of society, and that it was done away with entirely for it causes so much human suffering. Similarly, the stories of pro-war novels makes a case for why war is an important part of society or the human experience. So if Slaughterhouse Five states that war is an inevitability, how can it make a case against it? This means that it is not an anti-war book, but as we established earlier, it is certainly not an pro-war book either.

As the narrator described the structure and purpose of the tralfamadorian novel that Billy Pilgrim saw, I was reminded of the film Arrival. I should say, as a preface, that I surprised myself in not making this connection sooner. The plot of the film concerns the "arrival" of extraterrestrial beings and the attempts of a linguist to communicate with them. Over the course of the film, it is revealed that they have a perception of time quite similar to the tralfamadorians (non-linear, able to see all points of time, deterministic), and their "written" language reflects this. Each word or sentence is a circle made up of swirls, spirals, and odd patterns that signifies an entire concept, much like the tralfamadorian novels and their "brief clumps of symbols." By the end of the film, the linguist's understanding of the alien language allows her to see time in the same way they do, causing her to see her marriage, the birth of her daughter, her divorce, and the death of her daughter due to cancer. Seeing the tragedy and heartache that will come to her later in life does not deter her from bringing about those events because she has come to share the same fatalistic worldview as the aliens of the film, which is the same worldview as the tralfamadorians, and perhaps Billy Pilgrim.