What I most enjoyed of this third chapter of Slaughterhouse Five was the detailed description the author uses. I really could picture everything. Personally when a book is this descriptive, I understand it better because my mind is busy doing this “movie” so it doesn’t have time to get side tracked. One great example of this is when the narrator starts talking about the commander’s boots. He describes them so well I can perfectly imagine the polished boots with the image of Adam and Eve inside them.
In this chapter Billy keeps time traveling and I couldn’t stop thinking and comparing it with the book The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. The husband has like a genetic disorder, which makes him travel in time in any moment and to any time. That is exactly what happens to Billy, when he goes to sleep and wakes up in another time period.
I surely wouldn’t want to time travel. I mean, of course I regret some things and obviously I would like to live again some others, but the confusion that Billy has... No thanks, I pass.
It’s a little frustrating, I don’t even know which is Billy’s present. Is it the war? Is it when he is old, after the plane accident? Please, even if you where so sorry about things you’ve gone through in the past, having to change from present to past, to future, not knowing when the next change will occur, I think it would be a little tiring, no, not tiring, exhausting! That poor man seems so lost so confused.
To tell you the truth, I am suspicious that he is not rally time traveling, instead he is just having flashbacks, during his dreams, but they are so vivid that he confuses them with time traveling. I think that would be the most accurate prediction, and as I’ve said it in my past blogs, it must be because of the war trauma. However, I can’t dismiss the idea of time traveling, because it is actually the narrator the one who talks about his time travels.
I really hope, further in the novel I will understand this changes in events. Meanwhile I would like to leave the reader with a question:
Do you regret your past so much, that you would be willing to experience these un-announced time travels?
I wouldn’t.
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