"One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us."
When I read this quote, two main thoughts pop into my head. The first, that this is Vonnegut's humour at its best. The second, that is this really what we've come to? Taking death as nothing more than a form of entertainement for society?
One of the main reasons for Vonnegut to write his book was to show his anti-war and pro-reality views. He writes as if he wants to show us what war is really like after all of the celebrations after winning and the heroism when soldiers return. This quote really does display clearly what is though of the death of others now-a-days. This quote also relates slaughterhouse five to brave new world in the ideas of desensitization and the effects of it.
Monday 28 February 2011
Billy's Time Travelling: Fact or Fiction?
In the book “Slaughterhouse 5” by Kurt Vonnegut, a character named Billy Pilgrim seems to be flying through time and moments in his life. The question is, is he truly time traveling or not? I believe that he is just shell shocked and in his mind visiting these moments, not literally reliving them.
Many soldiers in the war ended up being severely damaged psychologically. This was classified as shell-shock. This caused very strange behaviour in many cases, and in one video (that I seem to recall watching in grade ten history class) a grown man was waddling around a mental hospital in a penguin like fashion as others made abnormal sounds. Billy thinking that he is time traveling and being abducted by aliens would make him one of the more normal among the shell-shocked crowd. It may be written to seem so realistic because to Billy, it is. His visions of the Trafamadorians and revisiting various parts of his life may be his mind’s way of sheltering itself from the horrors that he either was or is experiencing. It also makes sense that he claims to have first been abducted during the middle of the war.
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