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.