He loves her for that act, because it was such a human thing to do. .
Now, he presents us with his war book. He will strive to look back no more. This book, he says, is a failure. It was bound to be a failure because it was written by a pillar of salt. He gives us the first line and the last, and the central story of the novel is ready to begin. .
MY COMMENTS:.
I've read several Kurt Vonnegut books in the past, including this one. It has been a couple of years since I first read Slaughterhouse Five, and I'm glad I got the chance to read it again. Vonnegut, in my opinion, is one of the greatest humanist writers of all time. He is a pacifist in every since of the word. .
In this first chapter, even before the beginning of the novel, it is easy to see that the narrator, the author, is a very passive individual. This characteristic is brought even more to the forefront later in the novel.
Chapter Two.
"Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." He wanders from moment to moment in his life, experiencing chronologically jumbled events one right after another. He sees his birth and death and everything in between, all out of order, with no pattern to predict what will come next. .
Billy was born in 1922 in Ilium, New York. Tall, thin, and weak, he made an unlikely soldier. He was going to night school in optometry when he got drafted to fight in World War II. His father died in a hunting accident before Billy left for Europe. The Germans captured Billy during the Battle of the Bulge. In 1945 he returned to the States, finished optometry school, and married the daughter of the school's owner. During the engagement, he was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. After his release, he finished school, married the girl, got his own practice with help from his father-in-law, became quite rich, and had two kids. In 1968 he was the sole survivor of a plane crash. While he was in the hospital, his wife died of carbon monoxide poisoning.