It seems like every book we've read so far this semester has ultimately left me with a picture of history as a fate-driven and largely unchangeable cycle. Yet, as bleak as that perception may sound, not every book we've read has itself struck me as pessimistic.
Ragtime definitely left me with a predominantly hopeless lease on life. As I believe I touched on in a previous blog entry (although I may just be imagining that), I saw Ragtime as depicting everything a person does or tries to do as ultimately futile in the grand scheme of things, since history will just continue to take its cyclical course regardless. I felt as though every seemingly monumental plot point in the novel ended up being ultimately meaningless and, thus, was left wondering what the point of anything really was anyway.
Mumbo Jumbo, on the other hand, gave off a very different message about history, in my opinion. Granted, like Ragtime, the novel certainly suggested that everything was merely part of a cycle—Jes Grew was destined to die out because it is in its nature to rise and fall and rise and fall over and over again. However, the last few scenes of the novel saved this message from coming off as bleak to me. PaPa LaBas seemed so content with the cyclical nature of history that I too adopted an optimistic viewpoint. After all, Jes Grew didn't really fail just because it died out; rather, its ability to die out and come back again was one of its strongest and most important qualities.
With Slaughterhouse-Five, however, I'm less sure what I consider the overall message. At first, I found it at least somewhat hopeful because, even though the novel came to the eventual conclusion that wars are essentially inevitable and that we really don't have any free will to stop bad things from happening, the Tralfamadorians were clearly not at all fazed by this. By looking only at the good moments, they controlled what they perceived of the world, despite the fact that they couldn't control the world itself.
However, I'm not sure this Tralfamadorian mindset can be my overall takeaway from the novel because, while it is a beautiful way to look at life, it goes against everything I've ever been taught about dealing with conflicts and injustice. If the whole point of the novel is that Vonnegut's looking back on Dresden because he needs to for his own good, as well as for the good of those who know very little about the bombing, then it seems unlikely that he would want his readers to adopt a mindset in which they simply do not look back on painful memories, but rather pretend that they do not even exist.
I guess it would be easy to argue, then, that Vonnegut finds the Tralfamadorian view a little bit silly, which would be supported by the fact that they are aliens after all. However, just as I don't think he wants us to take their ideas at face value, I don't think he wants us to simply write them off either. Their complacent attitudes may seem somewhat crazy in that they're so much more accepting of imperfections and numb to emotions than we're used to, but at the same time we know in the back of our minds that there's quite a lot of truth to their ideology.
Thus, the outlook on life that I take away from Slaughterhouse-Five is not quite the optimistic one of a Tralfamadorian nor the pessimistic one of a soldier scarred by war. By superimposing history and science fiction, Vonnegut offers his readers a picture of how cruel and unforgiving the world can be, but also gives them an understanding of how, no matter what, life goes on. Somehow we must learn for ourselves how to unify those two ideas.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Thoughts I didn't want to litter my last post with
I'd originally intended to include this in my previous post, but then that ended up becoming coherent enough that I didn't want to throw in a largely unrelated idea that might mess it up. So, I'd like to mention that, while in my other post I only really discussed the second part of the sentence, "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," I was also really intrigued by the first part of it.
The idea of an author choosing a medley of seemingly unrelated moments and putting them all together to tell one particular story or make one particular point reminds me of reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Black Swan Green last year. I think it's really interesting how scenes don't have to seem terribly significant on their own to fit into and play significant roles in a larger narrative; it makes me wonder, if I were to have to tell the story of my life in just a few scenes, which scenes would I choose? I've been mulling over it since A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and have yet to come up with more than one childhood memory I consider deceptively unimportant yet ultimately life-changing enough to meet the qualifications (lucky I'm only 17 and have more time, else that would make for an incredibly boring life story), but it is interesting food for thought.
☆ ☆ ☆
While looking for the passage on Tralfamadorian fiction, I also happened upon a page I had dog-eared to go back to presumably so I could write a blog entry about it, but on further observation I don't really have enough to say on it to warrant an entry of its own, so I'll just piggyback it onto this thing. The passages is as follows: "Billy didn't want to marry ugly Valencia. She was one of the symptoms of his disease. He knew he was going crazy when he heard himself proposing marriage to her, when he begged her to take the diamond ring and be his companion for life" (137).
This detail reminds me a lot of Septimus and Rezia from Mrs. Dalloway. Septimus, much like Billy, is thoroughly scarred from his experiences in war, and for both of them this seems to result in their impulsively marrying women they don't actually love. I think it's interesting because Billy and Septimus both seem fairly numb to emotion, which one could argue was either caused by or amplified by the trauma they underwent at war, and with that in mind, both of their marriages look to me like desperate attempts to trick themselves into believing they feel emotions like love, when in reality they just don't seem to.
The idea of an author choosing a medley of seemingly unrelated moments and putting them all together to tell one particular story or make one particular point reminds me of reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Black Swan Green last year. I think it's really interesting how scenes don't have to seem terribly significant on their own to fit into and play significant roles in a larger narrative; it makes me wonder, if I were to have to tell the story of my life in just a few scenes, which scenes would I choose? I've been mulling over it since A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and have yet to come up with more than one childhood memory I consider deceptively unimportant yet ultimately life-changing enough to meet the qualifications (lucky I'm only 17 and have more time, else that would make for an incredibly boring life story), but it is interesting food for thought.
☆ ☆ ☆
While looking for the passage on Tralfamadorian fiction, I also happened upon a page I had dog-eared to go back to presumably so I could write a blog entry about it, but on further observation I don't really have enough to say on it to warrant an entry of its own, so I'll just piggyback it onto this thing. The passages is as follows: "Billy didn't want to marry ugly Valencia. She was one of the symptoms of his disease. He knew he was going crazy when he heard himself proposing marriage to her, when he begged her to take the diamond ring and be his companion for life" (137).
This detail reminds me a lot of Septimus and Rezia from Mrs. Dalloway. Septimus, much like Billy, is thoroughly scarred from his experiences in war, and for both of them this seems to result in their impulsively marrying women they don't actually love. I think it's interesting because Billy and Septimus both seem fairly numb to emotion, which one could argue was either caused by or amplified by the trauma they underwent at war, and with that in mind, both of their marriages look to me like desperate attempts to trick themselves into believing they feel emotions like love, when in reality they just don't seem to.
Tralfamadorian novels
I really liked the passage towards the beginning of Chapter 5 about Tralfamadorian fiction because it made their otherwise alien philosophies about time a lot more clear and accessible to me. I had originally had a difficult time understanding how it was that Tralfamadorians could see the world in four dimensions, simply because as a human I can't see all of time laid out before me, so naturally it's a bizarre concept to wrap my head around.
However, the Tralfamadorian take on fiction is one that I can understand quite easily. "[E]ach clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message—describing a situation, a scene," a voice through a speaker explains to Billy. "We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after another. 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 all seen at one time (111-2)."
The idea of reading something "all at once, not one [scene] after another," is one that really resonates with me. Granted, when I literally read a book, I am admittedly just reading one scene after another, but after finishing a novel, particularly a good novel, I feel like I read it all at once because in my mind it just becomes one whole picture.
Furthermore, it is that whole picture, not the individual scenes, that makes me get attached to a novel. In fact, the reason I'm sometimes hesitant to read my favorite books over again is because I know I'll have to suffer through the whole chronology of scenes, which includes both the good and the bad moments, to get back to that feeling of the story being one complete whole. Take, for example, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. It's one of my all-time favorite books, but I hate rereading it because, while I enjoy the beginning and absolutely love the ending, the middle is so painful to get through because the not-yet-mature (I say "not-yet-mature" rather than "immature" because by the end he is mature, not because my vocabulary is so limited that the latter term is not in my repertoire) main character becomes so frustrating and intolerable.
However, I still love the book even though I hate the middle because ultimately, as the Tralfamadorians so sagely put it, "there is no beginning, no middle, no end." What I remember of the book when I'm not literally reading it is the overall picture it creates in my mind—"an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep."
In light of that, sometimes I wish I could just swallow a book I've already read and know I like so I could have the whole feeling again without having to go through all the individual parts again. "Swallow" is a strange way of phrasing it, I know, but in all the time I've pondered over this (and I'd come up with this terminology long before starting Slaughterhouse-Five), I've never been able to come up with something better, so I'll just go with it. All it means, really, is that I'd love to be able to absorb a collection of scenes all at once like the Tralfamadorians can, rather than individually like humans have to.
However, even if we can't "swallow" novels, we can think of them in retrospect as whole stories not defined by rigid chronology, just as the Tralfamadorians think of the entire world. Thus, it becomes a little bit easier for us—or at least, for me—to get a handle on this Tralfamadorian fourth dimension. We'll never be able to literally see time like they can, but the analogy to literature at least gives me some kind of understanding of what seeing time might feel like to them.
However, the Tralfamadorian take on fiction is one that I can understand quite easily. "[E]ach clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message—describing a situation, a scene," a voice through a speaker explains to Billy. "We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after another. 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 all seen at one time (111-2)."
The idea of reading something "all at once, not one [scene] after another," is one that really resonates with me. Granted, when I literally read a book, I am admittedly just reading one scene after another, but after finishing a novel, particularly a good novel, I feel like I read it all at once because in my mind it just becomes one whole picture.
Furthermore, it is that whole picture, not the individual scenes, that makes me get attached to a novel. In fact, the reason I'm sometimes hesitant to read my favorite books over again is because I know I'll have to suffer through the whole chronology of scenes, which includes both the good and the bad moments, to get back to that feeling of the story being one complete whole. Take, for example, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. It's one of my all-time favorite books, but I hate rereading it because, while I enjoy the beginning and absolutely love the ending, the middle is so painful to get through because the not-yet-mature (I say "not-yet-mature" rather than "immature" because by the end he is mature, not because my vocabulary is so limited that the latter term is not in my repertoire) main character becomes so frustrating and intolerable.
However, I still love the book even though I hate the middle because ultimately, as the Tralfamadorians so sagely put it, "there is no beginning, no middle, no end." What I remember of the book when I'm not literally reading it is the overall picture it creates in my mind—"an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep."
In light of that, sometimes I wish I could just swallow a book I've already read and know I like so I could have the whole feeling again without having to go through all the individual parts again. "Swallow" is a strange way of phrasing it, I know, but in all the time I've pondered over this (and I'd come up with this terminology long before starting Slaughterhouse-Five), I've never been able to come up with something better, so I'll just go with it. All it means, really, is that I'd love to be able to absorb a collection of scenes all at once like the Tralfamadorians can, rather than individually like humans have to.
However, even if we can't "swallow" novels, we can think of them in retrospect as whole stories not defined by rigid chronology, just as the Tralfamadorians think of the entire world. Thus, it becomes a little bit easier for us—or at least, for me—to get a handle on this Tralfamadorian fourth dimension. We'll never be able to literally see time like they can, but the analogy to literature at least gives me some kind of understanding of what seeing time might feel like to them.
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