I began reading Slaughterhouse Five which starts out as a boozy memoir of a middle aged man reflecting on his time at war.
So that boozy smoking charm of Vonnegut is working for me! I am only in the beginning of the book, and I can tell I am opening a part of my soul. I am being the ideal submissive reader and I am trying to resist it, but it is like hearing exactly what I always wanted to hear from uncles, my grandfathers or my father about war. It is reflective in a way men don't actually want to share with the younger generation. I love him for that, for being a pillar of salt, trapped by sharing a story about looking back. Vonnegut was a POW in WW II, like my grandfather, John A. McMenamin. At an early age we were taught not to ask people about the war they lived. I imagine the character narrator, is not unlike my grandfather, willing to talk to the appropriate audience. My grandfather died when I was 12, so I never heard my grandfather's war story from his lips. It has built in me a curiosity that makes me want to be the ideal audience to the character narrator. I can almost see in the character narrator my Grandpop's crooked smile. It was a mistake of course to think I could be the ideal reader for Slaughterhouse five because Vonnegut is showing that the character us an unreliable narrator. Reading the work requires an authorial audience that says I can believe that Bill believes that he has been traveling to other planets and that time is a loop but not that these t hings are actually occurring. The switch from the narrator of a Vonnegutesque reflector to the main POV of a man who sees time as being stuck and unstuck is jarring, perhaps purposely so. The switch started to occur within the 1st Person POV of the 1st chapter with a line I underlined knowing it was beautiful, not realizing it was a metonym. That we would see this as piece of a bigger whole that would be revealed. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep |
I highlighted these words for their vague brilliance, exactly like the girl I used to be would have. I wanted them to be stashed away and applied to things that would take them to new meanings. But I was reading them like the 19 year old girl who smoked cigarettes, quoted Vonnegut, wrote crappy poetry and lit candles waiting for excitement. I was not reading them to see what they would reveal within the work. And yet looking back with only the hindsight of Chapter 2, I can see they are not about the past being brought into light but rather the circularity of time being introduced as moments- perhaps of being "unstuck." Is that being present or trapped in time? That is the question that propels me to Chapter 3.