Slaughterhouse Five Discussion

I've been bad.

I was supposed to post about our visit on Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five last weekend, and update the current selection. Ah well.

Hopefully everyone can forgive me!

 Those in attendance last Thursday include:

Dave & Mary
Jack and Shelia
Darryl and Barbara
Alice
Jeremy

 Most of us had finished the book. In general it seemed Slaughterhouse Five met with some approval and some disapproval, more or less on gender lines. The men seemed to like it, and the women seemed to prefer not to read such things again.

One of the big complaints expressed was the way it jumped around, in short episodes that were not linearly related in time. On the other hand, some of us found that to be an interesting artistic technique, especially given the alien's ability to see all of time, compared to the human ability to only see the moment.

One of the unresolved topics from our discussion was whether Billy, the main character, suffered delusions from a brain injury, and simply imagined the aliens and jumping around in time, or whether that was all "real".

We touched on the meaning of "so it goes" and the "po-tee-tweet". I think we agreed the repeated use of "so it goes" was intended to be annoying or at least attention-getting, perhaps to overcome a general desensitization to death on the part of Vonnegut's readers. po-tee-tweet we thought might indicate nature's general indifference to the activities of man, e.g. after the Dresden bombing, nature represented by the birds kept on, essentially unaffected, while men sought for purpose or meaning from the bombing.

We then selected our next work, "Sound of the Mountain" by Yasunari Kawabata.

I look forward to our next meeting!