So it goes.

#9. Could-have, Should-have, Would-have...and the Nothing-at-all's

If you could change something about the novel, what would it be?

I would change absolutely nothing about it. I realize this sounds sooo lame, but I thought about it.

After thinking of what I didn't like and what I did like about the book, I realized that you have pros and cons in life. Vonnegut tried to make his novel realistic in a sci-fi sort of method, which worked with the events. To take away any part of the novel would be to destroy the very essence of it. It may not seem that the trivial sections of the book would matter (such as what books Kilgore Trout wrote), or it may seem that some events were not given enough time to play out (such as Edgar Deby's execution). The reality is that that was how Vonnegut wanted to write the book. He actually graded his novels at one point in his life (Google this if you don't believe me). The only novel he gave an A+ to was to S-5. That says something about how he felt about this particular work. He downplayed Derby's execution because it was just one more death in his book. So it goes.

And think about it this way:

• Is there a more comedically tragic way ofValencia dying rather than of carbon monoxide poisoning? I have an odd sense of humor, I must admit, but the way Vonnegut described her anxiety when news of Billy's plane accident hit made the whole scene amusing. Ironically, she was the one who ended up dying as she was on her way to visit Billy in hospital.
• Is there a better beginning to a book than giving it all away? It's like a PowerPoint presentation, you present Table of Contents  for what you will cover, and then you break it down. It helps organize a reader's thought process. The quality of a book should not have to rely on surprise and suspense, but on its content and uniqueness. And what's more unique than the random line "Poo-tee-weet"?
• Is there really a better way than Pilgrim being killed othered than by a hitman of Lazzarro's choice? I doubt it. There was satisfaction and a sense of closure when Lazzarro fulfilled his revenge. Otherwise, Lazzarro's character would have just been another lame all-words-no-show kinda guy, which is already ubiquitous in life. That would have been boring.

S-5 is perfect the way it is because I couldn't imagine it being written with alternative scenes. It may be a psychologically human thing to think this way, but that's my take on this.

#8. Time, Time, Time Again, Younger Now Than We Were Before

What scene in the novel would lend itself well to film and why?

A fun scene to produce into film is the blurb about how Billy Pilgrim and his peers had to work in a factory that produced malt syrup. Billy actually revisted this memory of Dresden during a time of unconsciousness, so it can be inferred that he was time-travelling again. Film is the most effective way of producing the feel of a protagonist experiencing a dreamy, hazy, other-world.
This part of the novel was written in an amusing, nostalgic kinda way. The narrator seemed to miss the taste of the malt syrup, and tried to decribe it in a way that could also be decribed via film. A novel leads much to the imagination, whereas with film there is visual aid. A visual of the malt syrup would evoke the audience's taste buds to a higher degree.
The comedic aspect of the paragraphs was how child-like the workers acted. Although they were supposed to be working dilligently in the factory, they secretly spooned the malt syrup. Vonnegut details that spoons were hidden all over the factory in radiators and rafters. This sentence made me chuckle. It reminded me of how children act when they try to hide some petty "crime". I don't know what malt syrup tastes like, but I can assume that it actually does taste good, though it is possible that Billy only thought it tasted euphoric because of the lack of substantial food.

Yum yum.

In my head, this is how the scene runs:

-The screen is a haze; a tik-tok noise plays as background music, this music merges with factory sounds (implies time-travelling)
-Reveal a tablespoon that is thrust into a vat of a thin honey substance, turned round and round and re-emerges like a gooey lollipop
-This is plopped into a human's mouth; zoom out; it is Billy Pilgrim's pleasured face
-Suddenly, the workers hear someone else coming; suspenseful music plays
-A person of authority is auditing the factory
-The factory workers now appear to be hard at work
-As soon as the manager figure leaves, the workers simultaneously take their spoons from their hiding places and spoon some syrup on the sly
-The sound of footsteps play again
- Billy Pilgrim sees Edgar Derby through a factory window wanting some syrup, and quickly shoves a spoonful into his gaping mouth; Edgar's surpised face would be worth a thousand words
- Billy hides the spoon
-The workers spring up, immediately hide the spoons, and proceed with sweeping the floor or cleaning lavatories (or whatever else they were doing)

Ta-da.

#7. I Haven't Done This in Awhile...

This is what I felt when I read Slaughterhouse Five, in poetry form. I haven't written poems in a long, long while, and it's hard to be lyircally passionate about book-reading aha, but this is it. S-5 made me visit my memories as I was reading, especially the ones I hated and the ones I wish I could redo. I'm so intrgued by Vonnegut's mentality about time that that has become the theme of my blog. Vonnegut's words of wisdom made me want to come to peace with all my regrets. And I'm not just saying that. This is me trying to come unstuck in time. I hope it makes no sense.

Epigram or epitaph,
I could not understand those four lines
What is black ink on manilla paper
When it is both read but unread
At once.

I fell through the pages
Had to pace myself the second time around
I rushed past floating trees and pebble trails
It was then the lines unblurred into words.

Bygone days became mental scenery
As I sat there on the staircase beneath a chandelier
Reading these damn paragraphs-
Please
Stop the tidal waves now.

But my mind ran the 5K into my past
And suddenly I am time-warping in my head
This is my moment of weakness
I'm not leaning against a tree, falling asleep,
I'm sifting through mental photographs,
A disarrayed collection that I have forced into order...

That March day when you couldn't figure out a classic riddle
A summer when you left for the place of your childhood
There you jumped off a train bridge into water
And broke through the surface on an August day
I can feel the warm rain that drenched my jeans that October 9th
You filled out the letters to a hangman
Cut to the Sunday afternoon in January that I fell up the stairs
And a late April night that you were at my door
I begged my brother to tell you I wasn't home
But you walked through the front door
Knew all the steps up to my room
The floor dropped on the Canada Day that you closed the glass door
And I was walking barefoot on hot pavement.
The seasons were rolling around again.

A best friend lost,
And a lot of growing up to do,
But it was like a chain reaction that I couldn't follow.
Billy seemed lost all along
Somehow I found peace in his insanity
But I cannot in mine.

I've lived through the dead ends and open holes countless times
Scrawled out every possible way to describe all that happened
Yet my paper heart is still as blank as a cloudless sky.

Time can make you ugly,
But
What is time,
death,
and life
When I cannot feel anything at all?

Could I live the way Billy lives
Without regret,
resistance of fate
and
free will?
But you know I'm fallible
Chagrin has been all I could feel for the last few seasons
I've been treading in quicksand
Painted in colors so wrong that I could black out heaven's field.

And
This book
So broken and raw
Distorted yet enlightening
I loved it.

I found a way to come unstuck in time.

Live vs. Death [QUOTE]

'The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

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."'

-Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

#6. Slaughterhouse Five & Catch-22

I picked up Joseph Heller's Catch-22 during the March Break. I find it strikingly similar to S-5 because both novels are anti-war novels and the events are described out of sequence so that the respective time lines develop along with the plots. In addition, both works deal with the themes of inevitability of death and sanity versus insanity. Vonnegut made it clear that everything happens all at once, and though a person was dead in one moment, they were alive in many other moments. Heller narrates that although his main character wants to live, he will ultimately die. No one is certain whether Billy Pilgrim imagined the alien abductions or if they were real, and no one can escape the wrath of the term catch-22.
Honestly though, I find Catch-22 more hilarious than S-5. S-5 had elements of crude humour, such as how a dog (fed a slab of meat with bits of spring wire in it.) began bleeding from the inside out. I am only half-way through Catch-22. BUT my friend spoiled the ending for me. Apparently towards the end of the book, the style and tone becomes more pessimistic, and its a bitter ending.
So here's a briefing of the novel: It's about what happens to a certain U.S. squadron in WWII. The main character is Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces bombardier, who wants to finish the amount of missions required for him to go home. However, the number of missions needed is always raised. In the end of the novel, Yossarian still does not return home because the number has again been raised. There is also the concept of Catch-22, which I will explain in depth later. The lives of other characters are also narrated, and the events (though out of order) run into each other in a non-linear fashion that although is jumbled, makes sense.
Catch-22 is "a dilemma from which there is no escape because of mutually conflicting or dependent conditions" (Merriam Webster). For Yossarian to go home, he either has to finish his missions or be declared insane. But because he does not want to fly more missions, he must therefore be sane. So even if he is done his missions, he must still fly more missions because he is not insane.
The hilarity of Heller's masterpiece takes away some of the magic of Vonnegut's creation, although both books are captivating. They were real eye-openers, helping me see the world in a new perspective. These are the kind of books we should be reading in school.