Understanding The Misunderstood

Have you ever felt that this hour took years to pass? Or that the weekend was just a couple of minutes? Time makes sense to those who understand that it won’t make sense at all, for those who are prepared to not know. This is what I was thinking as I read Chapter 5 of Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, in which the Tralfamadorians (creatures of another planet who are able to see time as a complete repertoire of events instead of living each independent event) see human beings as, “great millipedes with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 31) This shows a different kind of game that time plays with us, not being able to see an event as a moment but just as part of a film, a lifetime film. This book is filled up with these events and descriptions that play with our appreciation and understanding of a natural yet mysterious thing such as time.

Kurt continues this chapter by describing the art of these living beings where, “There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 31) Showing how all of this society is motivated by a type of impressionism, this love for seeing beautiful moments with no motivation, purpose or sequence makes them a society I had never even thought of. In the first chapters of the book I thought the author was trying to describe his personal utopia, but as I continued reading the book I changed my understanding of the whole purpose of the piece which in my mind has ended up being in his narrating of a story that has no purpose or sequence, a writer writing on his own writing with the goal of exploring the “depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time” in this case, the life of Billy Pilgrim.

Making fun out of a life tragedy isn’t that easy to do, this is how I explain the importance of the Flying Saucer and the Tralfamadorians in the book. They simply make it fun and disorganized, meeting all of the necessary requirements: be very far away from earth so no one will link them with anything they’ve seen or believed in, make them different from all existing creatures so you don’t feel attached or partial towards them in any way, and the most important of all, make them easy to manipulate and make a novel out of them. The character of the narrator is ever-changing between two formats. First, it is in narrating mode to tell us of what Billy feels and does as we see in the following maxim. “She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 37) Tragic Billy is necessary for us to get the true message, he serves as an example of a soul that never found any passionate goal or reason for life. The second narrating format is message mode in which we are told what to do to not follow Billy’s path. “That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 42) The author teaches his common sense philosophy through the mouth of strange extraterrestrials because humans are so disconnected from their central source of wisdom, nature, that they have lost their ability to navigate their limited time with wisdom and humor.