Well I can definitely see why Vonnegut did not think this book was very "fun" to write. As I expected, the humor in this book is quite different from that of the stories in "The 50 Funniest American Writers." This book never had me laughing out loud and I find it hard to feel amused by the dark humor (which is kind of the point). I found the character of Roland Weary, with his obsession with torture and warped mind, especially hard to find humorous, even if he looked ridiculous. I felt annoyed with him more than anything.
War is a very harsh subject to write about, but Vonnegut does it quite well. I personally do not enjoy reading sad books such as this one. That being said, I think this was a well written account of such terrible events. Vonnegut leaves little unsaid as he details Billy's experiences, truly depicting the horror of war. The senselessness of the way it is written shows the senselessness of slaughter. The repetition of "so it goes" emphasizes just how much death there is in the book.
The book constantly jerks you through time with Billy, showing how the war has managed to reek havoc on almost all of his life. Once I got used to flinging back and forth through time, I started to enjoy this style of writing. Even though the time travel never really serves as an escape to a pleasanter time, I find it better than reading pages upon pages of the same tragic event. Jumping from moment to moment, even if only from one tragedy to the next, keeps the book interesting. Vonnegut forces the reader to experience the schizophrenia of Billy's mind, but doing so also allows you to discover the events that influenced and shaped his Tralfamadorian delusions.
I disagree with the Tralfamadorian idea of time, but can see how Billy used it to cope with all of the death in his life. They reject free will altogether, thinking that everything will happen regardless of how they feel about it, and they never try to change anything. Even in the most extreme case, their destruction of the universe, they see it as just another moment of "so it goes." Billy adopts their sense of apathy, allowing everyone and everything to push him around. That is one of the reasons why I like Edgar Derby. He is the only one who really bothers to take a stand on anything. The Tralfamadorians advise Billy to learn to pay attention only to the good times in life and ignore the bad ones. The only benefit of this idea is Billy's learning to appreciate the good times, but these moments can still be appreciated in light of the bad ones. In fact, they are more precious when you take all things into account.
Clearly Vonnegut himself did not take the Tralfamadorians' advice, as he wrote an entire novel over an incredibly dark time. If we try to brush the darker moments of our history under the rug, how can we ever learn from them and work to prevent their reoccurrence? The fact that the Tralfamadorians are willing to let the entire universe be destructed only drives this point home and makes their philosophy look ridiculous. Maybe that was Vonnegut's point in telling us this. He uses the Tralfamadorians to show the extreme/ultimate cost of ignoring the past and not working to change the present. Perhaps one could go so far as to say that this is the point of his writing the entire novel: if we do not acknowledge and work to prevent the shortcomings of our past, we may well be heading down a road of destruction.
On a side/happier note, I found the concept of the Tralfamadorian books interesting. Seeing the picture that an amalgamation of moments in time creates is a neat idea. I guess for us that is like looking at a series of memories and seeing how together they form a picture of us, like a small window into our identity.
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