Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.

Book Title: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Pages: 66-118 since last week; 118 since semester

Billy travels back and forth in time from defining moments of his career of optometry to when he is captured in the war by Germans to when he is abducted by aliens. When Billy is captured by these Tralfamadorian aliens, he asks, "why me?", and the aliens respond by saying that there is no why, because the moment simply is, and that everyone is trapped in the moment, like bugs in amber.

Tralfmadorians accept the fact that things just happen they way they do just because, and that "only on Earth is there any talk of free will." This encounter with the aliens reminds me of nothing less than the myth of Sisyphus and our class discussions about fate. The Tralfamadorians seem to think the complete opposite of what Camus thought about creating your own fate, that you cannot change time. I think Vonnegut's manipulation of time has something to do with the way he interprets fate, I'm just not quite sure about it all yet.

So it goes.

Book Title: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Pages: 1-65 since last week; 65 since semester

Billy Pilgrim has mentally "time-traveled" throughout points in his life, revisiting times when he is middle-aged and an optometrist to when he is young and in the middle of serving in World War II. Currently, Billy's crossed over into enemy lines with two scouts and another soldier Roland Weary, and he doesn't really care what's happening, he is just going along with them, disconneted from everything.

Billy Pilgrim is a person I've never really thought would be the protagonist of a novel. He's not strong or brave or philosophically inclined. He is just a guy blundering through every moment that has happened in his life, trying to make some kind of sense of it all. Billy kind of reminds me of Holden Caulfield of Catcher in the Rye, only with a less angst and more clumsiness. They both don't want to conform to the way they should live their lives by what everyone expects of them. They're just out there, lost, and they don't really care what happens.