Poo-tee-weet?

Before I began reading Slaughterhouse-Five I turned to the last page and read the books last few words. "Poo-tee-weet?" Curiosity I guess triggered my body into wanting to know how the novel ended. It's funny; how people engage themselves in a war fully conscious of how its going to play itself out; knowing that sooner or later it will all come to an end. Life is funny that way. I recently broke up with my boyfriend. He cheated on me. I entered the relationship knowing that I wasn't going to marry him, he wasn't going to be the father of my children, and as anything good in life, it would eventually come to an end. Yet I still wanted to go for it. Desire and hope that it would all turn out well made me do it I guess. 

Spring had come and the Germans had left. The war was finally over. "Billy and the rest wandered out onto the shady street. The trees were leafing out. There was nothing going on out there, no traffic of any kind." Life after the war was dead. There was no life. Dead bodies, bombed buildings, and debris decorated Dresden's landscape. One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, "Poo-tee-weet?" 

At the beginning of the novel, Kurt Vonnegut, who is serving as the narrator, addresses his publisher Seymour Lawrence and apologizes for delivering such a short, fragmented manuscript. He says that in fact there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Once it is over, everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be quiet after a massacre, and it always is except for the birds. 

After finishing the book I asked myself, "why?" Why waste your time writing a book if a war is as insignificant as the tweet of a bird. Why did I get myself in a relationship knowing from the start what was to come of it? I came to the conclusion that there really is no answer. Having the novel end in "Poo-tee-weet?" brings me an empty closure. Why? I really don't know. Life is funny that way I guess. 

War and love are like a small paper cut. It cuts only the surface yet bleeds as if it had stabbed your heart. You cry at first. But eventually it stops bleeding. The pain stops slowly after; and the cut begins to heal. Getting better each day, until it is almost invisible. Yet the scar is still there. There is nothing more left to do except wait. You wait to eventually cut yourself again and start all over. I guess we are addicted. We are insane. We are "unstuck". 

I Felt It Change Me.

The Departed is a 2006 American crime thriller directed by Martin Scorsese about a boy who is introduced to organized crime at a young age through an Irish mobster named Frank Costello. Frank dedicates his life to training this boy who eventually becomes a police officer and serves as his mole inside the Massachusetts State Police: Special Investigations Unit. At the same time, Billy Costigan, a man who was training to become a police officer, is hired by the the chief of the Special Investigations Unit to drop out of the Police Academy, do time in prison for an assault, gain credibility, and make it into Costello's internal "click" to serve as an undercover informant. Eventually both teams find out that there is a leak in their unit and the movie becomes a battle to discover each others "rats."

You might be asking yourself how this ties into Slaughterhouse-Five. Well due to the fact that Costigan remains on probation once he is sent free from jail, he is forced to meet with psychiatrist Madolyn Madden on a weekly bases. Costigan begins his undercover job as what seems to be an ordinary person. He then passes through a depressive stage in which he becomes overwhelmed of the massive murders which go on in his daily life as a worker of Costello and attempts to commit suicide. As the movie progresses though, one is able to see how Costigan has gone from being a average man with sentiments, to an insensitive person who has become immune to violence. 

"You sit there with a mass murderer, your heart rate is jacked. Yet your hand is steady. Thats something I noticed about myself, my hand now is always steady." - Billy Costigan

This made me think of war and its victims. Maybe Billy Pilgrim isn't as insane as one sees him. At first soldiers are just average people who sign up with hopes of serving, bettering, and bringing justice to their country. Once soldiers have been summated to the carnage and experience wars crude reality, they come back nothing but collateral damage. Putting aside ones physiological state, where depression, personality disorders, and the posttraumatic stress kicks in, once the war is over what do they do? The war has become their routine. Their life. It consumes them and there is no turning back. We are addicted. 

Mad Men

As the novel progresses, we meet Kilgore Trout: a bitter, dark humored, failed science fiction author in his mid sixties, who lives in a rented basement about two miles from Billy's "nice white house." 

Billy became a fan of Trout after having read multiples books of his. One thing that triggered me, was the fact that all of Billy's theories: the alien kidnapping and the concept of time relativity, all came from Kilgore Trout's novels. This meant that these books had been feeding to Billy's fantasies. Billy had built his reality around these novels, in which he took memories from events that marked his life (the bombing of Dresden) and the items he used to cope with the post-traumatic stress disorder (Trout's novels) to create his own deceptive reality.

Similar to Vonnegut, Kilgore Trout is a very crude humored man. At Billy's 18th wedding anniversary celebration, Maggie White becomes fascinated with Trout and begins bombarding him with questions of his works. After the woman asks what his most famous novel was about, Trout sarcastically answeres: "All the great chefs in the world were there. Its a beautiful ceremony. Just before the casket is closed, the mourners sprinkle parsley and paprika on the deceased." 

Trout reminded me of my grandfather: a witty, dark humored man who also happens to be in his mid sixties. He is the owner of an animal food making business. I remembered he once told me that he already placed in his will, that the day he dies, he would like to be cremated and have his ashes placed in the food mixer so that a limited extra protein edition can be sent out into the market. 

"If we weren't all crazy we would go insane." - Jimmy Buffett