Hyper Author

Here I am once again, absolutely exhausted, after a very long day and I am assigned to read Chapter 5 of Slaughterhouse-Five. I thought I would not take long, but it happened to be the longest chapter up till now. I finally finished it and realized that it was not only long, but very hard to keep up with. Kurt, or I should say, Billy, is a very hyper author. In 50 pages, he took me (as the reader) to more than 5 places with a transition of a sentence. “Moments after that, the saucer entered a time warp, and Billy was flung back into his childhood.” (Pg. 88) That is just an example of the whole chapter pattern. Why would Kurt need to jump around so much? Maybe he found it boring to be talking about the same topic for more that a page or two without variation. It is very paradox. This book should be a “pillar of salt”, a memorial of Kurt Vonnegut and his experience in the bombing of Dresden. We discussed in class the reason why Kurt adheres a science fiction tale (Tralfamadore) to a true-story base novel. I think that he himself was way to overwhelmed by his anecdotes that he wouldn’t write about it in such a dense way without any breaks, such as jumping around in time or inventing part of the book.

“He groped for the light, realized as he felt the rough walls that had traveled back to 1944, to the prison hospital again.” (pg. 123) Billy has, evidently, gone through a lot of situations. The mare situations make the novel mysterious because not all the situations are deeply of completely explained, just breezed through. It makes me eager to know more about the prison hospital and before I know it I am back to Billy’s honeymoon with “baby fat” Valencia. It is astonishing how Kurt remembers his history so very well detailed, he knew that the walls of the prison hospital were “rough” and that he was scared of falling of the Canyon and peed if his father touched him. But as the jumping around is for a reason, the details can be exaggerated or invented, and so on.