Diction? Or Vocabulary?

What makes every novel unique? The plot?  Yes.  The characters?  Yes.  But there is something that makes every word in every sentence in every novel different, the diction. Right there I could’ve used the word vocabulary instead of diction, but I preferred not to, the small difference in their meaning dissuaded me from doing so.  In the same way, Vonnegut chooses some gnomes over others, they shape the theme of the book.

After having read the majority of the novel, I noticed something new. Kurt Vonnegut uses the maxim “so it goes” many times, but there is a reason for this. He chose that axiom because it fit perfectly into the plot and the narration style that he was using. The informal register that the adage has reflects that of the entire novel. Used 106 times, it is safe to assume that Vonnegut didn’t just use it because he lost his thesaurus... “So it goes” has a conversational tone, as does the novel. “So it goes” creates a pattern that is detached from time, as is Billy’s life. “So it goes” comes after every death, it is passive and emotionless, as Billy is becoming. “So it goes” is the aphorism that represents Vonnegut.

Another aphorism that is often repeated during the course of the novel is “Billy came unstuck in time”, or some deviation from that.  I noticed that this pattern describes Billy Pilgrim’s life, the never-ending and yet never beginning story of acceptance.   I found that Francisco Serna’s blog post “Farewell, hello, farewell, hello” describes this very accurately.  By interpreting the theme of death that the novel has he makes the point that Billy may die in one moment, but he lives in another. Moreover, he compares it to the movie Source Code, this I believe, is where he turned a keen observation into a stroke of genius. This film portrays the idea that someone can live in a moment, die, and then relive the moment.  Francisco brilliantly pointed out this correlation, but he failed to distinguish the time traveling. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy knows the way that he is going to die, he can’t change it. It is because of this acceptance philosophy that the aphorism “so it goes” exists!  He accepts everything. On the other hand, in Source Code the protagonist is trying to change the past/present/future. 

Kurt Vonnegut carefully picked out every word in his novel, which is why every word is meaningful to the overall plot.  Will you change your diction?  Or will you settle for the established vocabulary?

Unmasking Kurt Vonnegut

After creating an appendix for Slaughterhouse-Five in class, I have found more correlations between Vonnegut himself and aspects or characters in his novel. “Oz. That was I. That was me.” We know that Vonnegut went to Slaughterhouse-Five, that he witnessed the bombing of Dresden. When the American soldier says “Oz”, it appears insignificant. However, because it is followed by a note from the narrator (who could be Vonnegut himself) the setting changes. It is also important to point out that the American soldier who said that, gets in the same boxcar that Bill is in, headed for Dresden.

While reading the remainder of Chapter six, I couldn’t really concentrate. I understood the obvious: Lazzaro will have Billy killed, they arrive at last to Slaughterhouse-Five, and the British say that if you don’t have a proper hygiene routine you will die. But after realizing the importance of the quote I mentioned above, all the rest seemed insignificant. Moreover, the entire storyline felt like it was just a means to unmask Vonnegut’s identity in the book.

In my reading blog response to Chapter five, I analyzed the meaning of the maxim: “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.” At the time it seemed important, it represented a glimmer of hope in the novel. But that by itself is not sufficient evidence to say that Vonnegut is a character in the story. Even if you take that aphorism and the excerpt from this chapter, their similarity seems to eradicate the validity of the argument I am trying to make. What makes Slaughterhouse-Five the masterpiece that it is turning out to be is the hidden messages in the text. They are insignificant for the plot, but add an infinite amount of complexity to the discussion about Vonnegut’s role in the novel.

I found that Diego Rodriguez, a classmate of mine, discussed this topic in his blog entry, Mustard Gas and Roses. “Billy answered. There was a drunk on the other end. Billy could almost smell his breath-mustard gas and roses. It was a wrong number. Billy hung up.” Diego compared this axiom with a part from Chapter 1, where Vonnegut says that he got drunk and called war friends: he could smell his breath of Mustard Gas and Roses. Diego says that he can’t decide on one interpretation of the aphorisms' correlation, so he gives us several options. When I originally read this blog post, I thought that most of what he said made sense, I understood why he couldn’t settle on only one. But now, after reading two more chapters, I have come to believe that none of the interpretations he mentioned are the appropriate one! Vonnegut is a character in his own novel. The fact that he is an American soldier, who is going to Slaughterhouse-Five, and that will probably be with Billy during the time period that Vonnegut was trying to find information about later, leads to one solid conclusion. Vonnegut is that American soldier, and Vonnegut called Billy the night that the Trafalmadorians took him! Vonnegut mentions that he will not use real names in his novel. Billy could be a fake name for one of his war comrades. Everything seems to be leading the reader to a point where, in some part in the book, Billy and that American soldier (Vonnegut) will interact further. But a new question has risen: Will Vonnegut formally identify himself as that “insignificant” soldier?

A Glimmer of Hope

Finally! We got a glimpse of hope from Slaughterhouse-Five. In the second half of the fifth chapter Billy starts to take into account the Trafalmadorian method, he begins to trust himself.

“I’m going to become beautiful for you. I like you just the way you are.” When Valencia pledges to lose weight for Billy, he declines the offer. Why? The old Billy Pilgrim if you will, would have accepted, she was an ugly woman. However, the Billy that appears in the second part of Chapter five is more mature. My complaint in previous reading blogs has been that the book has a gloomy atmosphere. But after finishing Chapter five I realized that Billy had embraced the Trafalmadorian method in a positive way. In this way, he knows that even if his wife is fat, he will enjoy the marriage.

Many times I see something and think, “This moment is epic.” Sometimes it is, other times it just fades away with time. When I read, “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.” I was astonished. This means that Vonnegut is a character in the novel! An American soldier (Vonnegut) passes beside Billy and says that he has “excreted everything but his brains.” And then he loses his brains too. What does this mean? First off, Vonnegut is not represented through Billy. Secondly, the narrator has a direct relationship with the author, he maybe even portrays the story of one of Vonnegut’s war comrades.

I find myself questioning the validity of the plot in itself. As a reader I know how the book is going to end, how Billy will turn out. Nevertheless, I am thrilled that the novel is turning out to be puzzling from a narrative point of view. Now that a piece of the puzzle is put together, I am eager to keep reading to figure out how the rest of it fits in.

Billy Pilgrim: The unanswered question

Remember: We live in a bright world. A world where you make your destiny, you create happiness.

In the first pages of the book, Vonnegut apologizes for his book and justifies his "short and jumbled and jangled" novel by saying that "There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." When I read this I thought that I would be reading about the war, not about the misery of life. In the beginning of Chapter 5 Billy's life is in an abyss. Since the idea of time is nonexistent, it is safe to say that Billy's entire life is miserable. The entire chapter has a sad connotation: "'My God, my God... 'It's the Children's Crusade.'" says a British officer when he sees the young faces in the war. "She upset Billy simply by being his mother...Billy didn't really like life at all." These two excerpts represent the negative and hopeless feeling that the novel is acquiring. When the Trafalmadorians took Billy, I thought that he would return and live life to its fullest, make the best of it. However, it appears that when he came back he was so affected by the Trafalmadorian way, that he became insane. The Trafalmadorians have a philosophy of acceptance. "There is no beginning, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects."

Why do Earthlings believe? It is our nature. In the movie Finding Nemo the character Dory has short-term memory loss, however, she is always optimistic and never stops believing in a bright future. She represents the positive side of the human race, she represents the opposite of what Billy is now going through.

In this chapter we follow Billy around the life that he has, however, instead of explaining the character, it brings about questions. When will we understand Billy? One thing was clarified in this chapter, the meaning of the phrase “so it goes”. Given to understand that Billy and/or Vonnegut might be the narrator, we can infer that the theory of acceptance the Trafalmadorians have was transferred onto them. The “aliens” believe that death is no more permanent than any other moment. “So it goes” represents the passing of a person’s life into a new phase if you will. It suppresses the devastation of the horrors that they saw in war.

Slaughterhouse-Five offers is an odd book. It constantly poses questions, without answering those previously positioned. It depicts life in misery and life in sheer joy. It has made me reflect about my own belief system. I have found that to help myself remain optimistic, I must put myself in the shoes of a Trafalmadorian and “…ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.”

Free will... Don't kid yourself

Have you ever imagined that you float through time and space? That no matter what you do, nothing will ever change? No. You probably haven’t. As an Earthling you must believe in free will…

Billy Pilgrim is reliving the night that the Trafalmadorians took him. A flying saucer, “navigating in both space and time” will come for him in an hour. I find it amusing that what he decides to do, knowing what is set to happen, is watch a movie backwards. WWII German warplanes flew over towns cleaning up fires and healing the wounded, until, at the beginning everybody turned into a baby. To me this represents the parallelism that exists between Billy’s life and time. “Billy was unstuck in time”, that phrase has been repeated almost as often as “and so it goes” yet I hadn’t found an explanation beyond the obvious pattern. In this chapter I finally did. When the narrator makes a connection between Billy’s time traveling and a mosquito stuck in amber I felt the “ahh” moment that comes when one finds the answer to something puzzling. The bombs that the airplanes retracted and the spastic time travel visible in Pilgrim’s life were tied together by the effects of Billy’s kidnapping!

The idea of the mosquito stuck in amber reminded me of the movie Jurassic Park. Here, the owner of the new dinosaur theme park recreated the once extinct species by acquiring the DNA that the dinosaur parts that were stuck in amber had. In a way, he is marking that time is circular, he recreates something that was once extinct.

“Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because the moment simply is…There is no why.” This excerpt represents fate, as a theme of the novel. “If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings… I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by ‘free will.’…Only on earth is there any talk of free will.” The Trafalmadorians say that fate, is what control the universe. Billy embodies that philosophy. He accepts that it is so. He lives having already lived, knowing who will die and who will live. “So it goes,” he says, no longer as a cue for a transition, it now represents his passive attitude towards life, because nothing can change.

As a reader I no longer feel the same anxiety when flipping through the pages of the novel. Slaughterhouse-Five represented freedom, through Vonnegut’s representation of Billy, and through the enigma that was Billy’s train of though. Now However, I am reading a book that just is. “Here we are… trapped in the amber of this moment.”

Billy=Vonnegut and Vonnegut=Billy

The third chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five offers more of the same. Normally that would be a bad sign. However, in this case it is interesting. Vonnegut continues to play around with the idea of time. Vonnegut transitions between Billy Pilgrim’s life very smoothly. He seamlessly shifts between a war prisoner in Germany and a dull optometrist years later. Realizing that Vonnegut can transition between stories proved a point that I made in my first two reading blogs: time is circular. While reading the first two chapters I thought that the circularity of time could be ascribed to the novel in general, now I’m beginning to think that Billy’s life is the subject of the phenomenon. Why? There is a poster on Pilgrim’s office that reads: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.” While most readers may think that that poster represents the importance of the chapter, I think that the line that follows is the true axis on which this chapter rotates. The next line says that Billy can’t change the past, the future, or the present. This represents the abysmal state of mind that Billy is in, furthermore, it might even reflect the frustrated Vonnegut in the “preface” to the book. This suggests that Billy represents Vonnegut. In the war Billy is driven by the unexpected, the ambiguity of life as a prisoner. Later in his life, he falls asleep on the job, falls asleep on his life. This represents the hopelessness of war, the exhaustion of a life by the horror of violence. I can trace this to the book Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden.

In Black Hawk Down, US Army Rangers are forced to hold off innumerable waves of militia attacks. The soldiers that survive this ordeal live the rest of their life dealing with post dramatic stress disorder and start to turn towards madness. This poses a real-life example of what Billy’s life is. I’m not saying that we should dismiss the events of the story because of the protagonist’s madness. Insanity can be traced to the roots of the plot and the eerie nature of the narrative style. Vonnegut could have seen himself in the eyes of Pilgrim. Furthermore, the strangely familiar anonymous narrator and the lunacy of Billy seem to fit in, could they be the same person?