Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade, a Dirty Dance With Death is my favourite book. A magazine summed up the book and Vonnegut's uncanny writing style by saying, "Our finest black humourist....we laugh in self-defense." Another on called Vonnegut " a laughing prophet of doom". For me Vonnegut is the greatest author the 20th century has produced( I was going to say time immemorial but that would get a bit too much, though i do think he his the best ever). When I laugh in his books, two seconds later I am introspecting whether it was right to laugh at dead corpses or other gruesome details that Vonnegut satires so amazingly. He makes us think about or own thoughts. He died only a week after I read Slaughterhouse-Five so that was a loss everyone in the literary world felt equally i guess. I am now going to publish an extract from Slaughterhouse-Five. It is a conversation between Billy Pilgrim and a Tralfamadorian.



"Where am I?" said Billy Pilgrim

"Trapped in another blob of amber, Mr. Pilgrim. We are where we have to be just now-three hundred million miles from Earth, bound for a time warp which will get us to Tralfamadore in hours rather than centuries."

"How-how did I get here?"

"It would take another Earthling to explain it to you. Earthlings are great explainers, explaining why the event is structured as it is, tell how other events may be achieved or avoided. I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber."
"You sound to me as though you don't believe in free will," said Billy Pilgrim

"If I hadn't spent so much time studying Earthlings," said the Tralfamadorian, "I wouldn't have any idea what was meant by 'free will'. I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will."

--------------------------------------------xXx------------------------------------------------

Its the work of a genius...