Poor Billy Pilgrim. Picture this: lying behind a big pile of rocks, trying to camouflage. Your entire body is exhausted of carrying the incredibly heavy luggage that you have held for months now. Your right arm sweating because of holding that trigger so harshly and your left arm holding the shotgun that when it explodes, the suffering won't be over.
War. Just imagine war. Would you like to stay in it? Or would you like to try to imagine being in another place where you don't have to face the reality of death or life in just the blink of an eye?This is why Billy takes us to so many places while he is captured by the Germans in World War II.
Even with that description, I don't think I could even imagine being at war. Seriously, if I were at war, and I returned, I think I would go crazy and have a trauma of being shot at. I already live scared to have to face that kind of fear.
He tries to escape from the horrid sounds that now matter how hard he closes his ears, the bombs and the firing will sound as if they were inside of his body. While Billy is in this event, he imagines every possible thing, like his first time swimming, when he was drunk and cheated on his wife and at the Lions Club meeting.
Kurt Vonnegut, writes in third person. He talks about Billy Pilgrim as if he were an omniscient narrator but all of the sudden, he says in page 67 "I was there. So was my old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare." Throughout the whole book, I have thought that Billy was Vonnegut. When I read this sentence I realized that maybe Vonnegut is putting his life through Billy Pilgrims', and puts his actual self as an omnipresent narrator. It means, he is in the story, not a very important character, but knows everything about the current one.
I must say though, I don't only pity Billy. There's poor Roland Weary dying of pain because of the clogs he received in exchange for the comfortable boots he had to give to the young German. Well, I don't pity him because of that, I mean he is very arrogant. He saves Billy's life just to act as the hero, right?
In between all of this mess, Billy can't stop going to the past, having flash backs, that, to me, somehow mean: how did I get here?
I find this interesting especially because its unique, it has new qualities unlike I have seen myself and other bloggers using. You make us picture images in our mind, and make it easy to understand, very well written.
ResponderEliminarI really liked this blog because you made me think about what war really is, and about the book. You brought a meaning to pages and words that I skimmed and made it more interesting. You use a lot of descriptions which makes it easy for me to understand what is going on in the novel.
ResponderEliminar