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.