100 Pages Of Worthless Text

100 pages of worthless text.

That is until the next 100. If it is possible for one part of a book to suddenly create meaning to another part of the book, this is the prime example. Call it purposeful (as I would), a representation of war – horrible and slow at first, but soon becoming a daily routine that alternates the mind beyond comprehension. Or call it lousy writing that discovers itself. But the dynamic changes, to put it mildly.

This book is not a story. There is no plot. This book is not about war, Kurt Vonnegut, or mid-life crisis. The book is a 275 page painting. Pointless, random paragraphs upon pointless, random paragraphs amount to one thing – an intimate expression of war. More intimate than a story. More intimate than a book. As intimate as a painting, and art.

Imagine a painting covered in micro-dots. And then imagine at various parts of the paintings a sudden big blob. That is the Slaughter-House-Five. The tiny dots represent words, masses of unnecessary words, like masses of unnecessary deaths, and days of pointless war. The large, scarce blobs represent the alternating moments of war, when those long monotonous days at war suddenly are eclipsed by sudden insights. This is the meaning of Slaughter-House-Five, because it illustrates war, not stories, but the actual emotions, concepts, experiences, and times of war.

In the book these large, scarce blobs are represented by phrases. Phrases that profoundly share the sudden insights, not those of war, but those caused by war. True to the preceding dynamic of the book, these phrases don’t start showing up until after 100 pages. One such moment occurs on page 130, “She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.” Another moment occurs on page 135, “Derby described the artificial weather that Earthlings sometimes create for other Earthlings when they don’t want those other Earthlings to inhabitant Earth any more.” On page 141, “That’s the attractive thing about war. Absolutely everybody gets a little something.” On page 149, “He always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.”