Slaughterhouse-Five

One of my favorite things about reading new books or watching new movies is the excitement that comes with watching a storyline unfold the first time. There's a reason I don't read too many reviews or summaries of books - I'd rather find out about them on my own. So when I was researching novels to read this year, I purposefully didn't research them much farther than their basic Amazon.com description so I could enjoy the drama of being a first-time reader.

Slaughterhouse-Five is the kind of book that is often referenced but rarely described. Kurt Vonnegut is typically hailed as a genius writer, and the only other book by him that I've read - Galapagos - was facinatingly disturbing (it revolved around a group of people left on an island in a post-apocalyptic world attempting to repopulate society, but one of the people had a birth defect and at the end, hundreds of years later, human life has evolved into hairy, walrus-like creatures. Aren't you glad I didn't put that one on the reading list?).

Unfortunately, I started writing this post right after I read the book and ran out of time to finish my train of thought. It's been almost a month since then, so rather than try and finish it, here's the list of observations I planned to blog about:

- Interesting way to write about a personal experience without using the first person point of view
- Billy Pilgrim: did the character really time travel, or was he influenced by Trout's books? He did travel before he read Trout, though...
- Why did Trout's books match Pilgrim's experiences so well? He asked at the party if he had gone through a time window. Maybe he traveled too?
- Maybe Pilgrim's time traveling is a metaphor for his insanity and trying to deal with Dresden
- Tralfamadorians see time all at once, seeing all times simultaneously, knowing all outcomes. Much like C.S. Lewis' "sheet of paper" description of how God sees time in Mere Christianity and how characters like Rochester experience time in Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair
- Pilgrim calls his time-traveling experiences a disease, what does this mean?
- Tralfamadorians explain that they can't change outcomes because the moments are structured - but by whom?

Some interesting thoughts - I'll have the reread the book to expound upon them.