There were quite a few instances of satire in the first chapter, too. Most of the things that came out of Vonnegut's writing were either making fun of something or presenting a completely uncomfortable similar thing. For example, on page 4 when he talks about "getting this disease late at night" but really he's just talking about he himself getting drunk because he's sad. Also, when he talks about the anti-war and anti-glacier books.
((I also thought that the line, "The destruction of Dresden was represented by a vertical band of orange cross-hatching, and all the lines that were still alive passed through it, came out the other side" (pg. 5), related to the poem "Buttons" we read. Basically that entire paragraph. Just the juxtaposition of crayon on paper to the actual atrocities happening.))
[Oh! and a related line to City of Thieves that I found very interesting: "...who took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoners of war." (pg. 1) This is opposed to CoT's "In the slaughterhouse where we first kissed, the air still stank from the blood of the lambs."]
The view on war in this book seems to be that it was useless and futile because everyone is going to die one way or another anyway. However, the view on death seems really optimistic, somehow? Especially the lines on I-don't-know-what-page about death being a point in time where you're not alive, but you are alive in some other point in time. It's kind of strangely comforting. Most people in these few chapters realize that war is bad and no one is going to make it out (relating back to the poem about duty), but some people were a little more optimistic. This is seen in the two snipers (were they snipers?) who try to leave "the three musketeers" but are shot. Additionally, a lot of terrible things in this book--like the packed train to the camp--were represented not at all terribly. This kind of relates to CoT with how a lot of very terrible things didn't sound that terrible to them because they'd had worse.
On to structure. I kind of really, really don't like the structure of this novel. Stream-of-consciousness makes me so upset because you get all this unnecessary, round-about information that no one actually wants and you take away from the actual story. Sure, you get some details/thoughts you may not have before, but you don't get the actual elements of plot. Going off of that, this style left me with little to no understanding of what the hell was happening.
Questions:
- I really don't understand anything about the "unstuck in time" thing. It's confusing and I know things about the story I don't want to know yet. I feel like I read the ending before reading the beginning. It's a little frustrating. Half the time I have to read over what I just read about five times before I realize that this isn't present day or this isn't during the war. The only explanation that I really found while reading could be a kind of PTSD thing. I honestly don't know.
- Billy Pilgrim makes me want to smack him. He obviously has some form of PTSD but also he is a drag and boring and apathetic.
- The "So it goes" lines seem to happen after every death. That's interesting.
Cool lines:
- "Through the valley flowed a Mississippi of humiliated Americans." pg. 64
- "Now they were dying in the snow, feeling nothing, turning the snow to the color of raspberry sherbet." pg. 54
- page 53 3rd paragraph
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