So it goes...

Hello everyone...

This is a book review but it won't be structured like the other ones because I wanted to discuss some stuff in more detail. So get ready for a lot of writing...

On Monday, I finished reading Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. This is an anti-war novel which is slightly autobiographical because it speaks about the bombing of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, during the Second World War by the Americans and Vonnegut was present there. 

However, the main storyline follows a man called Billy Pilgrim, who was also at the bombing. Billy Pilgrim has the ability to travel through time and experiences moments in the past, present and future. So, within Billy Pilgrim's story, there are two stories: Pilgrim's experience of the war and his experience of moments of his life, in the past, present and future and not in chronological order either. 

It is a mind-blowing novel and strongly competes with The Picture of Dorian Grey for being my favourite novel of all time. When it was published as well, it was so controversial, because of all its depictions of war and people in the war and it was one of the first books, I believe, that pointed out that homosexuals were also victims of the Nazi Holocaust, something that wasn't widely acknowledged. There were so many themes in it that messed with your ideas about time and the point of things that we do and, in essence, the pointlessness of the time we spend worrying about useless things. I will not be able to do it justice by explaining it because I believe that it is far more effective to experience it personally but I will try...

Some of the main themes...

The most interesting idea in the book was one about moments in time. Many people around Billy Pilgrim were dying, some in the war and some members of his family as well. When Billy Pilgrim travelled in time, he met a race called the Tralfamadorians from the place called Tralfamadore. They were aliens and they taught him this idea about moments. Humans can only see in three dimensions but Tralfamadorians can see in four. In the fourth dimension, moments in life are all occurring and then re-occurring simultaneously and endlessly. A person's life is a period of time, the past, the present and the future where there are thousands of moments. And, at some point in that person's life, they was a moment when they were happy and alive and well, even for just a second, or a split-second. And, when they died, it didn't matter that in that moment, they were dead and you weren't going to see them again because there were always moments that they were happy and alive and these moments keep replaying in the fourth dimension. 'The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exists.' This race, the Tralfamadorians, said that they saw human beings as millipedes with their baby legs at one end and their adult legs on the other end. Just an object made out of time and moments. I believe that it would be very interesting to try and live life, imagining every moment to not be lost but instead strung on a line in front of you and you could revisit them as you pleased. 

Linking on to this idea about moments, there was an idea about the illusion of free will. If every moment is continually re-occurring in the fourth dimension, a dimension that we cannot access because we are blind to that part of the universe, we have no free will because our life is already written out and happening, even if we, in the present, of whatever dimension we are in now, do not realise it. We think that we are choosing to do something really original and that we can do that because we have free will but it has already happened, even while you are debating whether or not to do it. One of the controversial ideas about this book and a reason that it was banned from a lot of schools in America, was because it was considered to be anti-Christian. But, that is an variation of an idea in Christianity, that God knows everything that will happen and is happening and so your life is in His control and you don't need to worry. Interesting.

There was also a repeated phrase. So it goes. and it was linked in with an idea about the uselessness of massacres and wars. Whenever someone died, Billy Pilgrim would say 'So it goes'. That means, whatever happens, happens and there is nothing that you can do about it. Death is inevitable and the only thing that we know for certain, above all else, is that we are going to die. There is no escaping it.

For example. 'His name was Howard W. Campbell, Jr. He would later hang himself awaiting trail as a war criminal. So it goes.' and 'The Germans carried the corpse out. The corpse was Wild Bob. So it goes.' By saying 'So it goes' after every death, it also puts every death on the same level. It didn't matter whether they were a major, colonel, private, Nazi, American, English or whatever, their deaths were all the same because they were the same in life, human with ideas and morals and faults, just the same. One death isn't even a pinprick on the entire universe and it meant nothing if put against the whole picture, even though it had devastating consequences on those affected.

This book also gives you a sense of where humans are in the world. During World War II, so much was devastated and destroyed, the city of Dresden was annihilated, so many people died and so on and so forth. However, when combined with ideas about the scope of our planet and our world and therefore us, living on this tiny world, the devastation is lessened in a sense. It isn't that it no longer affects us, but even though, it may destroy us, it doesn't matter at all to the rest of the universe. (I know I didn't explain that very well, but hopefully you will understand.) 

Another thing that I love about it, is the irregularity of the writing. In a way, nothing flows but at the same time, it does. I don't know how to explain it exactly. The storyline jumps around a lot and isn't chronologically written either. At the beginning of the novel, it can be quite difficult to understand what it going on but then you re-read certain parts and they make complete sense. Like I said, it is mind-blowing. 

Okay...I'm done. 

Clare