Potato Girl Well said. I Hadn't thought of that.

Thanks :)

+Potato Girl word. It definitely had that effect with me the first time I read it.

+Potato Girl great point!!!

+Potato Girl I think that the phrase might be the reality check that we need in the book. While there is quite a bit of death in the book, "So it goes" is there to remind us that things always die and humanity is cruel. It is similar to the Latin phrase "Homo homini lupus." But then again, it might be mocking how mundane and factual the casualties of war have become. "So it goes" basically meaning "whatever," in that case.

Nice catch! I never though about it.

Very good point!

Nerd

LillyianPuppy I once read a story featuring a man plagued by paranoid schizophrenia and a gap in his memory. There is no question that he suffers from these mental afflictions, but there is an element of fantasy in the novel that keeps the reader guessing on wether all that is described is truly supernatural, or if it is a symptom of the mentioned schizophrenia. Still, many things which occur in the novel cannot be explained without defaulting to the supernatural. And even though many things in the novel are discovered near the end to be figments of the protagonist's imagination, the death of the character, and the events afterward, where years later the deceased protagonist's therapist and his lover for a short time discuss a note he left behind, which he protagonist had claimed to hold the secrets of the universe. The note is never shown in the story. The former lover denies the note of being of any import, but the therapist is not so sure, because the protagonist once told her about events that happened in her life that she couldn't have known about. And I don't know which decision is worse: to believe in the supernatural and that They have won and the secrets of the universe are in their hands and nobody believes him after his death where he thinks by giving the secrets to the world will make it so Them having it is useless, or to believe that all that was done was useless and a flight of fantasy, and that the fear the protagonist lived through was the fear of nothing at all. And that he spent his final moments fully emerged in fantasy after his lover leaves him and he discovered his brother not to be dead like he believed, but mentally damaged beyond repair through an act caused by the protagonist's illusions. I think the only thing to do is accept both realities at once. That is all that can be done

I know this comment is old, but regardless. It's funny, I decided they were untrue. Whereas the reader gets to make a similar choice in Life of Pi, where I did feel more inclined to opt for the fantastical version. Possibly because the ethical environment of Pi's spirituality and fantastical journey rang truer for me than the rather determinist, detached behaviour connected to the Tralfamadorians.

Salo from The Sirens of Titan proves that are indeed real in that world. Mr Greene here is rather ignorant.

+GR3AT SAMU3L Yes! SPOILER: Also, he tells the three musketeers to go on without him and he is the only one of them who survives.

+GR3AT SAMU3L that's beautiful! thank you for pointing that!!

YES!! My thoughts exactly!

True

He mentioned that in the first part, I think

Hopefully the book got to stay.

I'm wondering if you asked her if she had even read it (before calling it filth and planning its censure)?

Same. As a vet and teacher -- it's why I assign it as a book.

I definitely think this can be read either way.

I mean I read a lot of PKD so i'm into that sort of thing but I thought half the point of the book was kinda that you didn't know what was going on for certain.

I still think they are real. Pilgrim does on couple occasions foresee his own future

i thought they were real too, because he knew how he dies, and he told people that he will die and told them to go so he can die.

I agree that the Tralfamadorians were not a fantasy. Instead of calling it science fiction, could Slaughterhouse Five be considered a work of mystical realism like One Hundred Years of Solitude?

Yes I agree, there's not much, certainly at the beginning of the novel anyway, to suggest that Billy didn't actually experience what was being described. I think as the novel goes on there are hints as to what is happening to Billy, I did think of PTSD and wasnt sure if vonnegut was purposely not mentioning the term 'PTSD'. But I think his time in psych and the influence of Kilgore Trout's novels shaped his way of dealing with things.

At the time when the book was written, PTSD wasn't so much a thing as it is now, so he didn't "purposely not mention it," but more likely wouldnt have known to mention it.

The terms of then were "shell shock" and "battle fatigue", I can't remember if either term is used. I always looked at it like it was up to us to decide what was really happening in the story. Here's the thing though, if you read Vonnegut's other work, you'll see that Tralfamadore and its aliens are actually the product of a Kilgore Trout novel, so it seems more likely that the whole thing is a fantasy of Billy's.

Same here, I never questioned whether or not the Tralfamadorians were real and I liked the idea that they were actually.

I questioned it, and I think both interpretations are valid. In fact, I felt like Vonnegut wanted the reader to feel uncertain about whether it's factual, because... Well, if it IS a fantasy, Billy believes it's real, and I think perhaps the narrator isn't certain either way. I did catch the implication that Billy Pilgrim was influenced by Kilgore Trout... but on the other hand, you could say that Pilgrim's stories influenced Trout. And then it gets really interesting, because when you're talking about time loops, cause and effect start to fall apart. Anyway, at the very least, I think the reader is at least meant to consider the implications if it's all true. What if we have to live all the moments of our lives over and over again? That makes it even more important to prevent suffering (because that person will have to experience those moments throughout eternity) and death (because an early death means limited experiences for that person). Not to mention, I feel like the whole novel is deeply ambivalent about the inevitability of war. This is coming from my perspective as a compatibalist. Basically, what this means for me is that I think of us as being tiny pieces of the universe and expressions of physics, acting in concert with everything else, rather than as being controlled. So, everything is determined... but part of what determines us is our beliefs. So if we believe war is inevitable, then it is. But whether we believe that or not is also already determined, and... In this case, it would seem that Vonnegut believes we can change the future, because he wrote Slaughterhouse Five... But the writing of the novel, and any effects it might have, were also inevitable. Yeah, it gets confusing. But the point is, I was particularly focused on that part, because I came into it with the Trafalmadorian perspective on time.

i mean i* not you

Interesting questions regarding anti-war novels. This has me wondering; has anyone ever read a pro-war novel? Or a novel that was ambivalent towards war?

TheFireflyGrave Well every movie that uses army assets are pro-war, well, at least pro-army. Its just easier to write about the atrocities of war than to talk about anything that supports war and fighting.

Can you please do Kurt's Cat's Cradle?

TheFireflyGrave Every Tom Clancy novel for instance. Not cool because, in hindsight, it may have got him killed.

+TheFireflyGrave to think of pro-war consider these two questions: 1) is violence used to make something cease or 2) is violence used for the salvation of life. A war can be described as large scale violence which comes down to one group trying through violence to end or control another or that there are two groups affecting each other. You can then look at any film of patriotism or old school heroic tale as being pro-war. Any saga of how people X survived against people Y using violence is pro-war. Beowulf, the viking saga, has a group of warriors coming to do battle (violence) against a pair of trolls (ceasation of trolls) so that the people of King Wrothgar will live (salvation) and not be killed off by the troll (the other ceasation). The modern first world readers are very separated from violence and only those we call soldiers are exposed to large scale violence. It is a good thing that we have moved from the ever present dangers in these parts of the world. Modern safe people look to movies to understand what is still happening in some parts of the world and if violence wasn't being done by soldiers to keep it away could all so easily fall into a common presence. Another older pro-war novel would be the Works of Julius Ceaser or the Greek tales around Troy. WW2 movies of the 40s, 50s and 60s are often done in pro-war stand when viewed that way. An ambivalent movie would be more hard to pick out since the point of the war is that two or more groups are fighting for survival and an ambivalent view would need to not care about which would survive or that both dying would be no big deal.

That's what I thought too when I read the part when he was at the veteran's hospital! another thing I noticed is that Bertram Copeland Rumfoord (the Air Force historian) was near him when Billy was supposedly travelling back in time to the time he was still in Dresen, and both Rumfoord and his wife heard him talking to himself, which implied that he didn't move at all; the whole scene was just him having a flashback, there was no time travelling at all.

He was in junior high school memorizing famous last words and trying to think of a way to experience the 'great perhaps.'

VideoNozoki He was also trying to figure out how to get out of a labyrinth

James A Clouder Also developing way too many crushes.

oh dear god

Noor Ladha PLEASE

Would watch

I was trying to read them to 😶

++

Scott Roper It thought me the meaning of life

The Meaning of Life by Mighty Pythons

yes please!!!!!

++++

I am not an expert about Slaughterhouse Five, but I can tell you one thing: the Tralfamadorians are neither real nor fantasies: they are fictional. They are not real, because they do not exist outside the book, and they are not fantasies, because they do exist in the book.

Ralph Dratman "because they do exist in the book." Actually, they don't. The author very strongly implies that the Tralfamadorians are an imagination of Billy, starting after a head injury he got in a plane crash, long after WW2.

k3nny111 Thank you. I will read it again.

I always took it that it happened, on account of the fact they appear in his other books.

Alex Zarandi orly?

+Brian Sterling Thesee are different books, and the aliens are not the same aliens.

Ethan Davidson I was just being a hopeful reader who would like to believe the contents of the book were concrete events and not visions, but I'm sorry that by using another example to prove my point made you think I thought the books were the same. Vonnegut reused characters a few times in different novels, why wouldn't he use the tralfalmadorians in both novels?

+Brian Sterling I too read it that way when I read it, which was a long time ago. If I made an error or just sounded like a jerk, I apologize. He wrote a lot of books with aliens, and it's easy to get them mixed up. However, did Vonnegut really say that the Aliens in "Sirens of Titan" were Tralfamadorians? I don't remember it that way, but again, I read it a long time ago.

They were the same name, but they were in an entirely different context. I understand, I read The Sirens of Titan receno, but I've read Slaughterhouse five a few times

I think shell shock was used before battle fatigue

thanks!

+silver gong yep it's the title used for The Fault In Our Stars in the Chinese version of the book

+Smaug I wouldn't say it has a nonlinear plot. More like an antilinear plot which doesn't make it Tralfamadorian-esque in my oppinion. But indeed, just like every Nolan work it is just great.