Hello readers! Thanks for staying with me on this long journey as we explored the wonders of Slaughter House 5. However, every journey must come to an end, as this will be my last blog post. So I have decided that for my last blog post, I will be offering you my views on some of the work of some of my peers. Reading Daniel and Arshdeep's blog "Welcome to the 5laughterhouse" really consolidated some of my views and opinions on the novel.
I will start with their view on fate. Fate, as Arshdeep clearly describes, is the destination rather than the journey. In his blog he mentions that the main events are predetermined, while the minor life choices are dictated by our actions. Haha, where do i begin on this one? My definition of fate is that it is the eternally viable excuse for incompetence. Despite the fact that our views are totally different, I can see where Arshdeep is coming from. Fate is the destination rather than the journey. There is some logical truth in this: everyone's lives end with death. The inevitability of death can be viewed as inescapable fate for us all. Otherwise, I would like to disagree. We are born with whatever god, or our parents gave us. How we use these traits and the amount of hard work involved will generally dictate the outcome. For me, my achievement in life will always be equal to the amount of hard work I invest.
The next idea can be more easily related to by myself. Daniel talks about Billy's lack of sanity, to which I concur with. But he also brings up and excellent point which i have missed: if Billy is supposed to be a representation of Vonnegut himself, could that mean that Vonnegut is proving his own madness? This is definitely a curious idea. Because I believe that Billy has gone bonkers, Vonnegut must have gone mad as well. However, in his case, madness may be the cause of his fame and success. But there is another conclusion to be made: what if Vonnegut is the sane one, while we are all in a false state of perception? Even better: what if we are all a little crazy on the inside, while Vonnegut just cared to share his madness in the condensed form of a novel?
Daniel also discusses in a later post about the lack of substance in Slaughter House 5, a point which completely agree with. After reading the novel, I felt that there was simply too much filler and other unimportant events which occurred, all of which could have been spent developing the characters further, or to add excitement to the plot line. Dan brings up a very intriguing point: "He manged to finally complete the book by dumping his beliefs, parts of his real life and filler to create the novel. Sometimes great things are made when you mix random things in a mixing bowl, sometimes delicious ideas and literature is born this way." and then he goes to describe that Slaughter House 5 is not one of these cases. Like Dan, I felt that many things which had happened in the novel served no purpose, like the picture that Roland Weary had of the girl having sex with the horse(other than to rip marks off of unwary students *wink wink nudge nudge Mr. Lynn). Also, I felt that some characters had no depth and did not serve any purpose, like Kilgore Trout, or Rumfoord. Had Vonnegut spent some of this space adding more details or plot develpoments, the book could have been much better.
Here are my overall views on the novel. At first, it was difficult to read because of the clumsy introduction, as well as the confusing storyline. The book got even more confusing later on with all the time travel and stuff, but once you get used to it, it becomes tolerable(and even enjoyable at times). The book got a lot better as the story progresses, but I feel that the climax completely fell flat. First of all, there was no build-up of suspense for the climax, which sort of goes with the phrase "all this happened, more or less." As well, the climax was supposed to be when Derby got executed for the theft of a teapot, but I felt that this event had no bearing on anything in the novel. The ending where they are shoveling corpses is definitely one of the most boring conclusions to a book I have ever read. The final verdict? To me, this book was nothing but filler and bad jokes. Although some of the points that Vonnegut brought up were interesting and worth thinking about, he could have done a better job of making it more interesting. Overall, this is a mediocre read for school, but I would never even touch it if i didn't have to. Thanks guys for staying with me until the end!
~Fin
No comments:
Post a Comment