Taking Control

Since we were little, we have been told that our parents are the people who will take care and look out for us. But as time goes by, we notice that this isn’t always the case. Often, children are forced to look after their parents, just like their parents took care of them when they were young. “It was very exciting for her [Barbara], taking his [Billy’s] dignity away in the name of love.” (pg. 132). Barbara, in her early twenties, was enjoying the feeling of superiority and greatness she got while bossing her old, traumatized and troubled father around. Even though what Billy was doing made perfect sense to him, it seemed foolish and childish to her.

The ideal parents, the ones we always like to believe we have, love their kids unconditionally, and would give anything for their well-being and happiness. Such a case is illustrated in the children’s book Love You Forever by Robert Munsch. Although it is meant to be a sweet and inspiring story about parental love, it is still somewhat creepy to think of an old woman crawling through her grown up son’s window at night and rocking him back and forth while singing. A perfect mother would not be as affectionate as the one portrayed in the book, and although they might not show their affection as openly, their feelings would still be the same. However, towards the end of the book, when the mother is old and sick, her son ends up caring for her and comforting her on her deathbed.

Seeing all of these reciprocal feelings of love and affection between parents and their children made me think about a TV show called Toddlers and Tiaras. In it, young girls are subject to gruesome conditions while several times being forced by their parents to participate in beauty pageants around the world. I find it amazing how parents could do such a horrible thing to their little daughters, simply because they are after shimmering crowns, grand titles, and a lot of money. These girls grow up thinking that everything is about appearance, make up and dresses, and they soon become the typical material girls. These mothers and fathers have taken complete control over the lives of their kids, and are in a way exploiting them for their own benefit.

How old do you think I am?

Shortly after Billy wakes up at the prison in Germany after his peculiar experience at the latrines, he finds another person being carried into the hospital. This character is Paul Lazzaro, a tiny man that has been knocked down by an Englishman for trying to steal cigarettes. The Englishmen that threw the punch that left this tiny man unconscious is also in the room, and after a short dialogue with the colonel/doctor, he describes the new American prisoners as “Weak, smelly, self-pitying – a pack of sniveling, dirty, thieving bastards.” (pg. 127).

I find it amazing how, in the midst of a horrible war, some people could still be so clueless as to what was actually happening at the battle front. At first, my impression of the Englishmen was a very good one, due to the big “feast” they prepared for the new prisoners, but throughout the chapter, my image of them became worse and worse. The quote above reminded me of a part of the book I Have Lived a Thousand Years. It is about a thirteen year old girl named Elli that was taken during World War II and was forced to live in several ghettos and concentration camps, ultimately ending up in Auschwitz.

A few days before the German defeat, all the Jews were loaded onto trains and forced to go days without food or water. The Germans wanted to starve and kill all of them before the Allies had the chance of rescuing them. Their plan failed, however, and Elli, now sixteen, is liberated. After getting off the dreaded train, one of the rescuers walks towards her and says that this experience must have been especially hard for her due to her age. Taken aback, Elli asks how old she appears to be. The rescuer answers that she looks around 60 years old.

This was something that really impacted me, because although I knew the suffering and hardships these people had to go through, I never imagined just how big an impact it had on their physical aspects. I feel somewhat identified with Elli, because we are nearly the same age and we are both Jewish girls. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be finally free from the horrible Nazis and then be taken for an elder person. What if I had lived during that time? Would I be like this girl? Would I be mistaken for a senior citizen as well?

What do you dream of?

In Baghdad, a servant sees Death at the market, who makes a face at him. The servant runs back to his master and asks to borrow a horse to go to the nearest town, Samarra, and avoid Death. When the master returns to the market to confront Death, Death answers that it was a face of surprise, not anger. Death states that he was taken aback when he saw the merchant there, for he had an appointment with him in Samarra later that day. The deep message that is conveyed by this children’s story is that you cannot avoid your destiny, no matter how hard you try. It exemplifies how one often meets his destiny on the road one takes to avoid it. The story reflects the popular belief that existed in the Middle East that fate exists, and it cannot be avoided. It is a story that has created many controversies, due to the fact that it is timeless, and will be continued to be analyzed by many generations to come. Different people have different view
s on this matter, and nobody is right or wrong.

This story exemplifies the Tralfamadorian way of thinking that everything is inevitable. It is like riding a roller coaster, where you know what is going to happen yet can’t do anything to change it. According to the view of life these aliens have, we are simply spectators in our own lives.

This blog post made me truly realize how horrible life would be if this ideology were to be true. People would have no goals or aspirations, and everyone would simply kick back and relax because “it simply is.”(pg. 86). What would we

look forward to if we already knew how everything turned out? We would lose everything we ever had the chance to hope or dream for, and I believe that we would lose the essence of life itself.

"Billy didn't really like life at all."

What would it be like to be a parent? Being aware that someone else’s life lies completely in your hands? Having the duty to educate them to the best of your abilities, while knowing that any faults or mistakes you commit may influence who this person becomes in the long-run? Those of us that do not have children may not even start to imagine the responsibility that comes along with this, and all the sacrifices parents have to make for the sake of their children.

When I was in eight grade, I had a teacher that took it upon himself to not only teach his subject, but to give us valuable life lessons as well. He did this by talking to us, allowing us to be completely sincere with him, showing us videos and powerpoints that he believed would leave a mark on each of us. It was in one of these powerpoints that I learned one of life’s sad truths, a reality that we all take a part of, even if we don’t know it. The presentation started with soft background music and a picture of a small boy playing in a park, with his dad seated on a bench nearby. There was a crow nearby, and he soon caught the young boy’s attention. “What animal is that?” asked the boy, who couldn’t be over 3 years old. “That’s a crow,” answered his dad softly, with a loving and caring tone. A couple of minutes went by and the first bird was soon joined by others of its kind. “How about that one?” asked the boy, pointing at another bird. “That’s a crow too,” said the father in the same loving tone. The child went back to playing when he encountered yet another animal, exactly like the one he had seen just a few moments ago. “That one?” inquired the boy. “Crow.” responded the father, and his tone hadn’t changed one bit.

Years went by, and the father became an old man. He couldn’t see very well or hear very well, and he was losing his memory with each passing day. One day, his son, now a grown man, decided to take him to the park they used to visit when he was young. As they strolled around the park, the old man saw a small, black shape moving in the distance and asked, “What is that?”. “It’s a crow.” answered his son. They walked a little further and the old man saw another black shape moving through the bushes. He asked, “How about that one?”. “That’s a crow too,” answered his son, sounding irritated. Minutes later, the old man asked yet again what the shape was, and his son exploded in anger. “Why is it so hard for you to understand that that’s a crow?! I have already told you three times and you keep on asking the same question! What’s the matter with you?” he screamed. The old man didn’t respond, he just stood there in silence. After a few moments, he calmly answered, “When you were small you would ask me this same question over and over again, and every single time I would answer it caringly, with a smile on my lips, because I understood that you were innocent and unaware, and I loved you for that. Today, I asked you that question, yet you failed to understand me and reacted with rage. I don’t blame you, I blame myself because I probably should have hugged and kissed you every time you asked me the same question twice.”

Many times we fail to acknowledge everything our parents do for us, and take them, their lessons, and their attitudes for granted. There is a moment in the book when Billy Pilgrim is in the hospital and his mom comes to visit him. In a childish act of aversion, he decides to hide under the blanket and ignore her. “She upset Billy simply by being his mother.” (pg. 102). This is the sad truth that many mothers and fathers have to face on a daily basis, especially with kids our age. Regardless of how annoying, pushy or irritating we may consider our parents, we should always remember that we owe everything we have and everything we are to them, for they are the reason we are here in the first place.

“Life can only be understood looking backward. It must be lived forward.”

Can you imagine what life would be like if we experienced it backwards? Not just Benjamin Button kind of backwards, but having it actually start at your death and make its way towards the past? Would we act in a different way? Wouldn’t this change the future (which in this case is the past)? All of these thoughts rushed into my mind as I read one of the best descriptions in the entire book. In it, Vonnegut recounts a World War II movie Billy watches while waiting for aliens to abduct him. I love the way Vonnegut was able to recreate a horrible scene, and turn it into what I consider to be a masterpiece. He started with the complete and utter destruction caused in World War II and ended in a complete utopia.

“Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.” (pg. 74). As I reflected upon what life would be like if everything occurred as it did in this peculiar movie, i suddenly remembered an old documentary I saw a couple of years ago about subliminal messages found in songs when they were played backwards. This is a technique known as backmasking, in which sound is recorded backwards when it was originally supposed to be played forwards. The documentary talked about a teenage boy that started listening to music all the time. He soon started to shun people out of his life and lock himself in his room for hours, simply listening to the songs over and over again. His parents never paid much attention to this, for they thought he was just going through a phase. They never expected to come home a few months later and find the lifeless form of their son hanging from the ceiling of his bedroom, with music still blasting on the stereo. They took the CD’s to a specialist who,with the help of backmasking, was able to uncover subliminal messages found in the music, and concluded that it was these messages which led the boy to commit suicide.

Although I still can’t decide whether or not I believe in this theory, it is still amazing how there can be so much more to things than meets the eye. But then again, life is about perspective, it’s about choosing how you truly want to view the world. Do you want to start at the beginning? Or at the end? How about starting in the middle? You should just try to find what view suits you best, which one feels right for you, because the truth is that in the end it won’t really matter, the result will be the same. Who knows where we end up after death, we are all forced to leave anyways.

"Because this moment simply is."

I find it interesting how, regardless of what you do or what you are experiencing, you always find connections to your daily life. This occurs not only in reading, but when you watch a movie, when a friend tells you a story, or simply something you see as you walk down the street that immediately makes you think about a past experience, a present worry, or a future decision. Vonnegut’s writing inspires much thought and interpretation, but not everything it sparks is directly related to the theme of the book. It may have no connection whatsoever in the eyes of a certain person, yet make perfect sense in the eyes of another.

Although I am still three years away from graduation, college and my career are an ever-present topic in my mind. When Billy talks about his kids on the eve of his daughter’s wedding, he states that “they were gone forever.”(pg. 73). After reading this, my mind immediately switched to thoughts about universities, professions, and business, and the impact my future decision will have on my entire life. Just as Billy was impacted by his experiences at war, I believe that who you choose to be in life impacts who you will truly become.

I personally do not believe in the “Trafalmadorian” theory of time-or in time travel, for that matter-I do believe that attitude, and the way you view things greatly influences actual events. If you, like Billy, decide to watch a film backwards in order to change your perspective on things, you will have gained experience, and with experience comes knowledge. However, you should never lose track of what is real, and what is actually going on, because as soon as you do, you lose everything. Dreaming and longing for a better past or future can lead to inspiration and may give people that have lost hope the desire to keep living, but being too optimistic, or being too much of a dreamer makes you believe things that aren’t real, or even possible. Everything that goes up must come down, and you have to be careful because once you reach the stars, you know you’re in for a nasty fall.

"Blood Brother"

The third chapter of Kurt Vonnegut’s book, Slaughterhouse-Five, is very interesting, and it gives the reader a lot to think about. The whole book is dedicated to writing about the horrible experiences soldiers are forced to dace during a war, and the devastating effects this has on their lives. Although it is still unclear whether or not Billy Pilgrim is Kurt Vonnegut (there is a passage in this chapter where the narrator, speaking as what we believe is Vonnegut’s perspective, says “I was there.” Yet makes no further reference to him actually presenting the moments he describes), it amazes me how, after everything Billy Pilgrim has gone through, he still shows indifference towards those who, like him, are suffering from the evil of society.

This feeling of apathy and lack of emotion towards others presents a great contrast with the main character of the movie Forest Gump. This naïve individual seeks to do something good for everyone that crosses his path, even if is the smallest act of kindness. Forest is also put to the test in several situations, and he always ends up placing the safety and well-being of others before his own. Although very different, these two characters amazingly survive war without really intending to, one because of ignorance and another for giving up on life. The war experiences described in the book are enough to mark a person’s life forever, not only in the way they think but in the way they act towards life. This is why, when pilgrim simply decides to drive on without looking back at the black person on the road, my perception of him changed, and I no longer felt the admiration and respect I felt towards him earlier in the book.

These thoughts also helped me think about and reflect upon my own thoughts and actions, and how we always seem to take things for granted. I realized that whenever we see someone on the street we do exactly what Pilgrim did, and completely take those people out of our lives. In a feeble attempt to try and change this world’s reality, I will try to keep a bag of cookies or any other bagged food and, instead of giving people on the streets money (which they will probably use to sustain their vices) I will give them food and hope that at least they don’t go to bed on an empty stomach.

“Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”

As I read the second chapter of Kurt Vonnegut’s book, I became identified with the instability Billy Pilgrims lives previous, during, and after World War II. After having lived through a very traumatic life, Billy ends up convinced that on the night of his daughter’s wedding, he was abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, from whom he learned a lot about existence, life, death, and time. They say that all moments have always existed and therefore there is no reason to cry over a person’s death because they are still alive in many other moments. This is a very interesting concept, and although I do not agree with it, it is still so abstract that it makes you drop the book for a few minutes while you think about such an intangible concept.

The novel is written in a very interesting way, seeing as it reflects Billy’s theory that everything is going on at the same time. Its structure reminds e of the movie “The Time Traveler’s Wife”, which illustrates the life of a man who helplessly travels through all the moments of his life without being able to control it, and the suffering this brings to those he loves, including himself. In the second chapter of the book, Vonnegut takes us on a journey through Billy’s life, jumping back and forth in time. However, he does this in a way that is not confusing or elusive for the reader, and you start to realize what type of character he is, and start discovering the reasons he acts the way he does. Along the middle of the chapter, the narrator describes a crucifix that hung from Billy’s wall of his bedroom in Ilium. He portrays it as a gruesome and very life-like image of Christ as he was hanging on the Cross, with an almost perfect imitation of his wounds and injuries. “Billy’s Christ died horribly. He was pitiful.” (pg. 38). This quote portrays the way Billy feels about his own life, just as the ‘pitiful’ Christ represents him. After suffering through the traumas of being mercilessly thrown into a pool, experiencing the death of several family members, surviving a violent plane crash, and living through horrible experiences in World War II, Billy is as badly scarred (both physically and psychologically) as the dying man on the cross.

Writer's Block

I believe we have all been faced with experiences where we have to write something, yet we are at complete loss as to what to say and the words simply don’t come out. This is what the main character of the book Slaughterhouse-Five experiences throughout the course of many years, wanting desperately to write about the horrible experience he lived during the Dresden Massacre of 1945. He informs the reader that he has written thousands of pages and several outlines, but he hasn’t been satisfied with the results (except for an outline he made in the back of a roll of wallpaper, but not even that was good enough). He explains how hard it was for him to write about something so horrible and vile and expresses that the book is “short and jumbled and jangled…because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” (pg. 19). Vonnegut explains how hard it is to remember horrific experiences, even when you want to.

In the end he managed to come up with a book, something he considers a great accomplishment given the circumstances. Even though he has been told that wanting to stop war is like wanting to stop glaciers from melting, he finally pulled through and is now able to share his traumatic experiences with the world. Just as the birds sing after a war, Vonnegut’s voice can be heard going “Poo-tee-weet?” as he opens his mind and leads us into this horrible world of destruction and chaos.

"The Perfect Life" -John Koethe

What defines life? What defines happiness? What defines perfection? These are some of the various questions that are addressed in "The Perfect Life" by John Koethe. He describes what it is like to live without worries, to feel invincible, powerful, and grand. To have a satisfactory life, even if it means living without expectations. This describes a young and inexperienced person's view of the world and how they live carefree, simply wandering about and enjoying the simple pleasures life throws in their path.

As people grow and mature, they catch up with reality and they are forced to face the ugly truth. They ultimately reach the point where, just like the main character of Dante's Inferno, they enter a mid-life crisis and cannot seem to find their way any longer. As time goes by, they remember those times when they lived without regrets, where there was a greater quantity of “future” than “past”. They start to realize that they should have taken advantage of those moments, because when life ends, all is left behind and eventually forgotten. They reach the realization that they no longer have enough time, and that they always had the life they had dreamed of.

The biggest message I got from this poem came from the first couple of lines, where the author states “I have a perfect life. It isn’t much, but it’s enough for me.” It shows how you can be happy with anything and everything if you simply appreciate what you have. It made me reflect upon my own life and be grateful for all it has given me, regardless of how small or insignificant it may seem. Attitude makes a difference, and it can even change your whole life if you let it. The things in your life are worth what you make of them, all you need is a smile on your face and a positive outlook in order for you to have a “Perfect Life”.

Poetic Justice

What would the world be like if everyone received a fair punishment for their actions? What would such a world be like? Unfortunately, we live in an imperfect world, and many times sinners get away with their actions and receive no penalty in return. In literature however, authors can shape the world in any way they want, and mostly they do so by employing a literary technique known as ‘poetic justice’. This means, in other words, that good things happen to the good guys and bad things happen to the bad guys.

The book Dante’s Inferno makes great use of this technique, because in Dante’s version of hell, all sinners receive a just punishment for the actions they committed on Earth. I believe that a clear example of this is portrayed in the fourth pouch of the eight circle, which punishes diviners, astrologers and magicians. “As lower down my sight descended on them, wondrously each one seemed to be distorted from chin to the beginning of the chest; for tow’rds the reins the countenance was turned, and backward it behoved them to advance, as to look forward has been taken from them.” (Canto XX lines 10-15.) These people, who claimed they could see into the future and guide other people’s paths are now ironically bound to walk around with their head turned the other way around on their shoulders, forcing them to walk backwards for all eternity. After allegedly seeing what lay ahead, now they are forced to walk in reverse because “he [they] wished to see too far before [them] behind [they] look, and backward make [their] way.” (Canto XX lines 38-39)