After finishing Chapter 2 I couldn't hold back on the reading, Vonnegut's style makes the narrative that much better and I could only hope the next chapter would do the same. It met all my expectations.
We begin the chapter by seeing how Billy and Weary encounter a melancholic German patrol and are soon put in captivity. They meet up with more American prisoners and began their journey to a POW camp deep behind German lines.
I could see how Vonnegut has a very peculiar style in his writing. Through out the story he introduces secondary characters such as the blonde german kid,Wild Bob, the Hobo and others to make the readers identify not only with Billy but with many other characters. He outlines their lives in a very basic way, enough for us to make a personal connection with each and every one of them. These only last a few lines, they then disappear in our memory to be long forgotten. Vonnegut also emphasizes time travel much more taking us a few times to the late 60's around the time Billy first met the aliens.
Something that caught my attention was when they mentioned Billy can't change the past, present or future. Most of the time when they talk about time travel they make reference to a butterfly effect where anything you change will create unimaginable repercussions in the future. The character's are then faced with the decision of changing their lives to meet their dreams without causing any horrible changes but always end up wrecking the future (The Butterfly Effect, Hot Tub Time Machine, Back To the Future). This story differs from them all for we don't see any attempts what so ever of Billy trying to change his life, he just lives in the moment through a predetermined destiny. I still have to see if later on he does make any attempts to do so, but is it even possible? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Alejandro, its great how you analyze how characters face the decision of changing the future in order to get what they want, while Billy is different from these. And now that I recall, you recommended me watching Hot Tub Time machine, which is very different from Billies case, but its valid. Maybe the reason why Billy doesn't change his future is because he lives like the tralfamadorians. Everything happens in a parallel way at the same time and no one alters the future. I don't know If you already read chapter five, but when you do Billy asks the Traflamadorians about this and the end of the world. They have quite an interesting philosophy
ReplyDelete