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.
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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.
A very shrewd connection: getting married and becoming established in society seems to these scarred vets as the easiest way to reoccupy "normality." In Billy's case, it's a smooth and direct path to being established in business and the community--almost a "reward" for the selfless, heroic act of marrying someone no one else would marry. (An ironic reversal of the kind of "heroism" called for in wartime.)
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