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.