Garden of Eden Reference in SF

Before I'm completely done with talking about Slaughterhouse Five, I wanted to revisit an interesting point that came up in the panel presentations yesterday. During the presentation, the point that Billy Pilgrim and Montana Wildhack were like Adam and Eve and planet Tralfamadore was like the Garden of Eden came up. I thought this was quite the fitting comparison because Billy and Montana were the first humans on Tralfamadore just like Adam and Eve were the first humans on Earth. Billy and Montana become like Adam and Eve to start the human race over again. Billy, like Adam, is not ashamed of his nakedness and is also given Montana after she is kidnapped kind of like God creating Eve for Adam to have a mate.

I feel like Billy Pilgrim is a Christ-like character in the regard that he was an innocent individual who was tainted by society and the evils of humanity. This makes his character even more useful because more people can read Slaughterhouse Five and follow his story. I can't really think of any other significance in the comparisons to Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden but whatever other underlying meanings there are, I'm sure they're meant to be there. Vonnegut makes them too obvious for them to be just a mere coincidence.

Final Thoughts on SF and Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse Five was definitely deserving of all of the accolades and attention that it has received. It was a well-written book that really had me thinking about the carnage and animosity of war to another level. I only vaguely knew about what happened in Dresden during WWII and after finding out more about it I couldn't help but think about how meaningless the bombing was. The very fact that Vonnegut himself was apart of it and even had to gather bodies as a POW makes the book that much more powerful.

I feel like Vonnegut was meant to write Slaughterhouse Five to expose just how mentally destroyed one becomes after witnessing such an atrocity. Since he has first hand experience, he can truly capture the essence of the matter and put it on paper better than someone that was merely writing on the topic. He expertly explores the thoughts and actions of someone so severely affected by the war because he knows exactly what Billy Pilgrim must've went through. I truly respect Vonnegut for being able to write on such a sensitive subject to him.

All in all, the book was a very good read that really held my interest. Vonnegut was a much more reliable source on anti-war efforts than anything I've ever read before. I was drawn to his writing because of his experiences and I wanted to know what he had to say about them through Billy Pilgrim.

Tralfamadore's Impact on Slaughterhouse Five

Before reading the book, I had an idea that Vonnegut's writing style or ideas would be a little different from conventional authors since this is a class about postmodernist writing after all. Since the book is "one of the world's great antiwar book" you would expect there to be a made up planet that the main character of the book gets abducted to, right? Wrong. What a curveball that Vonnegut threw at the readers. Even though this is an odd idea to me, it actually worked pretty well in portraying what war could do to one's mind.

Following World War II, Billy Pilgrim doesn't show very many signs of a mental collapse other than a mild nervous collapse in which he was given shock treatments. He lives a normal life and even enjoys great success in becoming rich. But after the plane crash in 1968 in which he is the only survivor, everything goes for the worse. He claims to be abducted to the planet Tralfamadore and has all of these experiences on the planet. I believe that Billy goes through this because he is so torn from all the what he witnessed at Dresden that he tries to escape from a world that would allow such a thing to happen by hallucinating.

Tralfamadore and their theory on death is just a coping mechanism for Billy to try to come to terms with his experiences. In the end although it is a strange tactic that I would never expect, it is an effective way to show the horrors of war and demonstrate how thoroughly traumatized a soldier becomes after experiencing the cruelty of war.

The Portrayal of Death in Slaughterhouse Five

Early in the book "Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut, we are introduced to Billy Pilgrim and the planet Tralfamadore. During my encounter with Tralfamadore, I found out that death is viewed much differently on the planet than on Earth. When one dies, they only appear to die and is alive in the past. "When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes.'" Billy Pilgrim says.

So it goes. Such a nonchalant phrase to say when you see someone die. It's pretty much like shrugging off that someone has died and carrying on like it's nothing big. Throughout the book whenever someone dies, the same recurring phrase, "So it goes" appears. The very use of this phrase seems to desensitize the harsh reality of what just happened and provide reassurance. When someone dies is seen dying in the war, the phrase is there to let the reader know that everything will go on and the Tralfamadorian thought of them still living in the past is there.

Death is not as big of a deal in Slaughterhouse Five as it would be in other anti-war novels. The reader relates with the Tralfamadorian mindset that life can exist through moments and memories which makes death not as significant as they would expect. If someone dies in the story, so it goes. Life goes on and they will live on in moments in the past.