Chapter Five: The Future!

We've all wished to know the future. In chapter five, Billy tells his wife Valencia that she looks fine as she is, although she apparently is hideous. But Billy knows that his marriage is comfortable based on his time travel adventure. This made me think about how easy my life decisions would be if I could see the outcomes before they ever happened. Think about how assured we could be in our decisions if the Tralfamadorian principle of time actually existed!

Chapter Five: Dramatic Irony

Chapter 5 has an excellent example of dramatic irony. A German guard in the Dresden prisoner of war camp knocks down an American prisoner for seemingly no reason at all. The man was perplexed by the guard's action, so he asks "Why me?" The guard responds with a stereotypical German accent "Vy you? Vy anybody?"

If you remember in chapter four, Billy asks his Tralfamadorian captors why he was being captured.This shows dramatic irony because the reader knows that the responses were the same (minus the accent), and the characters do not.

Chapter Four: Why?

When Billy is abducted by the Tralfamadorians, he asks a question that all of us would ask in a similar situation: "Why?"

I think this shows that the human condition is full of curiosity. In our lives, when an act of pure chance occurs (good or bad), we often wonder why we were the one chosen over all the other people who could have been. Vonnegut showed an accurate depiction of human behavior by making Billy ask such a simple question.

Chapter Four: Explication

Chapter four has an interesting moment where one could use explication. While rummaging through his daughter's former room, her phone rings. "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." After finishing the chapter, I realized that the drunk was actually Kurt Vonnegut himself. Vonnegut mentioned that he had a habit of becoming inebriated and calling former girlfriends.



In addition, the use of roses, symbolic of romance, and mustard gas, a deadly chemical weapon, seems strange. However, I think it shows how deeply the war affected Vonnegut, and that he can no longer appreciate normal things (roses) without remembering the horrors of war (mustard gas).

Chapter Three: Weary is Finally Broken

In chapter two, a German unit stumbles upon Roland Weary beating Billy...which Weary did to pretty much everyone back home too.

In this moment, Weary is tremendously tough. But as chapter three progresses, I noticed that Weary was gradually breaking down. After the Weary is forced walk with the other prisoners of war in the German boy's clogs, the only thing he could think about was "...the agony in his own feet. In another instance, he did not resist a German soldier who spat on him, which is completely out of Weary's character.

I think this illustrates how war breaks a man down. The constant death, pain, sorrow, and anger Weary has felt completely changed him into a irreversibly fractured man.

Chapter Three: Metaphor

In chapter three, Billy Pilgrim mentions that he saw "...corpses with bare feet that were blue and ivory." Although the colors seems to be menial details surrounding frozen corpses, they actually represent something much more profound. If you would kindly look at the color chart I "borrowed" from Color Wheel Pro (http://www.color-wheel-pro.com/color-meaning.html).




 

Color Meaning

  Blue

Blue is the color of the sky and sea. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven.
Blue is considered beneficial to the mind and body. It slows human metabolism and produces a calming effect. Blue is strongly associated with tranquility and calmness. In heraldry, blue is used to symbolize piety and sincerity.
You can use blue to promote products and services related to cleanliness (water purification filters, cleaning liquids, vodka), air and sky (airlines, airports, air conditioners), water and sea (sea voyages, mineral water). As opposed to emotionally warm colors like red, orange, and yellow; blue is linked to consciousness and intellect. Use blue to suggest precision when promoting high-tech products.
Blue is a masculine color; according to studies, it is highly accepted among males. Dark blue is associated with depth, expertise, and stability; it is a preferred color for corporate America.
Avoid using blue when promoting food and cooking, because blue suppresses appetite. When used together with warm colors like yellow or red, blue can create high-impact, vibrant designs; for example, blue-yellow-red is a perfect color scheme for a superhero.

Light blue is associated with health, healing, tranquility, understanding, and softness.
Dark blue represents knowledge, power, integrity, and seriousness.

  White

White is associated with light, goodness, innocence, purity, and virginity. It is considered to be the color of perfection.
White means safety, purity, and cleanliness. As opposed to black, white usually has a positive connotation. White can represent a successful beginning. In heraldry, white depicts faith and purity.
In advertising, white is associated with coolness and cleanliness because it's the color of snow. You can use white to suggest simplicity in high-tech products. White is an appropriate color for charitable organizations; angels are usually imagined wearing white clothes. White is associated with hospitals, doctors, and sterility, so you can use white to suggest safety when promoting medical products. White is often associated with low weight, low-fat food, and dairy products.

The corpses having blue and ivory feet can mean a couple of things:
1) Fragility between light (could be life) and dark (could be death). Think of the Ying-Yang principle.
2) Both colors have positive connotations. Vonnegut might be suggesting that death is a good thing.

Chapter Two: Is Free Will a Facade?

Free will is one of the most basic aspects of humanity that we take for granted. Just because we are told to do something doesn't mean we have to. In chapter two, it seems like Billy doesn't have free will. When he was a little kid, his father tossed him into a pool in order for Billy to learn to swim. Billy preferred to stay at the bottom of the pool, but he was rescued instead. Another example is during WWII, where he joined a unit comprised of two scouts, Roland Weary, and himself. Billy is a joke of a soldier, he is not armed, does not have any military-issued clothing, nor was he trained to handle war. Overcome with dismay and suffering, Billy tells his squad to leave him behind. Weary instead forces him to carry on with them. With these two examples, one must ask: does free will even exist, or is it just wishful thinking?

Personally, it can seem like free will doesn't exist. Authority figures such as teachers, parents, and bosses seem to make my decisions for me, without letting me make my own choices. So I can sympathize with Billy Pilgrim in this chapter.

Chapter Two: Style

The feeling you get when you try to figure out Slaughterhouse Five's narrative style.

In chapter two, Billy Pilgrim jumps around time a lot. For example, Billy is trying to leave a party and drive away. However, the very intoxicated Billy cannot locate his car's steering wheel. Since he was in the backseat, he obviously was not going to find a steering wheel. In his inebriated state, he concluded that the steering wheel was stolen, and promptly passed out. In the next paragraph, Billy "... still felt drunk, was still angered by the stolen steering wheel. He was back in World War Two again, behind the German lines." This "time jumping" causes the narrative to have a disjointed and almost broken quality to it. However, Vonnegut used this in order to prove a point. The point of a narrative is to explicitly tell a coherent story. Narratives (well, good ones at least) make sense of their subjects, providing the reader with a deeper understanding of it. This is the reason why Vonnegut makes the novel disjointed. He did not want to simply make a narrative about Dresden because that would entail him making sense of the events. As the bird in chapter one demonstrated, it is impossible to make sense of a massacre or any other large-scale destruction.