Slaughterhouse-Five

I guess I forgot to do this post, so here it is. I choose to write about one of themes, and the one I picked is time.

The perspective on time is, I think, one of my favorite parts about the book. First of all, this is because Billy's nonlinear journey through the past, present, (if there is a "present" in the story) and future is a really good plot device. Someone in class pointed out that this novel is somewhat constructed like Tralfamadorian book, where the scenes are arranged in no particular way, and that's absolutely true. Because Billy is "unstuck", he can supposedly see how everything will turn out and thus he has no use for worry and fear. It's a beautiful idea, really.

I'm a bit of a sci-fi geek so I always love it when I read or see things that bring something new to the table, which is my second reason for admiring the time travel elements. The best sci-fi uses fiction to address something important to all of us, and Vonnegut's unique view on time helps us examine why we put importance on some things and not others, just as HG Wells' work examined ideas about religion, evolution, etc.

And just as a personal note, I'm reading a comic book with a scene where people visit a kind of "alien zoo" (like the one in the book) and one of the aliens is a tralfamadorian. The funny thing is that a character remarks how disgusting it smells, which of course comes from how they communicate by farting. I thought that was amusing.