Thoughts of Simon

We’ve been talking a lot about the use of fiction in Slaughterhouse five lately, and it has gotten me thinking. Why did Vonnegut decide to put the Tralfamadorians into his book? They don’t really seem necessary, and in some cases are just plain weird. How did he even come up with that kind of story? It sounds like something from  The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.  Anyways, it got me thinking about PTSD. See, we learn that Billy doesn’t want to talk or think about the bombing of Dresden because of how traumatized he was, and he is only able to do so when he is millions of light years away from home. Maybe Vonnegut is in a similar type of situation. I mean, we learn in the first chapter of how hard it was for him to write this book, and how he wasn’t able to do it for more than 20 years. There’s also this weird connection between Billy Pilgrim and Vonnegut, where it almost seems like Billy is a younger version of Vonnegut, reliving the trauma of Dresden. What if Vonnegut was...

I was going to write a post on the chapter 52s and about how their version of history compares to traditional Egyptian and Greek mythology as well as our understanding of history today, but while reading over that passage again I noticed something extremely odd. Just a few pages into the chapter, there is a diagram about the US bombing campaigns during WWII, the Korean War, and the Indochina War. There is seemingly no reason for it to be there, as there is no mention of the United States or any of those places, nor anything to do with bombs altogether in the surrounding passages. It just appears out of the middle of nowhere in the middle of LaBas’ story. The interesting thing is that all of its data seems to be correct. There’s nothing to suggest that it has any relation to what is happening in the story, so why is it there? Its exact placement is also very interesting, as it is placed between the introduction of Osiris and the introduction of Set, and their different values and ideas...