Chirps and the rest.

So the book came to an end.

Only until the very last page and the very last word did I come to understand the book thoroughly.

You see, Vonnegut makes a good job of writing a decent novel. He uses a good quantity of symbols, allusions, irony, and satire; he develops complex characters like Billy Pilgrim and Kilgore Trout, and even takes the trouble to make himself a character in the story. He marvels the reader and inspires quality reflection, and yet he ends the book with the disenchanting onomatopoeia that is "Poo-tee-weet?" (Plus a question mark, that makes it even more confusing)

But as I thought about it, and connected all the pieces in the book, the bird’s chirp suddenly made sense.

In the beggining of the book Vonnegut says there's nothing intelligent to say about a massacre, in fact "Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again" So, everything dies, except for the birds, who are the only ones that spit silly little sounds like “Poo-tee-weet?” out of their  beaks. Then a few pages after Vonnegut says “This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.” Meaning it was written by a person who looked back at the past.

The fact that the book so suddenly ends with “Poo-tee-weet?” means the book is a failure. It had to be written, but in the end, Vonnegut doesn’t love it. “I’ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.”

And in my opinion, he made the strongest statement on war by providing this ending, because “Poo-tee-weet?” completely cancels, vaporizes, and annuls any significance the story-line could ever aspire to have, and ultimately says, I have nothing to say about war, it is what it is: stupid. 

Metafiction it is.

Pg. 125 revealed Vonnegut as a real character in the story. “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.”

You see, just when you think you’ve got this book all figured out, these sorts of things happen, and they mess with your mind. As usual, I now have more questions than answers about Billy Pilgrim’s identity.

Was Billy Pilgrim a real person? Or is he a recompilation of personalities Vonnegut met in the war?

Why does the author choose to make himself a character in the story?

Who’s the narrator then? Because we see “Moments later he said, ‘There they go, there they go.´” He meant his brains. And then we see Vonnegut’s direct intervention (“That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.”) He switches from third to first person.

And also, why would Vonnegut choose to introduce himself in the story as a guy taking an ugly dump in a latrine?

I’m thinking I’ll have to read further on to answer these questions and I’ll restrain from looking it up on Wikipedia.

Anyway, this new twist on the story makes it even more interesting. I’m gonna go ahead and say that Vonnegut’s appearance serves the purpose of giving the story the realism time traveling and aliens took away. About Billy Pilgrim, I’m still puzzled about him. Today, Sunday, October 2 I think Billy is a personification of Vonnegut’s experience; he represents what every soldier once felt in the war. This is how I feel today, but a couple of pages could change my mind. 

The Aid of Alien Eyes

This weekend I checked out Diego Rodriguez’s blog “Click Here to Continue” and among his entries, I found one with a very interesting interpretation of a little detail in the book. The first time we see the “mustard gas and roses” description is in Ch.1, where Vonnegut describes the smell of his drunken breath as mustard gas and roses. But then in Ch.4, in the night of his daughter’s wedding, before being kidnapped by the Trafamadorians, Billy Pilgrim receives an anonymous call, but nobody talks and the narrator says “he could almost smell his breath- mustard gas and roses”. 

Diego notices this and insinuates that the caller is Vonnegut himself, making Ch.1 a part of the story, and placing Vonnegut as a character in the book. It is an interesting theory and I congratulate Diego for noticing it, because it gives yet another perspective of the book. It reminded me of A Clockwork Orange when Alex and his droogs break into an isolated cottage where he finds a manuscript called "A Clockwork Orange". This I understand is called Metafiction, and I think Vonnegut is making use of that literary device in this book.

This little phone call only makes the reader more confused. I though Billy Pilgrim was a personification of Vonnegut’s war traumas, created, in a way, to materialize his pain so he could physically end it. So, Billy Pilgrim was Kurt Vonnegut. But if Vonnegut is in the story as himself, then who is Billy Pilgrim, what is Billy Pilgrim?

I’m starting to suspect the phone call has a more transcendent than I thought, which leads me to think I should pay even more attention to the little details in the book.

Diego also drew my attention to the actual description of the smell “mustard gas and roses” I can almost feel it in my nostrils. Also, there must be a weird connection between alcohol and flowers (which aren’t exactly the most similar things in the world) because this is the second time I’ve encountered them united in literature. The first time was in a surrealistic book called “Opio en las Nubes” by Rafael Chaparro Madeido, who paints a very particular almost dreamlike Bogota, hard to describe. The book’s characters drink alcohol as much as they breath, and romanticize the concept of a decadent, reckless life. They constantly repeat the phrase “Me gusta el olor de vodka con las flores” (I like the smell of vodka with flowers).

Going back to Billy Pilgrim, I shall pay close attention to the future of the book to see if the phone call has a more profound meaning.