Poo-Tee-Weet

Throughout the book I've been observing its anti-war nature, as it is presented in the first chapter so I decided to read it from that perspective. Everyone knows that World War Two was horrible and that something similar should never happen again, so Vonnegut conveys that message in a creative way so that the reader doesn't fell like its just another book about war. Unlike many war books, Billy, the main character, is not a great person you can relate with and, thus, feel sorry for him, but he is instead a crazy person very distinct from most readers, so you can feel like war has damaged him. As he doesn't portray characters as familiar, he doesn't either try to make the reader feel or understand the massacres and the horrible parts of WWII, Vonnegut proves that making sense out of war is impossible. You cannot feel how it's like to fight and to see others die, it is a complete atrocity that simply shouldn't happen. With the parses "So it goes." and "Poo-tee-weet," you can see how he achieves that. So it goes, as I explained in a previous blog post, shows how war and death are not important, life goes on. Vonnegut writes that to show the irony in war, we might be saving people in war but others still die. Similarly, with "Poo-te-weet," he show the irony in war and, again, how we don't think war through. In a book about WWII, where millions of people died, he says out the sound of a bird, unintelligent and in-descriptive. Vonnegut, with this juxtaposition, shows how there is no answer for war. It simply shouldn't happen.

Our Service

After reading Manuel Andre's blog post "Saving Private Billy," I started to think about how war and politics is just a big game. Of course this is not always but its happens in a lot of cases. In Slaughterhouse-Five, as an antiwar  book, the author refers to war like that in a lot of times. Mary O'Hare thinks Billy was just a boy in WWII, Billy's son went to Vietnam while young and the book is even known as The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. Even though I haven't seen the movie Saving Private Ryan, I can relate with what Manuel says about war, its a Children's Crusade. As he says, people have always had wars, or at least violent conflicts for power. This reminds me of a something my mom was talking about with me a few months ago. We were talking about why a lot of societies have military service or activities men must complete to rise as adults. Other than military service, we talked about indigenous communities in which men must survive in the wilderness alone for some time in order to be considered adults, about the missionary trips male Mormons must carry out when young adults, among other things. My mom brought up the point about that societies do this to reduce the competition of male adults, a very primitive thing. In wolf pack, where the leader males chase away any other adult males, and when their sons or any other male puppy grow up, they must look for another pack or territory, unless they are established as weak omegas. It is obvious that the alfas, or leaders, do this to keep in control and powerful. In a way, as my mom pointed out, civilized humans do the same. It is not as evident in military service, as most wars are fought with a purpose, but in wars a lot of young men travel away, where a lot of them die, leaving the older leaders in command from their homeland with all the women. As I mentioned in a previous blog, luckily this is changing as women now are as powerful as men and can hold positions in the government or join the military. Still, it could be that young men are sent to wars because they are stronger than older people, but it is also because the older people in command rather stay alive and in power. As mentioned throughout the book, war in a lot of times has been a Children's Crusade. In another side, as I said before, many indigenous communities have rite of passage ceremonies where teenager are sent to the forest or jungle to survive. This acts as a system of selection, only the healthy and smart people survive, contributing to the tribe and evolution, but it is also a way of having less competence for the tribe leaders. Although the ones that survive might be more powerful than the elder, the fact that they will be left with less competition from younger males shows how indigenous chiefs, unluckily only males overall, can benefit from this method. At last, this incentive to send people away can be seen in the Mormon religion. I'm not an expert on this topic and one of my few sources, the musical The Book of Mormon, is very biased, so don't take anything I say about this too seriously. When male Mormons grow up, they are sent of in a mission, many times a trip to a remote village in Africa or simply to visit another American state. I don't mean this in a bad way, but given that the way this religion was founded involves a lot of desire for power and that Mormons are polygamists, these missionary trips are a clear example of how men, in a chauvinistic way, get rid of their competence.
Our societies are evolving, and are clearly not at all like a wolf pack, but there are a lot of primitive instincts in how me make decisions.Wars at most do have purposes but, as it says on Manuel's blog, these can be the governments' decisions leaving the thousands of people who fight and die without a vote.

Written in 1969

Throughout the book I've got the feeling that Vonnegut is not a very politically-correct person--he is chauvinist and nationalist. I don't know if it is that I am interpreting it wrongly, but in the beginning of chapter 7, Billy refers to his wife Valencia as "the machine named Valencia Merble Pilgrim." This is not chauvinist because it refers to a woman as a machine but because it refers to his wife as one. Thinking that the person he should love the most is like a machine, among other examples from the book, make me assume that Billy is very chauvinist. In addition to that example, throughout the book Billy refers to Montana in a sexual way. In another side, he sort of shows Mary O'Hare, the wife of his friend Bernard, as a bossy pants. Billy's interactions with people in the novel are mostly with men, and whenever he mentions a woman it is either about money or something sexual, but overall about as an exterior matter. While she shows a better insight into his male friends, he doesn't characterize female characters as much. I know its a WWII book, so in the war parts there will be for the most only men, but some details like that "the Pole was a farm laborer who was being hanged for having sexual intercourse with German woman" (pg. 156) are unnecessary parts of the plot that simply add an old-fashioned and close-minded feeling.
As it says in the quote above, Billy always tends to note clearly where are people from. Whether its the Pole just mentioned,  the British soldiers or the Frenchman in Great Canyon, he usually stereotypes people.
Nowadays people can't publish things like this, it would be censored or people would sue the writer. Classics like Slaughterhouse-Five can help us see perspectives from the past. Even though it was only written 42 years ago, back then women were still working towards fairness and equal rights, and topics like stereotypes or xenophobia were not as a big deals as it is now. I guess it's good to have evidence form the past in this topic but it really makes me see how much the Western society has progressed in the last decades. I know that our society has decayed in some other ways we but have to be proud of things like this that we've accomplished.

It's Now Revenge

This diagram shows a similar opinion about war and revenge.

Vonnegut recently in the book has been highlighting several important aspects of war in order to show war wrong, as I said in my last blog post, but not until chapter six he started talking about revenge. "Anybody ever asks you what the sweetest thing in life is-- said Lazzaro, it's revenge" (pg. 139). Lazzaro before saying this had explained why nobody should mess with him, the if you touched him you better kill him right away because if not, he will kill you. He narrates how he killed a dog in a very cruel way, saying its sweet revenge. Lazzaro also has very distorted ways of looking at war. He says he isn't really angry at Germans because they were just doing what they were told to. He also wants to shoot another American soldier to prevent him from becoming a hero. Billy starts thinking about his death for a while but when he stops, Lazzaro continues to tell him about the people he would kill after the war. Later on, the author refers to Lazzaro  as "with rabies and a broken arm." This shows that Vonnegut is portraying Lazzaro as someone else who was corrupted by war, as he is crazy and has been harmed in war. Even if Lazzaro was that way before, the fact that all these prisoner hear what he says and do nothing means that it has become normal to them, because of war. At the end of chapter six, the author continues to show some of the bad things of war as he did before, and I mentioned on the previous blog. This is all evidence of that Vonnegut is portraying war as something wrong, as revenge and killing is something these corrupted characters do.

Vy Anybody?

From what i’ve read so far, I think that the author is trying to portray Billy Pilgrim as a person who was broken by war and the Children’s Crusade, in order to fulfill his purpose as an antiwar book. It all derives from Billy being captured by the Tralfamadorians. He adopts their philosophy in the way of looking at death. As their state early in the book, these creatures believe that everything is happening simultaneously, all the present, past and future. This means that when someone dies, they still exist in the past, so as they say, in page 27, crying in a funeral is silly. Billy adopts the Tralfamadorian saying of So it goes. Every time someone dies, Billy says So it goes, and this happens every couple paragraphs and even sentences. People die but life continues, so it just goes on. This sort of degrades the importance of life, as Billy makes it seem like something disposable. Generally this contradicts with our morals or ethics, making seem Billy as someone mean or immoral. As his trips to Tralfamadore started after going crazy from several traumatizing events, like WWII or a plane crash, war is what eventually caused Billy to become that way. So by chapter five, So it goes  seems normal. Every few sentences a dead body appears or a prisoner gets killed. So it goes. In another side, as said before, Billy seems to be like in the Children’s Crusades. There are a bunch of young men if Germany fighting for something, but do they really know what that is? The Americans, Germans, Russians, French and British are all together in what looks like they’re dealing to follow what others command them to do. As Billy degrades life, adn makes death seem normal, he starts putting everything that happens in war as a casual occasion. When he talks about the German prison, he doesn’t really show it as he was suffering--he simply states what happens. People are in good conditions, people are in bad conditions--he just says it. Another example is how he talks about the British. He says they were rich because they had food. Also, they were powerful because they were physically strong. All these things are only important in war. 

In the beginning of chapter five, in page 91, Billy asks a guard in the prison, “Why me?” The guard answers, “Vy anybody?” That’s what Vonnegut is asking us, why anybody? Why take young men to give their lives by someone else’s command? Why kill? Why war? Although this is not a common antiwar book, the author is able to put this question in mind through a creative way. 

Entertaining Differences

When Billy is taken by the Tralfamadorians, he is kept in a zoo, where everyone looks at him like a very different kind. This looks weird to me because he is trapped in a zoo but he really isn’t, as he is traveling in time, which tells me that he is crazy and all these things are a product of his imagination. It also seems weird and offensive to me that he is kept that way, after all, he is a human being. 

This makes me think of how people find differences amusing. For example, as he was kept in a zoo, when the Spanish arrived to America, they took indigenous people to the royal courts in Europe to amuse the rich. They were human and they suffered, but Europeans didn't look at it that way. The same thing happens in circuses. While in the present it’s usually just animals and shows, in the past circuses were made up by people rejected by society. 

Previously in the book something similar could be observed, how Germans and Americans perceive each other. I wonder whether this will be something discussed in the book-why we look at differences that way. 

The Chupacabras

Supernatural ideas like the Tralfamadorians are common everywhere, in fiction and life. Billy believes that he was kidnapped by these aliens right before his daughter’s wedding  and taken for months, while he only missed out on Earth for a few seconds. he questions them on why they captured him and they tell him that it’s because they are trapped in a blob of amber. The Tralfamadorians probably mean that the two worlds are coming together, in a “blob of amber.” Coming back to a point I mentioned before in this blog, imagining these mysterious creatures is Billy’s way to fill in the unknown and deal with his memories of the past. As humans every time know more about the universe and overall about what we don’t know, some people start believing in supernatural things and claiming them to be the reason for things we can’t explain. 

This alien encounter Billy has reminds me of a common myth from Puerto Rico, where my mother is from. A few decades ago large numbers of goats started to die in rural small farms. Their owners claimed to have founded them with their blood sucked out from what looked like a vampire bite. Thanks to that, they started calling the unknown creature that supposedly killed the animals the Chupacabras, or the goat sucker. I am completely sure that such thing doesn’t exist, but I find it interesting knowing about what made people start believing in things like that or how they react to it. I didn’t know much about this myth, only what I had heard from family in Puerto Rico, so I decided to look up what people thing about it. Farmers in the Puerto Rican pastoral mountains said tens of goats were killed at night. They found bites on their bodies and, as I said before, without blood. As a response, people decided to have the goats be analyzed. No one knew what was happening, but experts almost never agreed on that it was a creature from outer space. Even the University of California did some DNA tests on the marks and found that it was probably a coyote. This lead to the people who believed in the existence of the Chupacabras to started questioning how did a coyote get to Puerto Rico. Their only reasonable explanation was that they were alien coyotes. Taking about all this into consideration, I think that supernatural beliefs are inevitable. Humans will never know everything and most of us need an explanation for what we can’t understand, so we use superstitions for as something to lie on. 

Serenity, Courage and Wisdom

These three words appear in the beginning of Chapter Three in Slaughterhouse-Five, in the prayer Billy mentions he had on his office. It says, "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." I believe these three words represent various things going in Billy's head in this chapter and overall in the beginning of the book. Billy says that the prayer helps him stay hopeful, something that he needs as he isn't really using what the prayer claims God gave him. He cannot change the past, but he lacks serenity to deal with it. It appears to me that his "time traveling" could be like flashbacks people have when they've been traumatized. The fact that he feels uncomfortable about traveling or remembering his past, shows that he hasn't achieved a calmed and peaceful state. Shortly after mentioning this prayer, Billy says he's been going to a doctor for his emotional instability, as he's been crying and is not optimistic. Whenever Billy travels back to the War he isn't brave enough to deal with it. It could be that he is having flashbacks, but his lack of strength make him feel like he's living it over again, as the memory feels as bad as the actual situation. Even when he travels to other moments in his life after the War, he also needs more courage although it's not a bad memory. When he arrives to his optometry office and hears a siren go off, he feels very scared, as he wouldn't have been able to deal with a military conflict. Finally, the wisdom God grants people to tell the difference between what we can change and what we can't seems to be confusing Billy's thoughts. Billy could be brave enough to get over the past and be able to live peacefully, but he isn't. He goes back to his memories and lives them again, he is "unstuck in time" and is not trying to change what he can but he tries to relive what he can't. If Billy had that wisdom, he would try to improve his current life, but he is very confused and traumatized so he wishes he could have a better past. I believe that these three words, serenity, courage and wisdom, is what Billy, as the author suggests, needs to feel better and stabilize, being able to overcome his past and focus on a better future.

So it goes.

Eheu, fugaces labuntur anni. Alas! our fleeting years pass away. Vonnegut constantly touches the idea that life goes by quickly. He starts commenting on death on the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, saying that as glaciers will always exist, so will plain old death. By the second chapter, he constantly mentions death and continues with the phrase "So it goes." Our fleeting years pass away, so it goes. Life goes by and thats the way it is.


Death and life are very common themes in literature and film. Billy Pilgrim, the main character in this book, talks about how he is "unstuck in time." It is obvious for the reader that he is crazy, thinking that he can travel in time, but what the story is saying is that events in our life makes us look back. This reminds me of The Time Traveler's Wife, a book and later a movie about a man that unintentionally travels in time. This movie questions whether thinking too much about the past or future is good. The past is constantly arising in our minds and affecting the current situations, while the future is always intriguing people and driving them to work for something. Regret from the past or ambition for the future distract us from the present, proposing that one should live focusing only in what is going on. I believe that by "So it goes," Vonnegut is proposing that happiness comes by living in the present because everything else will go by fast. Billy constantly thinks about his past as he's been traumatized, and events in our lives make us look back. Being "unstuck in time" made him crazy. Oscar Wilde said, "No man is rich enough to buy back his past," so focusing on the present is the best choice we have. 

The Irony of War

From my first insight into Slaughterhouse-Five and its author, Kurt Vonnegut, I can observe that the way it's written gives the author the ability to capture the reader's attention. On the first chapter, the author explains what drove him to write this book, like his experiences in WWII and his life once he got back to America.Vonnegut tries to show that he can write a book like no other, as he can write an anti-war book when writing one is like writing an anti-glacier book. More than just proving he can write well, as it is an anti-war book, he is proving war wrong. 


As you read chapter one, you can notice the constant use of irony. As mentioned before, he mentions that writing an anti-war book is like writing an anti-glacier book, pointless. Anyway, he continues to write about war, and according to the New York Times review on the back cover, "a great anti-war book." It is ironic that he is writing a book about something that seems ineffective, but as he does it, he can show he is a good writer. It is also ironic the people whom Vonnegut dedicates the book to. The first, Mary O'Hare, seems to oppose to him, and in the conversation they have in the first chapter, they don't seem to get along very well. Still, the author dedicates the book to her showing that enemies are not enemies in every way. The second person, Gerhard Müller, had been a prisoner of the Americans in WWII, while Vonnegut and his friend had been prisoners of the Germans. At the beginning of the chapter he writes about Müller, a taxi driver who became friends with him, also showing how wars can be wrong, as enemies were able to be friends. As the author comments on how he wrote the book, he says he wanted the climax of the book be when an American soldier gets executed because of taking a teapot that wasn't his, instead of it being when thousands of people die as the city, Dresden, burns. Again through irony, he shows that war can leave out important things while making a big deal out of relatively small events. In conclusion, on this chapter Vonnegut starts to develop his anti-war book with some autobiographical content, using irony to support it.

"The Perfect Life," by John Koethe

Koethe's poem condenses the emotions felt during a typical Western life. The speaker seems like a humble person who doesn't think deeply about his life. For me it seems that during the first stanza the narrator is a teenager or young adult, but by the end of it, he or she turns into a grown up, climbing up to the climax of his or her life. In the second stanza, the adult gets to the point where improving gets harder, and unlike the teenager who was "looking back in satisfaction,"  the adult probably gets to his midlife crisis. Later on, the speaker gets older and feels calmed again. At the end of the poem, the person seems to either die or have dementia, forgetting about his perfect life. I believe that Koethe is trying to point out how humans in our culture are living up their lives too fast, instead of being happy about what seems like a peaceful life, the narrator feels like everything he or she did just faded away and was lost. People nowadays in Western societies spend a lot of time worrying about matters that don't really mean anything, material and superficial things, which will eventually be lost and forgotten.

What the author is trying to say leads me to think people shouldn't focus on things that have material value but should seek happiness and inner peace. In a world where everything we do is likely to be influenced by consumerism, having static things that will support you is better than the immediate satisfaction of buying a product that will work for a few months only. For example, someone who spends his or her life without appreciating family and friends, when gets old and starts getting sick, will have nothing. Even though its cliched, money can't buy love, but a life of affection can. If someone gets Alzheimer's, good memories of friendships will last, but superficial satisfaction will not. By saying Western at the beginning, I meant that our values have changed for us to stop appreciating life. Not saying that other cultures are better, but most others still appreciate abstract matters in life. Life goes by too fast, so real and deep emotions can help us live it up happily and smoothly.